(November 21, 2014 at 1:01 pm)pocaracas Wrote: What would it take to change that?An incentive of some sort. If you grow up here, you are going to learn that it's important to be polite (well, I grew up in New York, but you get the idea) and that it's polite to tip a waiter. If either of those is changed sufficiently, then there could be enough traction on the issue to force a change.
Ironically, religious indoctrination is probably the most effective way to get a person to reject a cultural or societal norm. JWs feel that saying "bless you" to someone who sneezes is a sin, and so for years I would not do that, even though it's considered the polite thing to do. But fear of god trumps fear of society/culture, at least until you realize that there is no god to fear. Then... fear of society and culture can flourish! Whee!
Anyway, I think there's a funny discussion on the topic of tipping at the beginning of the film Reservoir Dogs. It's an entertaining scene which consists almost entirely of one guy defending his decision not to chip in for a tip for the waitress. I think this is it:
[YOUTUBE]sn9nnOkASDg[/YOUTUBE]
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
