I got 6/18 for the faces ("Obviously, very bad.") I thought I would get at least 50%. Interestingly, of the ones I felt very sure about, I did much better (got about 4 out of those 6).
>this is what happens generally when you fight against anything out of anger. It’s not that you have no justification for fighting; the real problem is that your efforts only make the situation worse, not just for others, but for yourself also.
Problem is that it's hard to recognise that something is worth our moral efforts without feeling angry at the same time. Stoicism is constant work.
CJK people actually do look very similar anyway, which is not surprising as there are a lot of shared genetics.
The way people tell them apart is going to be mostly based on current popular fashion, which is quite difficult to do with these bust shots and what I'm guessing are older pictures
I'm white and got 7/18 and it said "You can't tell the difference" but I think it's because some of them I had no idea. There were a few where I was really sure and I turned out to be right.
I think it's the same with white people. There are some who look unique to their country and I can tell with high confidence but for others, I have no idea; they just look like a generic white person.
For example, I think these public figures look/looked very stereotypical for their country:
German: Otto Von Bismarck
English/Scottish: Hugh Grant, David Bowie, Winston Churchill, Maggie Smith
lots of contact with asian people here, definitely all look different, watch japanese and korean dramas on the regular so should be able to tell at least those. 6/18, funniest thing was to me though thinking "oh you're definitely japanese" and being spot on twice. The biggest shortcoming on this quiz: not telling you the correct answer, or the site giving guidance/examples of their data set.
This website is just the author's personal judgment exercise.
What’s really wild to me is having spent time in both Mexico and Thailand, I have seen some people in Mexico that could have a twin in Thailand. That was really unexpected.
My Vietnamese friend and I once went to a Philippine food festival. Most of the Filipino people there tried to talk to my friend in Tagalog. He’d talk back to them in Vietnamese. Granted, he doesn’t look Vietnamese to me, either. He looks like an islander.
This is a really interesting comment. Sometimes when I see photos of native people from South America (especially anything Amazonian), they do look a bit South East Asian to me. Do you think those people that you saw in Mexico were mixed (or fully) native (not European by descent)?
I got 12/18 on faces as an American-born Caucasian living in Japan for over 10 years. Since the subjects were photographed in New York City (and from the other comments, at least a decade ago), cues from fashion and makeup only helped me get about 4 of them, another 6 had pretty strong ethnic features. Of the remaining 8, it was a bit of a tossup and I did worse than guessing, getting only 2 correct.
13/18 on food. Even with a lot of the same general types of food, the presentation and specific ingredients made a lot of them somewhat simple. I got tripped up on a few, though, where I overthought it ("a Japanese X is usually not like this") or ones where it was really a tossup for me between Chinese and Korean since I'm less familiar with those foods.
The architectural version is interesting to me. There's really a world of difference, but you need to know some history and some of the "cultural vibes" particular to each country to understand.
Very uncultured and untraveled caucasian here. I got 10/18, surprising myself. Probably plenty of luck, but at least 5 or 6 I was quite confident about. Not sure how.
I played this quite a few years ago and felt pretty certain that they deliberately chose photos that were atypical of each ethnicity. That said, there kind of is no typical Chinese look since it's such a huge country. Those in the north are taller and have similarities to Koreans, those in the south will have more similarities to Vietnamese.
Admitting this kind of conflicts with the One China Policy and the implicit Han Supremacist attitude prevalent in CCP politics but China is ethnically diverse compared to Korea and Japan simply due to its geographic scale. There might be a certain Han "look" but I'd expect "Chinese" to be much more difficult to pin down even if you ignore the absurdity of trying to pin down "pure" ethnicities across an entire continent.
Delineating Korean and Japanese "looks" already seems a fool's errand if you consider that archeological evidence demonstrates close cultural and trade relationships (or alternatively: astronomically unlikely astonishing examples of parallel developments) between the two regions dating back at least to the Neolithic period - and that the current "native" population seems to only date back no farther than that period despite archeological evidence of prior populations.
Of course this all also exists in the context of Chinese history which largely hinges on what exactly you want to call "China" historically as for most of its written history there really wasn't a single unified entity.
We tend to project backwards a notion of nationhood that in the West largely only came about in the 19th century. In Europe, as a German, I find my own country to be such an obvious example to this as people from all nooks of the political spectrum will find ways to try and shoehorn the modern federal republic into an unbroken chain of history starting with the "Germanic" tribes valiantly resisting Roman rule.
In my country's specific case, the origin myth is completely nonsensical if you look at the actual historic record. The shared identity of the various tribes settling the region only existed from the outside perspective of Rome which simply referred to all foreign territories as being settled "barbarians" (because that's what the foreign languages sounded like to Romans - to put that in perspective, imagine we unironically called Asians "chingchongs").
The first entity with the word "German" in its name was the Holy Roman Empire but the words "of Germany" were only added centuries later and for the longest time the mythological warrior Hermann who "repelled" the Roman invaders by "uniting the tribes" was seen as a villain because - true to its name - the Holy Roman Empire saw itself as the successor to the Roman Empire. It literally included parts of Italy after all and was preceded by the Carolingian Empire (covering much of the same territory but more of modern France). And of course more recently we've learned that the tribes were actually more divided than unified following the conflict with Rome and that the role of Hermann may have been heavily overstated due to the fact that he was a Roman soldier and thus provided a good basis for a grandiose narrative.
You could point at the Kingdom of Germany as a historical root of German identity but there was no shared cultural identity during that period and certainly no awareness of it among its population. The common folk for most of the middle ages would have most likely only been aware of their local ruler or clergy with a faint awareness of the overarching power structures but migration through trade not withstanding separations were often as strong between neighboring villages as between modern countries.
