Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World
Book by Joseph Henrich.
It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that.
There are so many interest studies mentioned there, one that really stuck with me is how Protestant-raised Americans will work harder for the next day after having (reasearch-led) incestuous thoughts when compared to Catholics and Atheists.
He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man).
One of the wildest claims in there is the one that the north of Italy is more developed today because it was part of the Holy Roman Empire while the south wasn’t. About a thousand years separate these and he finds effects still. Mostly in connection to the spread of read/write to the public being a core tenant of Protestantism.
Anyway, this is not a summary of the book but instead a few points from it that really stuck with me after reading it. Fascinating stuff
I have to ask (and I don't mean this combatively) - given the ongoing realization of the replication crisis, how likely is it that the book you mention reflects a summation of the "too pat" studies about human behavior that, en masse, always seem pithy in an interesting headline, but years later end up being completely bunk?
I've noticed over the years many chains of reasoning - made up of what I believe someone called "cocktail party" pithy takes - that only last as long as you don't dig into the nuts and bolts of them. Pleasant little takes on our psyche and behavior that makes for nice reaffirming thoughts of our views but break down under later analysis.
It feels like we have sometimes accreted an amalgam of these pithy takes based on very small, one off, studies (never replicated) that let us comfortably assemble an affirmation of our broader takes.
This is a rotten thing to say about your book recommendation, given I have never read it (I hope you'll forgive me), but based on the last few years of the replication crisis, do you think, in your heart of hearts, that what you are describing truly does stand up?
I do not have the time now to craft you a full answer as I don’t have the book on hand and have only been commenting from memory so far. But to give you a quick answer: I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. Most of the authors claims are backed by actual papers for reference on the footnotes. As for replication it seems that the author himself replicated some of his studies with different hunter gatherer societies in the world. It’s been a good while since I read it.
I can tell you from my personal experience that the info there has helped me understand the differences between how people think in Brazil (where I come from) and how people think here in the US. Could it be me pattern matching? Possibly
I wouldn’t expect all of it to be true, but I would be very surprised if most of the sources the author provide are false or lack theory and tests, since he explain control groups and experiments in details.
I’m not that married to the book either, as I find some claims rather bold (like the Italy divide)
The title does sound catchy tho
Edit; the author’s main point is how the papal rule on monogamy changed Europe and its colonies to this day, which I didn’t capture on my main comment. Lots to unpack there
> I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers.
That's not the issue. The replication crisis is the phenomenon that many scientific results and conclusions which originate from serious, peer-reviewed research, couldn't be replicated by other researchers, and sometimes not even by the original scientist. This is especially concerning because many results with strong statements – unintuitive ones as well as bias-confirming ones – turned out to be non-existent [1]. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "shallowness" or "cocktail-party takes", although the strength of the purported effects, combined with pop-science simplifications and reductions, lend themselves well to such memetically spreading factoids.
[1] The "softer" sciences tend to be much more affected by this than the "harder" sciences.
I know, and I guess it's better than nothing, but replications by the original author don't exactly grant the same level of confidence as independent replications.
I know we are not supposed to talk about karma (and therefore a downvote ironically may be appropriate on this comment), but I agree vote behaviour on HN lately shows a still-small but growing tendency toward suppressive downvoting.
This seems to happen generally for two reasons: Even a neutral comment is evaluated for what stance it most closely aligns with, and then downvoted to suppress the opposing view just in case. Or alternatively, a comment that appears low-key combative (but really isn't directly so) gets downvoted in an attempt to ensure harmony.
Both moves to me have "culture war vibes", and come from either adopting those habits or feeling very tired from strife.
I think it's increasingly easy to fall into either bracket, but let's not do that on HN! If a comment is generally polite enough, the only bar to meet is adding new information or new thought into a conversation. None of us come here to be pandered to, and getting challenged by viewpoints that force you to consider the corner cases of your own views is half the fun.
Not to call you out for your post but I think this is a result of the 'just asking questions' culture we live in where asking questions online has been weaponized/agenda driven. Even the person asking the question admits their question could be interpreted this way first thing: "and I don't mean this combatively)" and even their caveat these days is sadly easily interpreted as 'I'm just asking questions'. Just look at how the start of my first sentence changes the tone.
The question asker doesn't know the work, doesn't respond to what OP said, but instead challenges OP about methodology, and leads with 'I know this question can seem combative'. Then falls to 'do you think, in your heart of hearts'... how does that question and asking for assessment align with the 'I'm all about methodology' stance of the question asker? It sounds a like a 'core values' assessment/assignment not a 'the room for error in this study' assessment is being asked for. The question on the whole:
'I know this can sound combative but I'm just asking questions. Given other things have been bad and knowing nothing of this being talked about, but pointing out it's probably completely wrong (based on nothing but X other thing is wrong).... really, in your heart, do you believe you are coming from integrity?'
That sounds toxic AF.
Personally as a relative newcomer here it seems like there is a lot of this 'just asking questions' on HN.
Edit: Throttled. I pointed out how I saw the post could be (mis)interpreted. Yeah, that necessitates me replaying it back how it could be (mis)interpreted. That is valid when my point is about... how posts could be (mis)interpreted resulting in a poorer quality of discussion. Sorry if you didn't understand the point I was trying to get across. I didn't say the interpretation was valid, I said here is how posts like the one the person I responded to referenced can derail discussion in an era of 'just asking questions'. Zero disingenuousness nor unconstructive on my part and it's wild you can't see that. My post was about better quality discussion using the message the person I responded to used. Yours is about calling me specifically out. Which is more 'constructive'?
That's not the case here. Non-replicable results from studies in the social sciences are a very real, very frequent phenomenon, and the first question to ask when seeing a claim about a significant effect should be "Has this been replicated?". Being sceptical (without being overly negative or critical) is not "toxic" as you call it, instead it protects us all from becoming trapped in our bubble.
> 'I know this can sound combative but I'm just asking questions. Given other things have been bad and knowing nothing of this being talked about, but pointing out it's probably completely wrong (based on nothing but X other thing is wrong).... really, in your heart, do you believe you are coming from integrity?'
> That sounds toxic AF.
You had to rephrase PeterHolzwarth's post and put word in their mouths to make it sound "toxic AF". That's a disingenuous and unconstructive thing to do in a discussion.
This is why I have enjoyed not having downvote powers yet. It's made me check why I downvote things - and re-evaluate what I upvote. I've found myself upvoting things I don't really agree with but make interesting points that I find myself dialoguing with. Perhaps this is why I mostly lurk
I'd never heard of the replication crisis, but it mirrors what I think is a core problem with modern political discourse.
Example:
Two people with similar classically liberal values hear the same "pithy take" on a politically contentious issue. One accepts it as presented, the other digs in and finds it doesn't hold up to scrutiny at all.
Almost invariably, the skeptic is ostracized, his findings met with incurious dismissal.
From my own time in psychology, the thrust of the book might be good, but that specific point about Protestant work ethic sounds exactly like all the other "just so" studies that didn't replicate.
But lots of otherwise good books have these little mistakes on them, so I find it best to gloss over them and see if the point stands without them.
>No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction.
it is a common rhetorical device to phrase something as an absolute when the negation of it is only an edge case.
hence
>Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge! Of course, civil engineers don't move bridges as frequently as programmers deal with changes in software but,
Not to be that guy, but where can I read those interviews? I got as far as the blog (https://www.hillelwayne.com/) and looked around October of 2019 and can't seem to find anything. As it stands this isn't even anecdata, this is some guy saying some other guy said he talked to a few guys who say something happens from time to time.
no idea but it stands to reason people will need to move bridges at times, we're in the middle of building a bridge, earthquake happens, stuff no longer like it was, gotta move that bridge is just the initial obvious situation that I can imagine from outside. Similar other natural disasters would also affect it, flash flooding etc.
I'll grant that, but that's not a "they don't do this as often as that, but", that's a "it's not unheard of". That was meant to be a response to a Tao of Programming-like post about why programming work has so much improvisation.
Well the reason you don't move a bridge is because it's really hard and really expensive. Just like you don't build an airplane while it's flying because it couldn't be flying if it wasn't built.
The analogies seem to just be missing the point. There's constraints, so what?
I've worked in hard science, engineering, and software. No one is omniscient, so the goals evolve and pivot during the project. That's pretty standard practice. You can't just plan and execute unless you're omniscient. Honestly, the big differences I see is that programmers spend less time at the drawing board and engineers and scientists spend much more time there because working in physical space is very costly and time consuming. But there's a lot of similarities. Programmers would be more effective if they spend more time at the drawing board and engineers would be more effective if they could hack on their tasks more cheaply (which is why sim has had such an impact for them)
>Programmers would be more effective if they spend more time at the drawing board
Would they, though? As you've correctly pointed out, design goals in software engineering get shifted by decision-makers because its cheaper than in civil engineering. The whole point of the ToP article is pointing out that software engineers have to account for possible future radical changes that in other branches of engineering are at most exceedingly rare. Any time you spend on initial planning beyond a bird's eye view may be time wasted.
Yeah. I find it weird to think not. Many problems are found during those planning stages. The process is iterative. Like I said, no one is omniscient. So that also means you can't just figure out everything during the planning stage. If that could be solved there then no one would ever pivot and frankly, that'd be a pretty strong case for planning in the first place lol.
But think about it this way, how do you plan a vacation? I'll tell you how I do it and you'll tell me if you're different, which is okay. There's no "right" or "wrong" way. I'm sure some things will be different and it's going to change every vacation, but bear with me here, since this is more of a communication aid than telling you how to vacation lol.
Prior to the vacation I plan out the major things, like how do I get there, how do I get back, the lodging, and so on. I'll have some key things planned out that I want to do. But I won't ever have everything planned out in detail. I actually do not like having each day scheduled unless that is more tentative and and acting as a stand in. Then after traveling my schedule changes, especially in the beginning. Things are different than I expected, so I'll learn that I'd have more fun doing X instead of Y. Or I find that I really like Z so I want to allocate more time to that. Maybe the weather changed and so I can't do P, and I instead do Q. I'll ask locals and hotel staff what their favorite places are to eat and go there. I'll likely have had a few more famous places to eat laid out, but definitely not every mean. Fuck, some days I'm just tired and would rather call the day early and do takeout. As the vacation closes, things become way more "stable". If I go to the same place in a second vacation I'll definitely lean on my experiences and do things very differently, usually with less flexibility (depending how much I was ale to discover what I like doing the first time around).
