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People I don’t want to date: Anyone who gets hung up on arbitrary definitions and is ignorant of other cultures.

That questions seems to be a pretty good filter, just not for the reasons he thinks it is.

(As I child – not in school but before – I learned that there are five continents: Africa, Australia, America, Asia, Europe. I don’t think I was ever told in school how many continents there are. All we were told were names of certain landmasses to make sure we are all talking about the same thing when saying America, Antarctica, South America or Eurasia. Why bother counting them? That doesn’t even make sense.)




See, but if you made that question mandatory, you'd weed out me, because I was taught in a different school in (probably) different country, and my set of default continents is different.

OTOH, I think I marked this question as irrelevant.


I wonder if the question exists just to filter out people who don't mark it as irrelevant.


Seems odd to separate Asia from Europe and not separate North and South America. I mean Eurasia is even on the same plate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg

But, I expect when they start teaching people which plates things are on plenty of people are going to find it strange.


I think you didn’t understand me. That’s not what matters. There is no need to count continents. It’s unnecessary.

If you know every property of something it’s not necessary to ask whether it really is a continent or not.

There isn’t even a communication problem when it comes to this question so it isn’t really necessary to find some sort of great definition.

No matter how many continents you told there were, if you payed some attention you know what people are talking about when they say America, North America, Europe, Asia or Eurasia.




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