The closest thing we get to an idea of a "German national identity" is following the conquest by Napoleon and the rise of an aristocratic/mercantile republic monarchy which provided the democratic roots for the modern republic - but even in WW1 "German" culture was heavily defined by Prussia (which covered most of German territory). Historically therefore it seems less like German nationalism was the politicalization of a shared ethnic, cultural and political identity but rather provided a framework to fabricate such an identity in its absence. Even if you igno...
I got 3/18. I'm not sure what to think of that. I live in a city full of Asian people, international students, tourists etc etc. One of my best friends in high school was Korean. One of my closest friends at uni was Japanese. One of my close friends now is Chinese.
It's too slow. It takes at least five seconds to load the next picture after you answer. You should probably just preload all the pictures client-side. I wasn't able to get through it.
Twenty five years ago, I lived in San Francisco. This website was "talk of the town" for a quick minute. The real trick is looking at people's hair styles. In my experience, fashion indicates one's ethnicity/nationality much more than face shape alone. Think about a blond Italian from northern Italy, vs a blond German from southern Germany. They will have wildly different fashion styles (clothes and hair). The same for a Londoner and a Parisian.
I got a bit more than average correct, but they all looked like New Yorkers from the early 2000s to me if I'm honest. Maybe it's because I'm watching Castle right now, or it is indeed because fashion and stylistic choices tell a lot more about when and where someone is from.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 62.2 ms ] threadDomain created 2001-07-18
https://archive.ph/http://alllooksame.com/
https://archive.ph/CeR00
>this is what happens generally when you fight against anything out of anger. It’s not that you have no justification for fighting; the real problem is that your efforts only make the situation worse, not just for others, but for yourself also.
Problem is that it's hard to recognise that something is worth our moral efforts without feeling angry at the same time. Stoicism is constant work.
CJK people actually do look very similar anyway, which is not surprising as there are a lot of shared genetics.
The way people tell them apart is going to be mostly based on current popular fashion, which is quite difficult to do with these bust shots and what I'm guessing are older pictures
I think it's the same with white people. There are some who look unique to their country and I can tell with high confidence but for others, I have no idea; they just look like a generic white person.
For example, I think these public figures look/looked very stereotypical for their country:
German: Otto Von Bismarck
English/Scottish: Hugh Grant, David Bowie, Winston Churchill, Maggie Smith
French: Napoleon, Jacque Chirac, Alain Delon, Gerard Depardieu, Francoise Hardy
American: Clint Eastwood, Abraham Lincoln, JFK
Swedish: Agnetha Faltskog
This website is just the author's personal judgment exercise.
lol
What’s really wild to me is having spent time in both Mexico and Thailand, I have seen some people in Mexico that could have a twin in Thailand. That was really unexpected.
13/18 on food. Even with a lot of the same general types of food, the presentation and specific ingredients made a lot of them somewhat simple. I got tripped up on a few, though, where I overthought it ("a Japanese X is usually not like this") or ones where it was really a tossup for me between Chinese and Korean since I'm less familiar with those foods.
Delineating Korean and Japanese "looks" already seems a fool's errand if you consider that archeological evidence demonstrates close cultural and trade relationships (or alternatively: astronomically unlikely astonishing examples of parallel developments) between the two regions dating back at least to the Neolithic period - and that the current "native" population seems to only date back no farther than that period despite archeological evidence of prior populations.
Of course this all also exists in the context of Chinese history which largely hinges on what exactly you want to call "China" historically as for most of its written history there really wasn't a single unified entity.
We tend to project backwards a notion of nationhood that in the West largely only came about in the 19th century. In Europe, as a German, I find my own country to be such an obvious example to this as people from all nooks of the political spectrum will find ways to try and shoehorn the modern federal republic into an unbroken chain of history starting with the "Germanic" tribes valiantly resisting Roman rule.
In my country's specific case, the origin myth is completely nonsensical if you look at the actual historic record. The shared identity of the various tribes settling the region only existed from the outside perspective of Rome which simply referred to all foreign territories as being settled "barbarians" (because that's what the foreign languages sounded like to Romans - to put that in perspective, imagine we unironically called Asians "chingchongs").
The first entity with the word "German" in its name was the Holy Roman Empire but the words "of Germany" were only added centuries later and for the longest time the mythological warrior Hermann who "repelled" the Roman invaders by "uniting the tribes" was seen as a villain because - true to its name - the Holy Roman Empire saw itself as the successor to the Roman Empire. It literally included parts of Italy after all and was preceded by the Carolingian Empire (covering much of the same territory but more of modern France). And of course more recently we've learned that the tribes were actually more divided than unified following the conflict with Rome and that the role of Hermann may have been heavily overstated due to the fact that he was a Roman soldier and thus provided a good basis for a grandiose narrative.
You could point at the Kingdom of Germany as a historical root of German identity but there was no shared cultural identity during that period and certainly no awareness of it among its population. The common folk for most of the middle ages would have most likely only been aware of their local ruler or clergy with a faint awareness of the overarching power structures but migration through trade not withstanding separations were often as strong between neighboring villages as between modern countries.
The closest thing we get to an idea of a "German national identity" is following the conquest by Napoleon and the rise of an aristocratic/mercantile republic monarchy which provided the democratic roots for the modern republic - but even in WW1 "German" culture was heavily defined by Prussia (which covered most of German territory). Historically therefore it seems less like German nationalism was the politicalization of a shared ethnic, cultural and political identity but rather provided a framework to fabricate such an identity in its absence. Even if you igno...
Is it good or bad? I don't know.