The point is that no matter what you're doing, there is exploration and exploration is coupled with the doing phase. It'd be pretty fucking exhausting to plan out the vacation at the airport. I mean people do do this and I'm sure you could still end up having a great time. But a little planning can really go a long way, right? That's the planning. Just like when you get back to your hotel at night and modify plans. That's a planning stage too. The logistics of a vacation almost force this kind of behavior on people. But in programming it is much easier to pivot, almost to the degree that you can be mid meal at a restaurant and decide you want to eat somewhere else. Being able to pivot like that is an incredibly powerful and useful feature, but this doesn't mean that planning still doesn't provide major benefits. Going in blind is crazy! If anything, it makes it more important. In both physical and software you still are time limited and unable to brute force all paths. In physical you can't jump mid meal and even if you pivot as soon as you get a good look, you're much more limited to what you can pivot to because you can't teleport across town. But in programming, you can. You can brute force sometimes, but that clock still ticks forward and you're still going to benefit from planning. The real difference is in physical I might be able to consider 2 dozen places to eat but in software I might be able to try a few hundred. Still need to plan if there's a few thousand, right?
You need to balance these things: the planning, exploration, and execution. Working in physical forces a dominating planning stage and more careful exploration stage, because execution is so costly. But in software execution is cheap. That doesn't mean we should throw out the planning stage, it means we can exploit it much more effectively!
I don't mean to be dismissive of the effort you went to in writing all that, but nothing you've said argues why software engineers would benefit from more planning. It argues for some planning, sure; I never said no planning whatsoever is good. If you intend to build, say, a website, that presents a very different set of challenges and usable tools than if you instead intended to build a microcontroller's firmware. But you seem to agree with me that in software you can turn on a dime, yet you don't don't offer any reason why more planning than what is already done would be beneficial.
> yet you don't don't offer any reason why more planning than what is already done would be beneficial.
You're selling high precision, which is impossible in this discussion. I don't know you and thus can't adapt my message to your specific needs. You'll need to think carefully about what I've said to see if it applies to you or not. Look carefully at that vacation scenario. How does it differ from how you go about solving a programming problem? Why do you think I'm stressing so much about how the ability to turn on a dime is an entirely different dimension?
You're a programmer, so I'd expect this to not be too difficult since you deal with deep levels of abstraction every day, right? You know how to generalize functions? You're aware of anonymous functions? Functors? Templates? And many other such generalizations? Why are you seeking such high precision when you can write down a function that automatically adopts to a wide range of cases and situations?
> don't act like I'm being unreasonable for asking what reasons you have for making it.
You are though. You never had any intention of talking in good faith, and it was my mistake for engaging.
You've constructed a setting where no matter what level of planning I suggest you'll be able to say that this already is performed.
You've constructed a setting where I must make a suggestion for YOU, when I've made a note about a generalization I've observed. Did I say "all"? Of course not. I'm a programmer too, right?
You've ignored my generalization while attempting to weaponize it against me by seeking high precision.
You then use precision to argue the variability and importance of adapting to differing settings.
You've moved the goalpost multiple times.
You've actively worked against requests to help refine the conversation to settings more appropriate for you, to determine if you are included in the initial generalization or not.
So yeah, you are being unreasonable. I see that all you wanted to do was pick a fight. I want no part in your dumb game.
It's hard to infer what you're exactly saying here, but I've worked in physics (my undergrad), aerospace engineering (first job), and programming (my phd and onwards), so I think I can bridge whatever gap is being discussed here.
In programming, engineering, and hard science your goals evolve during development. There's always discovery during the doing process that necessitates pivots, and sometimes hard pivots. The main difference I've seen is just how much time goes into planning. Software has an advantage in that when working with physical things mistakes are incredibly costly both in money and time. You fuck up a tolerance and you might need you wait a few weeks for the part to be remade and you might have an expensive paperweight (hopefully you can use for some testing).
So what that leads to is more planning stages. That's not just make a plan and go, but make a plan, go, regroup, replan, go, repeat. It often means gathering people who are the owners of different parts of a project because you can't just duct tape things together and the most permanent solution is a temporary solution that works. This greatly affects how I go about programming and is something I notice I do differently from my peers. I spend a lot more time at the whiteboard while most people I know never visit one. I'm not spending all my time there, or even most, but I couldn't do my job without "pen and paper".
In programming the "laws of physics" aren't constantly changing and you're not "building a plane while flying it" (how would it even get off the ground lol), but your requirements are constantly changing. That's... normal engineering and normal in both experimental and even theoretical science. That's because we're not omniscient and you don't know the full answer from the get go lol.
This isn't to say in trad engineering and science we doing also "move fast and break things". Just like in programming you'll build toy models or scaled down versions. But I do think programmers could benefit a lot more and make a lot fewer mistakes (substantially reducing future workloads) would they spend a bit more time at the drawing board. It's great that in programming we can jump in and poke around and experiment so much faster than the physical world allows us, but it seems that this feature is overused instead of being used in addition to planning and designing. That's what actually made me come over to this side, was the ability to iterate faster. But sometimes you gotta take a step back and look at things. Sometimes you gotta move the bridge. Sometimes you gotta tear it down to build an entirely new one. The latter is actually much easier in programming and honestly I feel like it's used less frequently. But that's like being unwilling to throw away your first draft when writing a report (or anything). Why hold on? The first draft's job is to get the stuff out of your head and see it in a more physical form. It's so easy to rebuild, magnitudes easier than doing it the first time, but it always hangs on as if losing it is losing work.
You're right to be cautious, especially given how many pop-psych books have aged like milk after the replication crisis came into full view. Henrich’s work feels a bit different to me. He’s not just stringing together catchy one-off studies; he’s pulling from a mix of anthropology, economics, history, and cross-cultural psych
> It feels like we have sometimes accreted an amalgam of these pithy takes based on very small, one off, studies (never replicated) that let us comfortably assemble an affirmation of our broader takes.
The patterns are there and are hard to deny. The reasoning and explanations of these types of books? Don't take them for granted, do your own research if anything is of particular interest, think for yourself, etc. The books can be of value without being 100% correct.
If only the protestant countries' secret services would stop arming rebels every time they democratically elect someone that wants to stop funneling riches to said protestant countries…
I don't think that is a fruitful line of reasoning, given that the vast majority of the world is not Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant! You should consider digging deeper for underlying causes that go beyond localized religions.
Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause.
> Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause.
Protestantism does seem to become the preferred variant of Christianity in areas of bottom-up power systems, such as the UK (at least wrt Magna Carta), which does make perfect sense given the Vatican being the ultimate in top-down thinking.
Magna Carta (1200s) was issued 300 years before England defected from Catholicism (1500s), so I think we may be looking at the wrong thing as "the cause" here.
> I noticed years ago that majority Catholic and Orthodox countries are generally less prosperous than Protestant countries
Based on what? I can't think of a single pairing of Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox countries that genuinely had a similar enough history, geography, geopolitical situation to be able to compare them easily. Maybe the closest would be Belgium and Netherlands, but even then Belgium spent a few hundred years more under a faraway empire milking them, and as a frontier for lots of fighting with the French, and occupied by the Germans. And Belgium is also smaller in land and population, and had a very different colonial way of working. It also had resources (coal) that allowed it to industrialise quickly, while the Netherlands didn't so focused mostly on trade and trade posts.
And... Belgium has a slightly worse economy by most classic metrics (GDP, GDP per capita, etc.).
Maybe the only other even remotely comparable countries with different religions are the Baltics (Estonia was Lutheran when they were religious, Latvia is very mixed, Lithuania is mostly Catholic). Estonia and Lithuania have pretty similar GDP per capita, with Latvia a bit behind.
But seeing this through a religious lens is missing the forrest for the trees at best.
The book examines this in multiple different ways, not just at the national level, but even within countries (provinces that are more catholic vs more protestant, and even within Germany, how far the city was from Wittenberg), as well as comparing third world countries that encountered catholic missionaries vs protestant missionaries.
1. The reformation increased literacy/education in the populace to a greater extent in protestant areas, because you no longer needed clergy to talk to God, or understand the bible. Protestant countries have had better education for longer and it has a compounding effect.
2. The "Marriage and Family Program" (the "MFP")... protestant areas discouraged cousin marriage and levirate marriage much earlier than catholic countries, and it is still very common in the rest of the world. Consanguineous marriage is ludicrously prevalent in the middle east, it makes most of the rest of the world more tribal and you end up with compounding genetic defects. By making cousin marriage taboo, it encouraged children to move to a different town and made people less clannish.
> humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that.
I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but my gut tells me this risks being one of those bold claims that grows legs and runs for a while until we debunk it.
Yeah, has that Malcolm Gladwell knowledge porn vibe. A book that empowers its reader with secret knowledge of explanation that all fits together a little too neatly and loses nuance or is often just plain wrong.
I think the “secret explanation” can simply be things you don’t know (or that most people don’t know) because they’re not interesting per se, but when combined they make an interesting whole.
I enjoyed some books that don’t have anything unknown in its parts but that brought a lot of shift in perspectives for me, such as “Man’s Worldly Goods”[1] and “The Drunkard’s Walk”[2].
That explanation sounds great until you find out that Gladwell is more than willing to misrepresent events to fit into whatever point he's trying to make. The most egregious example I know of being the Korean Air Line Flight 801 crash.
There are plenty of great books that treat a topic right for a lay reader while still leaving you satisfied at having learned something interesting and novel. But there are also a lot of books like I described that cash in on the desire for such experiences but it ended up being more of a sugary treat than a full meal :)
After finding out even Think Fast, Slow (a book from a very creditable researcher and nobel laureate) is full of replication crisis, I approach pop-sci as entertainment instead of self-education.
*nobel memorial laureate.
This is exactly why people get annoyed with the branding of the bank of Sweden’s economics prize. We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.
As one of the professors I had undergrad classes with liked to say "Economics is the only field where you can be awarded the Nobel prize for showing A and then next year someone gets a Nobel prize for showing not A".
Was it? I thought Millikan's measurement had a minor error from an incorrect viscosity of air, and several other researchers' subsequent measurements were fabricated to agree with Millikan's.
It's not completely insane, the part of the brain that gets used for recognising words is very close to the part of the brain that recognises faces. The brain likely cannibalises the part of the cortex that's used to recognise faces to recognise words and letters instead. See this study[1] where the visual word form area reacts much more strongly to faces in illiterates than in people who have learnt to read.
There are people who have face-blindness (inability to discern faces) or dyslexia (visual processing disorder that leads to severe difficulties with reading). The two aren't strongly correlated.
Dyslexia seems to be tied to some broader visual processing issues, which impair the ability to discriminate faces somewhat. But not the other way around.
If the two skills were strongly related, you'd expect a very strong and obvious link. Maybe in form of both performing poorly, if damage to the same pathways impairs both. Or as one performing poorly while another performs unusually well (super-recognizers? children who learn reading at 2?) - if the two skills compete for brain real estate and create a performance tradeoff, as claimed.
It's the one that immediately set off my alarm bell. I always try to put myself in the shoes of a scientist and imagine how it would be possible to design a study to test a claim. To me, this one implies humans of today are worse at recognizing faces compared to humans of the past who did not read as much or at all. That one cannot possibly be tested because you cannot test the cognitive capabilities of people of the past who no longer exist.
On the more productive side, this suggests we might develop standardized tests of human capabilities and limits that would allow people of the future to compare themselves to us.
I'm struggling to think of any way to test the hypothesis which is (A) practical and (B) accurate.
For example, suppose you sampled a group today and found an inverse-correlation between "good at recognizing many faces" and "good at recognizing written text"... That still wouldn't show that one facility grew causing the other to shrink, because maybe people are just born (or early-development-ed) with a certain bias.
I'm quite willing to believe that human brains do Weird Stuff with respect to reusing circuits and development, but I still don't see how they concluded "the skill encourages the brain state" by disproving "the brain state encourages the acquisition of the skill."
It would be ethically difficult to randomly assigned children to groups (A) taught to read versus (B) forced to remain illiterate while ensuring both groups had the same number of people's faces in their social circles.
IIRC the author compares brain scans and recognition abilities of children of hunter gatherers that where sent to school vs same age relatives that were not. I’m bringing this up from memory now and I’m not so sure of this, but this claim stems from some studies of the author
It seems that there is an study in which the part of the brain used to recognize words is also used for recognizing letters, and when one increases taking more space the other shrink. That study used brain scanners to measure and detect brain activity.
> One of the wildest claims in there is the one that the north of Italy is more developed today because it was part of the Holy Roman Empire while the south wasn’t. About a thousand years separate these and he finds effects still.
I would note that the north and south of Italy have very different geography and climate. Which can be upstream of all sorts of things, culturally. The geography of Italy's two halves support different types of economic activity; and the social realities of living within these different economies, naturally evolves into major differences in culture. (Compare/contrast: the differing cultures of coastal vs midwestern America. Now imagine that split with a few thousand more years for the divergence to take hold.)
History happens once; but geography is always affecting a nation, all throughout its evolution. So if you're looking for reasons that two sub-populations within a country might have noticeable differences today, differing geography is going to be the "horse", while history is more of the "zebra."
That being said: geography can also constrain history.
Southern Italy is almost entirely coastline, in a part of the world where, for much of the last ~2000 years, everyone was constantly invading everyone else by sea. Northern Italy was relatively-more immune to amphibious assault, as its capitals could be situated more inland. (Rome itself — the exception that proves the rule — was located in south Italy, but was defended from amphibious assault mostly by the Roman Empire's huge naval home-fleet being docked to the southern-Italian coast; not by anything inherent to its location. Once the Roman Empire itself went away, big rich cities in southern Italy suddenly became juicy targets for conquest and/or sacking.)
> So if you're looking for reasons that two sub-populations within a country might have noticeable differences today, differing geography is going to be the "horse", while history is more of the "zebra."
This is wrong empirically and providing proof for this is how Acemoglu and Johnson won the economics Nobel. In basically all maps of voting patterns within Europe you can read its institutional history. You can see the border of the Holy Roman Empire in economic and voter data in Poland, you can see the iron curtain in every map of Germany.
If you want one of the counterexamples to your Italy theory, Venice was one of the richest middle-age cities in Italy and it is famously built on water.
Let’s not forget another data point. South was richer before unification than the north.
The north regions regularly at war with France and Austria were pretty much debt fuelled, whilst the south was considered the bank of Italy, solvent and very rich due to flourishing economy.
After unification, Piedmont dumped its war debts on the whole country and drained the south’s cash reserves, using them to modernise the north while the south was left weakened.
Yes, your point and other points around the web I’ve seen make his argument about north and south Italy very controversial to say the least. He does have data to back it up, where he presents distance to nearest church as a predictor for how well a population will fare, and south Italy didn’t have the churches that north the Italy had
> (Rome itself — the exception that proves the rule
You really have to explain specifically what you mean by this phrase, or else it's typically just saying you don't actually understand the rule or the exception.
It sounds like you're claiming Rome succeeded for reasons that overcame its geographical disadvantages, and due to this growth protected itself from naval invasions. But Rome was not a maritime power during its early republic period, let alone earlier. So why didn't Carthage or anyone else just sail upriver (Rome was not on the coast, just to clarify the context) and destroy Rome? How did Rome succeed in the first place to become a maritime power capable of defying southern Italy's geography?
I haven't read the book but it sounds really interesting. Regarding tone though,
> monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today
Does the author use the word "blame" to mean "the reason for" or do they present it as a critique of monogamy? Not a big deal, just made me curious when I saw that.
I meant it as “is responsible for” or “explains”. The author doesn’t seem to make any judgement in over the other, but he presents polygamy in a society as a causation for male violence. Sorry for that, English isn’t my first language
> He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man).
Would love to see that link and any other posts others might have run across here as well. I feel like pre covid it was common to see high Quality ask hn discussions with niche/prestigious book recommendations often. I dont see that as much now.
Funny thing with the words. I remember before I could read and billboards just looked like designs. Then once I could read it was like reading was unavoidable, it could not be shut off and you are constantly reading instead of just appreciating the text as some design pattern. At the time I felt ripped off.
Got to love calvinist societies like northern europe. "oh you are poorer than me due to centuries of colonization? That's your own moral failing!".
And while nowadays they are mostly non religious and don't directly express the idea in these terms, the disparity of treatment is still incredibly strong.
And basically it's all down to having better weapons at a certain point in history.
I haven’t read it but I think that’s genuinely interesting and not obvious.
And probably could change based on the roles of first and second wives and, yes, how male status plays out and how it influences the life of the wife.
We don’t have legal polygamy but in many places there’s not much stopping people from living in an unmarried multi-woman household with a man (or vice versa). But it’s not a very common arrangement, and it’s interesting to think about why.
The first level "why" at least is straightforward: Christianism. Even when not directly imposed, it's still the basis of the Western system of values and morals.
But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? Was it property and rules about property? Was it to maximize the number of children, so that the group/tribe/kingdom would be militarily stronger than the neighbor? Or maybe it was to prevent some sort of very specific and concrete problem, real or perceived, that arose from tolerating free love, and that we today have no clue about?
> But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)?
I dunno about heterosexuality being encoded[1] into cultural canons, but for monogamy it's actually quite simple: violence.
Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.
===========
[1] As far as heterosexuality goes, it's not "encoded by wilful intention" so much as "this is the default". IOW, most people are happy going with the default, so if you make something opt-out, the majority won't opt-out. Same for opt-in. This is why countries that have opt-out organ donors have more organs donated, while countries that have opt-in organ donations have a fraction of he opt-out countries.
Literally one of the main points of the book: the church’s mandate and enforcement of monogamy in Europe lowered violence so much that a different kind of society emerged.
> Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.
This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
Monogamy is possessiveness, and possessiveness is what drives violence.
>If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.
* In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.
* It makes marriage intrinsically more complicated simply because of the more complex interactions. For example, if Alice is married to Bob, who is married to both Alice and Carol, who is married to both Bob and David, what are Alice and David to each other? Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?
* Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?
> In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.
You can use a condom. TIL, rubber condoms are a mid-19th century invention; a significant upgrade over sheep gut.
The alternative is called polyfidelity.
> [...] what are Alice and David to each other?
They're called Metamours.
> Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?
It's called a polycule.
> Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?
You write a will.
By the way, inheritance laws are messy already as they are. Try figuring out how to reject inheritance (e.g. of debt) in your jurisdiction.
> There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.
Yes, the reason is to reinforce division and oppression. One "side" is underprivileged, the other has to fight each other for supremacy. The stronger few win, everyone else loses. History is littered with examples.
Don't get me wrong, these are all very good questions. But we've figured all of these things out quite a while ago. People do live like that, and form lasting, loving communities. I'd wager that an entire society built on top of that would have no lesser chance at thriving than the one we've been born into.
Sure. Now. But monogamy and polygyny are a little older than condoms.
>Metamours [...] polycule
You're answering rhetorical questions which, incidentally, are not about terminology, but about legal and social mechanics. Knowing what a "metamour" is, says nothing about what the formal and informal responsibilities of the parties involved are or should be with respect to each other. My whole point is that not having to define such relationships and their expectations is a reason to forbid them culturally.
>You write a will.
How did that work before most people knew how to write?
>By the way, inheritance laws are messy already as they are.
That's not an argument in favor of legally legitimizing polycules.
>the reason is to reinforce division and oppression
I mean, I gave several reasons why historically either monogamy or asymmetric polygamy would have been preferred over symmetric polygamy, that have nothing to do with oppression.
>I'd wager that an entire society built on top of that would have no lesser chance at thriving than the one we've been born into.
Sure, maybe. Personally, I'm more of the opinion that cultural features are memetic, and that memes are not uniformly successfully propagated. If monogamous and polygynous societies are more common than polyandrous and polycular societies, it's probably for a reason.
> You're answering rhetorical questions which, incidentally, are not about terminology, but about legal and social mechanics.
Yes, that's what I've tried to imply. You name things, so you can discuss them in more abstract terms, so you can form a social & legal framework around those concepts.
> My whole point is that not having to define such relationships and their expectations is a reason to forbid them culturally.
>> [...] not having to define [...] is a reason to forbid [...].
Suppress the concept. "We don't talk about that."
> How did that work before most people knew how to write?
How did people enter agreements?
> Personally, I'm more of the opinion that cultural features are memetic, and that memes are not uniformly successfully propagated.
Agree. It's also how dictatorships rise. Another form of oppression that concentrates power and fires back at the group who have initially supported it. Another lose-lose.
> This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
Only if your argument is that this behaviour is nurture, not nature. IOW, if your argument is "this behaviour is completely disconnected from instinct and has nothing to do with evolutionary pressure", then sure, your argument makes sense.
Many of the great apes, and indeed, other animals, don't think in terms of political soundbites, though, so we can readily observe that the behaviour "violence over mating rights" is a thing that developed in those creatures that eventually evolved into other creatures which evolved into pre-hominids which evolved into hominids which evolved into us.
Some things are instinct. It's a very large stretch to claim that violence over mating isn't instinct, but political.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that...
Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood. I can say that I always, personally, considered the idea of controlling a person abhorrent, as much as I found uninteresting the idea of orbiting my intimate life around a single person with special and very high privileges over whatever I do and think, including outside of bed. However, all my relatives were very insistent that I should date girls and marry. 100% culture, 0% nature. Of course, this is just a single data point.
The heterosexuality part being the "default" is a bit naive, because it ignores the lengths to which some people go to force their kids to be heterosexual. Again, anecdotally, my father sired two gay sons, who had to go to great lengths to have a less traumatic life. Sometimes I suspect my father wasn't that hetero himself, and was only ensuring the next generation inherited his cultural legacy/trauma.
I could consider an argument that a majority (heterosexual) imposes a cultural canon on a non heterosexual minority. But the problem with that is that we don't really know if that majority/minority split would exist without the very strong cultural conditioning. And, as I said before, I don't really believe that homophobia is something the Canaanites invented out of spite. Most likely, it was a cultural trait that conferred advantages to groups, particularly after the agricultural revolution locked human population in a cycle of growth and war for land--but that's just a pet theory of mine.
There are even theories (read the controversial book "Sex at Dawn" if you want the details) that our current cultural canons about sexuality run against what was our nature for hundreds of thousands of years.
i don't think it's a valid way to think about society/religion/culture what your formulazation reflects.
up until just 2-3 centuries ago, people did not think about these questions in a self-deterministic way, i mean they trusted the ancestors to sorted out most of the things over the centuries, and they were not suposed to take huge social/cultural reforms, only minor adjustments. did not even have so huge view on the spacial and temporal panorama of different cultures and societies over the whle word like us today. today even just binging up this statement makes people angry like "oh those silly old people. they _unconditionally_ obeyed to whatever their parents and superiors told them. this is the way to opression and tiranny, etc, etc. not like us! we are truely grown ups today. humanity is out of the dark child days. now! now disagree to _everything_. default is «i deny»". i mean … who do you think want to fool you? i think, on average, parents wants to leave the well-tested and proven-to-be-stable fundamental ideas about the world to their children. and those dont change very often; the more fundamental the less changing world-properties are.
but changes in society started to accelerate, so came social and economic revolutions which all want to redefine as much as possible. with really big improvements in the sociology, antropology and other culture-related disciplines, people started to believe that we are watching ourself from the outside, so able to manipulate the norms and the law to "make society better". only noone has the same definiton what is "better".
Sounds a lot like Tom Holland - Dominion (to help the robots - "...broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.").
There is undoubtedly a real effect here, but IMHO one problem with the original article is that it treats the US as the only reference point.
On the one hand, this reflects the US dominant position in world affairs and the fact that probably most of the training materials come from there.
But on the other hand, there are some outlier results that are left unexplained. For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US.
I’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of ‘weird’ as an insult (charitably because all the old insults get you shadowbanned on social media, less charitably because conformism is what the mainstream values more than anything), so the author isn’t even pretending to hide their agenda here.
I think they chose the WEIRD acronym to challenge the western centrism. For most of the readers of the book, the culture described by the WEIRD acronym is not only the normal culture, but is in many ways considered universal.
By calling it WEIRD, the author is trying to drive home the point that the vast majority of people in the world are NOT in that culture that many westerners feel is 'normal', which would make it 'weird' in the sense that it isn't actually the norm.
Now, I have a lot of problems with the book and his arguments, but I don't think there is anything sneaky or nefarious about the word choice, it is very up front and straightforward as to the reasoning behind it.
The authors had a perfect opportunity to use Chinese models to see if their trend held up. Instead, they treated ChatGPT as the “default”. Sound familiar?
WEIRD is not pejorative in TFA. There's no problem being WEIRD. I am WEIRD. What's alleged in TFA is that AI, as it's currently deployed, is implicitly chauvinistic towards perspectives other than WEIRD. This sort of thing has historically been a problem with AI/ML and automation in general. The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times).
Poorly considered automation can create frictionless experiences for some and Kafkaesque experiences for the rest, where systems refuse to accept your atypical name, your atypical style of speaking is flagged as an indicator of fraud, etc. Automating processes involving people necessarily makes assumptions about those people, and such assumptions are often brittle.
For example, it's easy to imagine a resume filtering AI being implicitly prejudiced against people from Fictionalstan, because it was only trained on a few resumes from Fictionalstan and most of those happened to be classified as "unqualified". This is a danger anytime you have a small number of samples from any particular group, because it's easy for small sample sizes to be overwhelmed by bad luck.
In general I think these types of issues are best viewed as software bugs. It's a clearer and more actionable perspective than as ideological issues. If the software isn't serving some of our end users properly, let's just fix it and move on.
> The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times).
I'm a Caucasian living in Asia and the facial recognition systems that they recently required all banking apps to use struggles massively with my face.
I fully agree with you here that this isn't systemic racism, it's just a bug. It only becomes racism if they don't put any effort into fixing it.
When a member of a group says that a term used to refer to them is pejorative, is it now an acceptable response to simply say ‘no it isn’t’? That hasn’t been the case for decades.
You know, are you seeing it as pejorative or just want to silence the whole idea? Because people who came up with WEIRD acronym were ... WEIRD. They were literally talking about themselves and about weakness of studies that were made.
WEIRD isn’t insulting to be because it’s simply descriptive of you take the terms themselves.
However. No one gave them the right to speak for everyone, and in regular parlance “weird” isn’t a super nice thing to say about someone. They could’ve chosen something else like WESTED “Western, Educated, Stable, Technologically-advanced, Economically Developed” but didn’t. And they don’t get to choose how people will react when they’re called weird.
The claim at issue isn't, "I find the term WEIRD insulting." As you say, everyone is entitled to feel that way. It's "the term WEIRD is intended by the authors of TFA as an insult and reveals their agenda as being 'anti-west' [1]". I can understand how someone would find it insulting, but in the article we are discussing, it is descriptive and not pejorative.
Keep in mind that I am also WEIRD. Please help me to understand by referring to the specific part of the article where WEIRD was used in the pejorative.
No, I never said that. To be perfectly clear: if you want to argue that a text says X, you need to provide evidence from the text. Everything I see you commenting in this thread appears to be based your preconceptions around this acronym, nothing you've said even indicates you've read the article.
Read it or don't, it's your business, but if I ask you for evidence from the article and your response is to try to put words on my mouth (on an irrelevant tangent, at that), I'm going to write off your argument entirely.
The idea that “mainstream” values “conformism” seems like a relic of the 1980s. Have you looked around at public figures in the news? There’s less Debbie Boone and more Dennis Rodman going on. The freaks are flying their flags out there for everyone to see.
I heard a congressman in a town hall meeting last night call a colleague "crazy liberal" - a psychotherapist called in and said don't use that word "crazy" - language is being perverted here
We've been here before. The ‘Goldwater Rule’ says that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
Maybe I should have elaborated further. Her point was that the term "crazy" is in itself destructive and counterproductive. Although I use the term all the time, gotta fess up to that. So now I am naval gazing too.
The etymology was begging to be looked at, so I did. My understanding from undergrad was that it came from Greek "akrasia" as I recall but it's worth looking at:
The use of language by leaders in the US lately sometimes seems reckless and inflammatory, even shocking and provocative, and I'll stop there before getting flagged for who knows what.
>In fact, this paper found that more than that, it thinks American.
I think that's because it seems to be primarily trained on reddit and therefore mirrors everything reddit stands for. Not a good thing considering just how overrun the site is with bots and political activists of all kinds.
You're absolutely right! Social media like Reddit are overrun with bots, sycophants, and trolls trying to provoke reactions by engaging in controversial topics. This forms echo chambers, which is a sub-par source for training data, and reflects those biases in LLM responses.
“Do non-American LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek, Mistral, Apertus) perform better or worse here? Do they have their own cultural biases in-built?”
I'm wondering the same thing, in addition to the related question of “Would an LLM perform better or worse if prompted with languages other than English?”.
ChatGPT is worse in Russian. Example: after accurately noting that a name appeared in a particular Russian book, it asked if I wanted the direct quote in Russian. I said yes. At this point it switched to Russian output but could no longer find the name in that book, and then apologized for having used what seemed to have been "approximations" about the book before.
(I did then go and check the book myself; ChatGPT in English was right, the name is there)
I was using Qwen3 locally in thinking mode, and noted that even if it is talking to me in Japanese, it is doing it's "thinking" steps in English. Not having a full understanding of how the layers in an LLM handle language connections I can't say for sure, but for a human this would result in subpar outcomes.
For example (not actual output):
Input: "こにちは"(konichwa)
Qwen Thinking: "Ah, the user has said "こにちは", I should respond in a kind and friendly manner.
Qwen Output: こにちは！
It quiiiickly gets confused in this, much quicker than in English.
I'm kind of wondering when will it become a universal understanding that LLMs can't be trained with equal amounts of Japanese and Chinese contents in training data due to Han Unification, making these two languages incoherent mix of two conflicting syntax in one. It's remarkable that Latin languages is not apparently facing issues without clear technical explanation as to why, which I'm guessing has to do with the fact of granularity of characters.
That said, in my tiny experience, LLMs all think in their dataset majority language. They don't adhere to prompt languages, one way or another. Chinese models usually think in either English or Chinese, rarely in cursed mix thereof, and never in Japanese or any of their non-native languages.
Would they not quickly bocome divergent vectors? In the same way that apple and Apple can exist in the same vector set with totally different meanings?
So all information gleaned reading a glyph in the context of japanese articles would be totally different vectors to the information gleaned from the same glyph in Chinese?
I don't know, but at least older Qwen models were a bit confused as to what words belong to which languages, and recent ones seem noticeably less sure about ja-JP in general. Maybe it vaguely relates Hanzi/Kanji character being more coarse grained than Latin alphabets so that there aren't enough character counts to tell apart or something.
I don’t think this can be solved until there is massive investment to train LLM in native Japanese. The current ChatGPT tokenizer still use BPE and you can’t even present a Japanese character with a single token
Ah nah, that was just me here, I'm no good with the phone IME. I tried a bunch of different sentences. It always thought in English.
It was pretty good at one shot translations with thinking turned off however, I imagine thinking distracts it from going down the Japanese only vector paths.
Quite a few reasoning LLMs do reasoning in English only. Because the RL setup specifically forces them to do so.
Why?
Because the creators want the reasoning trace to be human readable. And without a pressure forcing them to think in English, they tend to get weird with the reasoning trace. Wild language-mixing, devolved grammar, strange language-mixed nonsense words that the LLM itself seemingly understands just fine.
I have saved instructions for Gemini to translate queries into the local language then retranslate the output back to English, when asking about non-English speaking countries/cultures. It seems to work fairly well, but I think it's just due to the different content trained in that language; obviously there would be more in depth discussion of Indonesian cuisine in Indonesian. Whether the country is rich or democratic shouldn't really affect the output.
That's interesting! I manually do the same by prompting in the target language, since it drastically changes the results.
This has been true of web search since forever mind you. The wev has always been culturally delineated by language, and the English Web as I call it is not the only web.
It seems like almost all contexts might get value from specialized training. People often vary radically depending on where they were raised and where they live, their occupation and social class, and a range of other factors. Even workers from essentially identical backgrounds but practicing different trades can have very different perceptions and framing for what might appear to be shared tasks.
I imagine the culture of HRLF trainers affects things. Maybe there’s disproportionally more of them from Oz/NZ, as native English-speaking countries with possibly lower wages?
I had heard that a lot of human feedback was being provided by people in Nigeria, as it has a very large English speaking population (owing to its history as a British colony) while also having low wages. This was the explanation given as to why ChatGPT seemed to use the word "delve" so often, apparently it's used much more frequently in business contexts there.
Possible that they're using different sources of feedback for different training though
There may be a real point here but this post and paper are not good evidence for it.
The blogpost doesn't have a date, but links to a 2023 preprint, which is hard to evaluate b/c it doesn't actually have a methods section, despite referring to it multiple times. (Did this ever get published?)
But it _sounds_ like they asked GPT via API to do the same survey 1000 times, without telling it to attempt to model the preferences of any particular country, but both the blog and the paper are interpreting a correlational analysis as evidence that it's bad at modeling local values.
> The greater the cultural distance between a country and the USA, the less accurate ChatGPT got at simulating peoples’ values.
> This correlation represents the similarity between variation in GPT and human responses in a particular population; in other words, how strongly GPT can replicate human judgments from a particular national population.
And to some degree, this is more a portrayal of the difference in human responses than anything about GPT; given the survey data, no matter what responses the LLM gives, it's going to be closer to some national averages than others.
LLMs also have a characteristic default voice/style which we're annoyed by, but _when instructed_ it can mimic another style. If you have some multi-dimensional style space, yes you could find the group that it's closest to, but it would be misleading to say it does a poor job "simulating" or "replicating" others if you didn't actually test that.
Some of the questions don't really make sense to ask an LLM (being about the survey taker's personal financial situation and such), but the paper doesn't seem to go into detail of what questions were used.
Another paper that echoes similar concerns — AI Suggestions Homogenize Writing Toward Western Styles and Diminish Cultural Nuances (https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11360)
Social media reflects a silicon valley perspective and US domestic news have contaminated the entire eurozone since over a decade.
Movies are also a distillate of a local culture often with a rather uniform ideological slant.
AI being a clone army of corporate spokesmen from the US west coast brings sparsely little new cultural homogeneity to the already very smoothed table.
> The greater the cultural distance between a country and the USA, the less accurate ChatGPT got at simulating peoples’ values.
I'd be somewhat concerned that what is actually reflected is a cultures willingness to adopt US (west coast) values over its own. We see this constantly in some European countries where we're willing to adopt US view points and problems over our own. Either because we're constantly exposed the US problems online or because the US problems are simply more "interesting", in the sense that they are more decisive and easier for us to split into right and wrong.
Sooo it's like training a robot to "think like a human," but all the reference humans are Silicon Valley product managers and undergrads from elite universities
I don’t have the data but I assume the corpus available to train an LLM is majorly in English, written by Americans and western counterparts. If we’re training the LLMs to sound similar to the training data, I imagine the responses have to match that world view.
My anecdote is that before LLMs I would default to search Google in English instead of my own native language simply because there was so much more content in English to be found that would help me.
And here I am producing novel sentences in English to respond to your message, further continuing the cycle where English is the main language to search and do things.
In my experience, ChatGPT, at least, seems to have had multiple languages used to train its corpus. I am guessing this based on its interaction with me in a different language, where it changed English idioms like "short and sweet" to analogous versions in that language that were not direct translations.
But my guess is that the data sets used from the other languages are smaller (and actually, even if it had perfect access to every single piece of data on the internet, that would still be true, due to the astonishing quantity of English-language data out there compared to the rest. Your comment validates that). With less data, one would expect a poorer performance in all metrics for any non-Anglophone place, including the "cultural world view" metric.
Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich.
It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that.
There are so many interest studies mentioned there, one that really stuck with me is how Protestant-raised Americans will work harder for the next day after having (reasearch-led) incestuous thoughts when compared to Catholics and Atheists.
He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man).
One of the wildest claims in there is the one that the north of Italy is more developed today because it was part of the Holy Roman Empire while the south wasn’t. About a thousand years separate these and he finds effects still. Mostly in connection to the spread of read/write to the public being a core tenant of Protestantism.
Anyway, this is not a summary of the book but instead a few points from it that really stuck with me after reading it. Fascinating stuff
I have to ask (and I don't mean this combatively) - given the ongoing realization of the replication crisis, how likely is it that the book you mention reflects a summation of the "too pat" studies about human behavior that, en masse, always seem pithy in an interesting headline, but years later end up being completely bunk?
I've noticed over the years many chains of reasoning - made up of what I believe someone called "cocktail party" pithy takes - that only last as long as you don't dig into the nuts and bolts of them. Pleasant little takes on our psyche and behavior that makes for nice reaffirming thoughts of our views but break down under later analysis.
It feels like we have sometimes accreted an amalgam of these pithy takes based on very small, one off, studies (never replicated) that let us comfortably assemble an affirmation of our broader takes.
This is a rotten thing to say about your book recommendation, given I have never read it (I hope you'll forgive me), but based on the last few years of the replication crisis, do you think, in your heart of hearts, that what you are describing truly does stand up?
I do not have the time now to craft you a full answer as I don’t have the book on hand and have only been commenting from memory so far. But to give you a quick answer: I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. Most of the authors claims are backed by actual papers for reference on the footnotes. As for replication it seems that the author himself replicated some of his studies with different hunter gatherer societies in the world. It’s been a good while since I read it.
I can tell you from my personal experience that the info there has helped me understand the differences between how people think in Brazil (where I come from) and how people think here in the US. Could it be me pattern matching? Possibly
I wouldn’t expect all of it to be true, but I would be very surprised if most of the sources the author provide are false or lack theory and tests, since he explain control groups and experiments in details.
I’m not that married to the book either, as I find some claims rather bold (like the Italy divide)
The title does sound catchy tho
Edit; the author’s main point is how the papal rule on monogamy changed Europe and its colonies to this day, which I didn’t capture on my main comment. Lots to unpack there
> I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers.
That's not the issue. The replication crisis is the phenomenon that many scientific results and conclusions which originate from serious, peer-reviewed research, couldn't be replicated by other researchers, and sometimes not even by the original scientist. This is especially concerning because many results with strong statements – unintuitive ones as well as bias-confirming ones – turned out to be non-existent [1]. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "shallowness" or "cocktail-party takes", although the strength of the purported effects, combined with pop-science simplifications and reductions, lend themselves well to such memetically spreading factoids.
[1] The "softer" sciences tend to be much more affected by this than the "harder" sciences.
But I said the book does offer replication studies in different populations in different continents, albeit from the same author
I know, and I guess it's better than nothing, but replications by the original author don't exactly grant the same level of confidence as independent replications.
No idea why this is getting downvoted. Everything I wrote is true and directly on topic. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
I know we are not supposed to talk about karma (and therefore a downvote ironically may be appropriate on this comment), but I agree vote behaviour on HN lately shows a still-small but growing tendency toward suppressive downvoting.
This seems to happen generally for two reasons: Even a neutral comment is evaluated for what stance it most closely aligns with, and then downvoted to suppress the opposing view just in case. Or alternatively, a comment that appears low-key combative (but really isn't directly so) gets downvoted in an attempt to ensure harmony.
Both moves to me have "culture war vibes", and come from either adopting those habits or feeling very tired from strife.
I think it's increasingly easy to fall into either bracket, but let's not do that on HN! If a comment is generally polite enough, the only bar to meet is adding new information or new thought into a conversation. None of us come here to be pandered to, and getting challenged by viewpoints that force you to consider the corner cases of your own views is half the fun.
Not to call you out for your post but I think this is a result of the 'just asking questions' culture we live in where asking questions online has been weaponized/agenda driven. Even the person asking the question admits their question could be interpreted this way first thing: "and I don't mean this combatively)" and even their caveat these days is sadly easily interpreted as 'I'm just asking questions'. Just look at how the start of my first sentence changes the tone.
The question asker doesn't know the work, doesn't respond to what OP said, but instead challenges OP about methodology, and leads with 'I know this question can seem combative'. Then falls to 'do you think, in your heart of hearts'... how does that question and asking for assessment align with the 'I'm all about methodology' stance of the question asker? It sounds a like a 'core values' assessment/assignment not a 'the room for error in this study' assessment is being asked for. The question on the whole:
'I know this can sound combative but I'm just asking questions. Given other things have been bad and knowing nothing of this being talked about, but pointing out it's probably completely wrong (based on nothing but X other thing is wrong).... really, in your heart, do you believe you are coming from integrity?'
That sounds toxic AF.
Personally as a relative newcomer here it seems like there is a lot of this 'just asking questions' on HN.
Edit: Throttled. I pointed out how I saw the post could be (mis)interpreted. Yeah, that necessitates me replaying it back how it could be (mis)interpreted. That is valid when my point is about... how posts could be (mis)interpreted resulting in a poorer quality of discussion. Sorry if you didn't understand the point I was trying to get across. I didn't say the interpretation was valid, I said here is how posts like the one the person I responded to referenced can derail discussion in an era of 'just asking questions'. Zero disingenuousness nor unconstructive on my part and it's wild you can't see that. My post was about better quality discussion using the message the person I responded to used. Yours is about calling me specifically out. Which is more 'constructive'?
> […] 'just asking questions' […]
That's not the case here. Non-replicable results from studies in the social sciences are a very real, very frequent phenomenon, and the first question to ask when seeing a claim about a significant effect should be "Has this been replicated?". Being sceptical (without being overly negative or critical) is not "toxic" as you call it, instead it protects us all from becoming trapped in our bubble.
> 'I know this can sound combative but I'm just asking questions. Given other things have been bad and knowing nothing of this being talked about, but pointing out it's probably completely wrong (based on nothing but X other thing is wrong).... really, in your heart, do you believe you are coming from integrity?'
> That sounds toxic AF.
You had to rephrase PeterHolzwarth's post and put word in their mouths to make it sound "toxic AF". That's a disingenuous and unconstructive thing to do in a discussion.
This is why I have enjoyed not having downvote powers yet. It's made me check why I downvote things - and re-evaluate what I upvote. I've found myself upvoting things I don't really agree with but make interesting points that I find myself dialoguing with. Perhaps this is why I mostly lurk
I'd never heard of the replication crisis, but it mirrors what I think is a core problem with modern political discourse.
Example: Two people with similar classically liberal values hear the same "pithy take" on a politically contentious issue. One accepts it as presented, the other digs in and finds it doesn't hold up to scrutiny at all.
Almost invariably, the skeptic is ostracized, his findings met with incurious dismissal.
This is probably only true when the "pithy take" upholds accepted dogma.
This has been my experience, yes. Although dogma implies long held beliefs.
The rate of adoption has accelerated along with the news cycle.
From my own time in psychology, the thrust of the book might be good, but that specific point about Protestant work ethic sounds exactly like all the other "just so" studies that didn't replicate.
But lots of otherwise good books have these little mistakes on them, so I find it best to gloss over them and see if the point stands without them.
https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
Here are the cocktail ideas. Hits the spot.
>No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction.
it is a common rhetorical device to phrase something as an absolute when the negation of it is only an edge case.
hence
>Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge! Of course, civil engineers don't move bridges as frequently as programmers deal with changes in software but,
Not to be that guy, but where can I read those interviews? I got as far as the blog (https://www.hillelwayne.com/) and looked around October of 2019 and can't seem to find anything. As it stands this isn't even anecdata, this is some guy saying some other guy said he talked to a few guys who say something happens from time to time.
no idea but it stands to reason people will need to move bridges at times, we're in the middle of building a bridge, earthquake happens, stuff no longer like it was, gotta move that bridge is just the initial obvious situation that I can imagine from outside. Similar other natural disasters would also affect it, flash flooding etc.
I'll grant that, but that's not a "they don't do this as often as that, but", that's a "it's not unheard of". That was meant to be a response to a Tao of Programming-like post about why programming work has so much improvisation.
Well the reason you don't move a bridge is because it's really hard and really expensive. Just like you don't build an airplane while it's flying because it couldn't be flying if it wasn't built.
The analogies seem to just be missing the point. There's constraints, so what?
I've worked in hard science, engineering, and software. No one is omniscient, so the goals evolve and pivot during the project. That's pretty standard practice. You can't just plan and execute unless you're omniscient. Honestly, the big differences I see is that programmers spend less time at the drawing board and engineers and scientists spend much more time there because working in physical space is very costly and time consuming. But there's a lot of similarities. Programmers would be more effective if they spend more time at the drawing board and engineers would be more effective if they could hack on their tasks more cheaply (which is why sim has had such an impact for them)
>Programmers would be more effective if they spend more time at the drawing board
Would they, though? As you've correctly pointed out, design goals in software engineering get shifted by decision-makers because its cheaper than in civil engineering. The whole point of the ToP article is pointing out that software engineers have to account for possible future radical changes that in other branches of engineering are at most exceedingly rare. Any time you spend on initial planning beyond a bird's eye view may be time wasted.
Yeah. I find it weird to think not. Many problems are found during those planning stages. The process is iterative. Like I said, no one is omniscient. So that also means you can't just figure out everything during the planning stage. If that could be solved there then no one would ever pivot and frankly, that'd be a pretty strong case for planning in the first place lol.
But think about it this way, how do you plan a vacation? I'll tell you how I do it and you'll tell me if you're different, which is okay. There's no "right" or "wrong" way. I'm sure some things will be different and it's going to change every vacation, but bear with me here, since this is more of a communication aid than telling you how to vacation lol.
Prior to the vacation I plan out the major things, like how do I get there, how do I get back, the lodging, and so on. I'll have some key things planned out that I want to do. But I won't ever have everything planned out in detail. I actually do not like having each day scheduled unless that is more tentative and and acting as a stand in. Then after traveling my schedule changes, especially in the beginning. Things are different than I expected, so I'll learn that I'd have more fun doing X instead of Y. Or I find that I really like Z so I want to allocate more time to that. Maybe the weather changed and so I can't do P, and I instead do Q. I'll ask locals and hotel staff what their favorite places are to eat and go there. I'll likely have had a few more famous places to eat laid out, but definitely not every mean. Fuck, some days I'm just tired and would rather call the day early and do takeout. As the vacation closes, things become way more "stable". If I go to the same place in a second vacation I'll definitely lean on my experiences and do things very differently, usually with less flexibility (depending how much I was ale to discover what I like doing the first time around).
The point is that no matter what you're doing, there is exploration and exploration is coupled with the doing phase. It'd be pretty fucking exhausting to plan out the vacation at the airport. I mean people do do this and I'm sure you could still end up having a great time. But a little planning can really go a long way, right? That's the planning. Just like when you get back to your hotel at night and modify plans. That's a planning stage too. The logistics of a vacation almost force this kind of behavior on people. But in programming it is much easier to pivot, almost to the degree that you can be mid meal at a restaurant and decide you want to eat somewhere else. Being able to pivot like that is an incredibly powerful and useful feature, but this doesn't mean that planning still doesn't provide major benefits. Going in blind is crazy! If anything, it makes it more important. In both physical and software you still are time limited and unable to brute force all paths. In physical you can't jump mid meal and even if you pivot as soon as you get a good look, you're much more limited to what you can pivot to because you can't teleport across town. But in programming, you can. You can brute force sometimes, but that clock still ticks forward and you're still going to benefit from planning. The real difference is in physical I might be able to consider 2 dozen places to eat but in software I might be able to try a few hundred. Still need to plan if there's a few thousand, right?
You need to balance these things: the planning, exploration, and execution. Working in physical forces a dominating planning stage and more careful exploration stage, because execution is so costly. But in software execution is cheap. That doesn't mean we should throw out the planning stage, it means we can exploit it much more effectively!
I don't mean to be dismissive of the effort you went to in writing all that, but nothing you've said argues why software engineers would benefit from more planning. It argues for some planning, sure; I never said no planning whatsoever is good. If you intend to build, say, a website, that presents a very different set of challenges and usable tools than if you instead intended to build a microcontroller's firmware. But you seem to agree with me that in software you can turn on a dime, yet you don't don't offer any reason why more planning than what is already done would be beneficial.
You're a programmer, so I'd expect this to not be too difficult since you deal with deep levels of abstraction every day, right? You know how to generalize functions? You're aware of anonymous functions? Functors? Templates? And many other such generalizations? Why are you seeking such high precision when you can write down a function that automatically adopts to a wide range of cases and situations?
Buddy, you're the one who originally made a specific claim.
>Programmers would be more effective if they spend more time at the drawing board
If you want to retract it then that's fine, but don't act like I'm being unreasonable for asking what reasons you have for making it.
You've constructed a setting where no matter what level of planning I suggest you'll be able to say that this already is performed.
You've constructed a setting where I must make a suggestion for YOU, when I've made a note about a generalization I've observed. Did I say "all"? Of course not. I'm a programmer too, right?
You've ignored my generalization while attempting to weaponize it against me by seeking high precision.
You then use precision to argue the variability and importance of adapting to differing settings.
You've moved the goalpost multiple times.
You've actively worked against requests to help refine the conversation to settings more appropriate for you, to determine if you are included in the initial generalization or not.
So yeah, you are being unreasonable. I see that all you wanted to do was pick a fight. I want no part in your dumb game.
It's hard to infer what you're exactly saying here, but I've worked in physics (my undergrad), aerospace engineering (first job), and programming (my phd and onwards), so I think I can bridge whatever gap is being discussed here.
In programming, engineering, and hard science your goals evolve during development. There's always discovery during the doing process that necessitates pivots, and sometimes hard pivots. The main difference I've seen is just how much time goes into planning. Software has an advantage in that when working with physical things mistakes are incredibly costly both in money and time. You fuck up a tolerance and you might need you wait a few weeks for the part to be remade and you might have an expensive paperweight (hopefully you can use for some testing).
So what that leads to is more planning stages. That's not just make a plan and go, but make a plan, go, regroup, replan, go, repeat. It often means gathering people who are the owners of different parts of a project because you can't just duct tape things together and the most permanent solution is a temporary solution that works. This greatly affects how I go about programming and is something I notice I do differently from my peers. I spend a lot more time at the whiteboard while most people I know never visit one. I'm not spending all my time there, or even most, but I couldn't do my job without "pen and paper".
In programming the "laws of physics" aren't constantly changing and you're not "building a plane while flying it" (how would it even get off the ground lol), but your requirements are constantly changing. That's... normal engineering and normal in both experimental and even theoretical science. That's because we're not omniscient and you don't know the full answer from the get go lol.
This isn't to say in trad engineering and science we doing also "move fast and break things". Just like in programming you'll build toy models or scaled down versions. But I do think programmers could benefit a lot more and make a lot fewer mistakes (substantially reducing future workloads) would they spend a bit more time at the drawing board. It's great that in programming we can jump in and poke around and experiment so much faster than the physical world allows us, but it seems that this feature is overused instead of being used in addition to planning and designing. That's what actually made me come over to this side, was the ability to iterate faster. But sometimes you gotta take a step back and look at things. Sometimes you gotta move the bridge. Sometimes you gotta tear it down to build an entirely new one. The latter is actually much easier in programming and honestly I feel like it's used less frequently. But that's like being unwilling to throw away your first draft when writing a report (or anything). Why hold on? The first draft's job is to get the stuff out of your head and see it in a more physical form. It's so easy to rebuild, magnitudes easier than doing it the first time, but it always hangs on as if losing it is losing work.
You're right to be cautious, especially given how many pop-psych books have aged like milk after the replication crisis came into full view. Henrich’s work feels a bit different to me. He’s not just stringing together catchy one-off studies; he’s pulling from a mix of anthropology, economics, history, and cross-cultural psych
> It feels like we have sometimes accreted an amalgam of these pithy takes based on very small, one off, studies (never replicated) that let us comfortably assemble an affirmation of our broader takes.
The patterns are there and are hard to deny. The reasoning and explanations of these types of books? Don't take them for granted, do your own research if anything is of particular interest, think for yourself, etc. The books can be of value without being 100% correct.
The book has been recommended and discussed here before.
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If only the protestant countries' secret services would stop arming rebels every time they democratically elect someone that wants to stop funneling riches to said protestant countries…
I don't think that is a fruitful line of reasoning, given that the vast majority of the world is not Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant! You should consider digging deeper for underlying causes that go beyond localized religions.
Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause.
> Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause.
Protestantism does seem to become the preferred variant of Christianity in areas of bottom-up power systems, such as the UK (at least wrt Magna Carta), which does make perfect sense given the Vatican being the ultimate in top-down thinking.
Magna Carta (1200s) was issued 300 years before England defected from Catholicism (1500s), so I think we may be looking at the wrong thing as "the cause" here.
No, that's my point.
Generally speaking places that view things in a bottom up way became Protestant. The others stayed Catholic.
> I noticed years ago that majority Catholic and Orthodox countries are generally less prosperous than Protestant countries
Based on what? I can't think of a single pairing of Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox countries that genuinely had a similar enough history, geography, geopolitical situation to be able to compare them easily. Maybe the closest would be Belgium and Netherlands, but even then Belgium spent a few hundred years more under a faraway empire milking them, and as a frontier for lots of fighting with the French, and occupied by the Germans. And Belgium is also smaller in land and population, and had a very different colonial way of working. It also had resources (coal) that allowed it to industrialise quickly, while the Netherlands didn't so focused mostly on trade and trade posts.
And... Belgium has a slightly worse economy by most classic metrics (GDP, GDP per capita, etc.).
Maybe the only other even remotely comparable countries with different religions are the Baltics (Estonia was Lutheran when they were religious, Latvia is very mixed, Lithuania is mostly Catholic). Estonia and Lithuania have pretty similar GDP per capita, with Latvia a bit behind.
But seeing this through a religious lens is missing the forrest for the trees at best.
The book examines this in multiple different ways, not just at the national level, but even within countries (provinces that are more catholic vs more protestant, and even within Germany, how far the city was from Wittenberg), as well as comparing third world countries that encountered catholic missionaries vs protestant missionaries.
Trust by Francis Fukuyama explores this relation if you want more meat than comments on a board.
When you think of countries that are protestant, are you imagining Denmark, Sweden, Germany?
What about Central African Republic, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea?
I don't know if it's a joke I didn't, but it's the topic of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
The book suggests two main reasons for this.
1. The reformation increased literacy/education in the populace to a greater extent in protestant areas, because you no longer needed clergy to talk to God, or understand the bible. Protestant countries have had better education for longer and it has a compounding effect.
2. The "Marriage and Family Program" (the "MFP")... protestant areas discouraged cousin marriage and levirate marriage much earlier than catholic countries, and it is still very common in the rest of the world. Consanguineous marriage is ludicrously prevalent in the middle east, it makes most of the rest of the world more tribal and you end up with compounding genetic defects. By making cousin marriage taboo, it encouraged children to move to a different town and made people less clannish.
The cause is the Spanish Armada did not conquer England.
> humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that.
I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but my gut tells me this risks being one of those bold claims that grows legs and runs for a while until we debunk it.
Yeah, has that Malcolm Gladwell knowledge porn vibe. A book that empowers its reader with secret knowledge of explanation that all fits together a little too neatly and loses nuance or is often just plain wrong.
I think the “secret explanation” can simply be things you don’t know (or that most people don’t know) because they’re not interesting per se, but when combined they make an interesting whole.
I enjoyed some books that don’t have anything unknown in its parts but that brought a lot of shift in perspectives for me, such as “Man’s Worldly Goods”[1] and “The Drunkard’s Walk”[2].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Worldly-Goods-Wealth-Nations/dp/... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives...
That explanation sounds great until you find out that Gladwell is more than willing to misrepresent events to fit into whatever point he's trying to make. The most egregious example I know of being the Korean Air Line Flight 801 crash.
https://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell...
There are plenty of great books that treat a topic right for a lay reader while still leaving you satisfied at having learned something interesting and novel. But there are also a lot of books like I described that cash in on the desire for such experiences but it ended up being more of a sugary treat than a full meal :)
Are you saying the theory of igon values is not so universal after all?
After finding out even Think Fast, Slow (a book from a very creditable researcher and nobel laureate) is full of replication crisis, I approach pop-sci as entertainment instead of self-education.
*nobel memorial laureate. This is exactly why people get annoyed with the branding of the bank of Sweden’s economics prize. We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.
As one of the professors I had undergrad classes with liked to say "Economics is the only field where you can be awarded the Nobel prize for showing A and then next year someone gets a Nobel prize for showing not A".
The peace prize is awarded to warmongers all the time though.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
You can find, maybe, three or four such recipients out of 100. And they usually did make peace, even if they previously or later made mistakes.
Obama.
> We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.
Maybe, but e.g. Millikan's prize for physics was on the basis of results that appear to have been at least partially fabricated.
Was it? I thought Millikan's measurement had a minor error from an incorrect viscosity of air, and several other researchers' subsequent measurements were fabricated to agree with Millikan's.
I suppose to be fair to the field of economics, the replication issues were mainly with research in psychology (as I recall).
On the other hand, does economics have less of a replication issue because it’s basically unreplicable?
It's not completely insane, the part of the brain that gets used for recognising words is very close to the part of the brain that recognises faces. The brain likely cannibalises the part of the cortex that's used to recognise faces to recognise words and letters instead. See this study[1] where the visual word form area reacts much more strongly to faces in illiterates than in people who have learnt to read.
[1] https://www.unicog.org/publications/1-s2.0-S1364661311000738...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_word_form_area
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area
There are people who have face-blindness (inability to discern faces) or dyslexia (visual processing disorder that leads to severe difficulties with reading). The two aren't strongly correlated.
Dyslexia seems to be tied to some broader visual processing issues, which impair the ability to discriminate faces somewhat. But not the other way around.
If the two skills were strongly related, you'd expect a very strong and obvious link. Maybe in form of both performing poorly, if damage to the same pathways impairs both. Or as one performing poorly while another performs unusually well (super-recognizers? children who learn reading at 2?) - if the two skills compete for brain real estate and create a performance tradeoff, as claimed.
It's the one that immediately set off my alarm bell. I always try to put myself in the shoes of a scientist and imagine how it would be possible to design a study to test a claim. To me, this one implies humans of today are worse at recognizing faces compared to humans of the past who did not read as much or at all. That one cannot possibly be tested because you cannot test the cognitive capabilities of people of the past who no longer exist.
On the more productive side, this suggests we might develop standardized tests of human capabilities and limits that would allow people of the future to compare themselves to us.
There are people who are illiterate today who you can test.
I'm struggling to think of any way to test the hypothesis which is (A) practical and (B) accurate.
For example, suppose you sampled a group today and found an inverse-correlation between "good at recognizing many faces" and "good at recognizing written text"... That still wouldn't show that one facility grew causing the other to shrink, because maybe people are just born (or early-development-ed) with a certain bias.
The part of the brain that recognises faces quite literally shrinks in literates compared to illiterates
https://www.unicog.org/publications/1-s2.0-S1364661311000738...
I'm quite willing to believe that human brains do Weird Stuff with respect to reusing circuits and development, but I still don't see how they concluded "the skill encourages the brain state" by disproving "the brain state encourages the acquisition of the skill."
It would be ethically difficult to randomly assigned children to groups (A) taught to read versus (B) forced to remain illiterate while ensuring both groups had the same number of people's faces in their social circles.
IIRC the author compares brain scans and recognition abilities of children of hunter gatherers that where sent to school vs same age relatives that were not. I’m bringing this up from memory now and I’m not so sure of this, but this claim stems from some studies of the author
The author uses mostly hunter-gatherers tribes/societies in different continents as the control groups, usually. Most of his work is in anthropology.
It seems that there is an study in which the part of the brain used to recognize words is also used for recognizing letters, and when one increases taking more space the other shrink. That study used brain scanners to measure and detect brain activity.
Or perhaps something that it's true even after we "debunked" it
> One of the wildest claims in there is the one that the north of Italy is more developed today because it was part of the Holy Roman Empire while the south wasn’t. About a thousand years separate these and he finds effects still.
I would note that the north and south of Italy have very different geography and climate. Which can be upstream of all sorts of things, culturally. The geography of Italy's two halves support different types of economic activity; and the social realities of living within these different economies, naturally evolves into major differences in culture. (Compare/contrast: the differing cultures of coastal vs midwestern America. Now imagine that split with a few thousand more years for the divergence to take hold.)
History happens once; but geography is always affecting a nation, all throughout its evolution. So if you're looking for reasons that two sub-populations within a country might have noticeable differences today, differing geography is going to be the "horse", while history is more of the "zebra."
That being said: geography can also constrain history.
Southern Italy is almost entirely coastline, in a part of the world where, for much of the last ~2000 years, everyone was constantly invading everyone else by sea. Northern Italy was relatively-more immune to amphibious assault, as its capitals could be situated more inland. (Rome itself — the exception that proves the rule — was located in south Italy, but was defended from amphibious assault mostly by the Roman Empire's huge naval home-fleet being docked to the southern-Italian coast; not by anything inherent to its location. Once the Roman Empire itself went away, big rich cities in southern Italy suddenly became juicy targets for conquest and/or sacking.)
> So if you're looking for reasons that two sub-populations within a country might have noticeable differences today, differing geography is going to be the "horse", while history is more of the "zebra."
This is wrong empirically and providing proof for this is how Acemoglu and Johnson won the economics Nobel. In basically all maps of voting patterns within Europe you can read its institutional history. You can see the border of the Holy Roman Empire in economic and voter data in Poland, you can see the iron curtain in every map of Germany.
If you want one of the counterexamples to your Italy theory, Venice was one of the richest middle-age cities in Italy and it is famously built on water.
Let’s not forget another data point. South was richer before unification than the north. The north regions regularly at war with France and Austria were pretty much debt fuelled, whilst the south was considered the bank of Italy, solvent and very rich due to flourishing economy. After unification, Piedmont dumped its war debts on the whole country and drained the south’s cash reserves, using them to modernise the north while the south was left weakened.
Also that Italy has only been a single country for a couple hundred years [0], so there will obviously still be regional differences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Italy
Yes, your point and other points around the web I’ve seen make his argument about north and south Italy very controversial to say the least. He does have data to back it up, where he presents distance to nearest church as a predictor for how well a population will fare, and south Italy didn’t have the churches that north the Italy had
All the basketball players are tall. Ergo, if we want to be taller, we should all play basketball.
Yes, maybe I was not clear but I’m in doubt of the Italy claim in the book and that’s why I remember it
This would only work as evidence if church placement was random. Could be a correlation with a different cause.
Don’t forget diseases like malaria in the south. That wasn’t dealt with until Mussolini drained some swamps.
> (Rome itself — the exception that proves the rule
You really have to explain specifically what you mean by this phrase, or else it's typically just saying you don't actually understand the rule or the exception.
It sounds like you're claiming Rome succeeded for reasons that overcame its geographical disadvantages, and due to this growth protected itself from naval invasions. But Rome was not a maritime power during its early republic period, let alone earlier. So why didn't Carthage or anyone else just sail upriver (Rome was not on the coast, just to clarify the context) and destroy Rome? How did Rome succeed in the first place to become a maritime power capable of defying southern Italy's geography?
I haven't read the book but it sounds really interesting. Regarding tone though,
> monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today
Does the author use the word "blame" to mean "the reason for" or do they present it as a critique of monogamy? Not a big deal, just made me curious when I saw that.
I meant it as “is responsible for” or “explains”. The author doesn’t seem to make any judgement in over the other, but he presents polygamy in a society as a causation for male violence. Sorry for that, English isn’t my first language
I get the general point about institutional divergence, but thousand-year historical causal chains always make me a bit cautious
> He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man).
Must suck to be a lower-ranking man lol
> women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man
I bet you think "2nd" means "secondary."
I bet the parties to the marriage think "2nd" means "most recently allocated."
One of my greatest pleasure of random walking the internet is building my list of possible next books to read.. thank you for this one!
Do you have some recommendations? I remember seeing Show HN tools gathering book recommendations from here, but I like specific experiences
yeah I just ordered a copy of "We Survived the Night" based on a post here. Never would have heard of it otherwise.
Mind linking to the post for the curious?
Would love to see that link and any other posts others might have run across here as well. I feel like pre covid it was common to see high Quality ask hn discussions with niche/prestigious book recommendations often. I dont see that as much now.
it was a link to paris review of books- here is the book
https://pioneerworks.org/programs/julian-brave-noisecat-we-s...
Anthropologists have a couple centuries to go before they earn any credibility.
TIL that Rome wasn't part of the Holy Roman Empire. "Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" according to Voltaire.
It was part of the Holy Roman Empire for hundreds of years, but not at the end. The Holy Roman Empire started in 800 CE and Rome was part of it.
The Italian states started becoming more autonomous in the mid-1100s. It wasn't until the 1600s that they were fully independent.
Funny thing with the words. I remember before I could read and billboards just looked like designs. Then once I could read it was like reading was unavoidable, it could not be shut off and you are constantly reading instead of just appreciating the text as some design pattern. At the time I felt ripped off.
The acronym was coined in a paper with the same title about 10 years before the book.
"better" man?
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Got to love calvinist societies like northern europe. "oh you are poorer than me due to centuries of colonization? That's your own moral failing!".
And while nowadays they are mostly non religious and don't directly express the idea in these terms, the disparity of treatment is still incredibly strong.
And basically it's all down to having better weapons at a certain point in history.
> women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man
This seems like a bit of a tautology; how are they 'ranking' these men?
I haven’t read it but I think that’s genuinely interesting and not obvious.
And probably could change based on the roles of first and second wives and, yes, how male status plays out and how it influences the life of the wife.
We don’t have legal polygamy but in many places there’s not much stopping people from living in an unmarried multi-woman household with a man (or vice versa). But it’s not a very common arrangement, and it’s interesting to think about why.
The first level "why" at least is straightforward: Christianism. Even when not directly imposed, it's still the basis of the Western system of values and morals.
But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? Was it property and rules about property? Was it to maximize the number of children, so that the group/tribe/kingdom would be militarily stronger than the neighbor? Or maybe it was to prevent some sort of very specific and concrete problem, real or perceived, that arose from tolerating free love, and that we today have no clue about?
> But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)?
I dunno about heterosexuality being encoded[1] into cultural canons, but for monogamy it's actually quite simple: violence.
Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.
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[1] As far as heterosexuality goes, it's not "encoded by wilful intention" so much as "this is the default". IOW, most people are happy going with the default, so if you make something opt-out, the majority won't opt-out. Same for opt-in. This is why countries that have opt-out organ donors have more organs donated, while countries that have opt-in organ donations have a fraction of he opt-out countries.
Defaults matter.
Literally one of the main points of the book: the church’s mandate and enforcement of monogamy in Europe lowered violence so much that a different kind of society emerged.
> Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.
This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
Monogamy is possessiveness, and possessiveness is what drives violence.
>If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.
* In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.
* It makes marriage intrinsically more complicated simply because of the more complex interactions. For example, if Alice is married to Bob, who is married to both Alice and Carol, who is married to both Bob and David, what are Alice and David to each other? Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?
* Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?
> In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.
You can use a condom. TIL, rubber condoms are a mid-19th century invention; a significant upgrade over sheep gut.
The alternative is called polyfidelity.
> [...] what are Alice and David to each other?
They're called Metamours.
> Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?
It's called a polycule.
> Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?
You write a will.
By the way, inheritance laws are messy already as they are. Try figuring out how to reject inheritance (e.g. of debt) in your jurisdiction.
> There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.
Yes, the reason is to reinforce division and oppression. One "side" is underprivileged, the other has to fight each other for supremacy. The stronger few win, everyone else loses. History is littered with examples.
Don't get me wrong, these are all very good questions. But we've figured all of these things out quite a while ago. People do live like that, and form lasting, loving communities. I'd wager that an entire society built on top of that would have no lesser chance at thriving than the one we've been born into.
>You can use a condom.
Sure. Now. But monogamy and polygyny are a little older than condoms.
>Metamours [...] polycule
You're answering rhetorical questions which, incidentally, are not about terminology, but about legal and social mechanics. Knowing what a "metamour" is, says nothing about what the formal and informal responsibilities of the parties involved are or should be with respect to each other. My whole point is that not having to define such relationships and their expectations is a reason to forbid them culturally.
>You write a will.
How did that work before most people knew how to write?
>By the way, inheritance laws are messy already as they are.
That's not an argument in favor of legally legitimizing polycules.
>the reason is to reinforce division and oppression
I mean, I gave several reasons why historically either monogamy or asymmetric polygamy would have been preferred over symmetric polygamy, that have nothing to do with oppression.
>I'd wager that an entire society built on top of that would have no lesser chance at thriving than the one we've been born into.
Sure, maybe. Personally, I'm more of the opinion that cultural features are memetic, and that memes are not uniformly successfully propagated. If monogamous and polygynous societies are more common than polyandrous and polycular societies, it's probably for a reason.
> You're answering rhetorical questions which, incidentally, are not about terminology, but about legal and social mechanics.
Yes, that's what I've tried to imply. You name things, so you can discuss them in more abstract terms, so you can form a social & legal framework around those concepts.
> My whole point is that not having to define such relationships and their expectations is a reason to forbid them culturally.
>> [...] not having to define [...] is a reason to forbid [...].
Suppress the concept. "We don't talk about that."
> How did that work before most people knew how to write?
How did people enter agreements?
> Personally, I'm more of the opinion that cultural features are memetic, and that memes are not uniformly successfully propagated.
Agree. It's also how dictatorships rise. Another form of oppression that concentrates power and fires back at the group who have initially supported it. Another lose-lose.
Societies often overoptimize for a local maximum.
>Suppress the concept. "We don't talk about that."
You're not disagreeing that it's a valid reason, you're just saying you don't like it.
>How did people enter agreements?
A will is not an agreement, it's a declaration of posthumous intent. It necessarily cannot work in oral form.
>Agree.
Good. I'm glad you agree. I'm just going to ignore the appeal to emotion.
> This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
Only if your argument is that this behaviour is nurture, not nature. IOW, if your argument is "this behaviour is completely disconnected from instinct and has nothing to do with evolutionary pressure", then sure, your argument makes sense.
Many of the great apes, and indeed, other animals, don't think in terms of political soundbites, though, so we can readily observe that the behaviour "violence over mating rights" is a thing that developed in those creatures that eventually evolved into other creatures which evolved into pre-hominids which evolved into hominids which evolved into us.
Some things are instinct. It's a very large stretch to claim that violence over mating isn't instinct, but political.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that...
You may be taking things from the wrong end.
Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood. I can say that I always, personally, considered the idea of controlling a person abhorrent, as much as I found uninteresting the idea of orbiting my intimate life around a single person with special and very high privileges over whatever I do and think, including outside of bed. However, all my relatives were very insistent that I should date girls and marry. 100% culture, 0% nature. Of course, this is just a single data point.
The heterosexuality part being the "default" is a bit naive, because it ignores the lengths to which some people go to force their kids to be heterosexual. Again, anecdotally, my father sired two gay sons, who had to go to great lengths to have a less traumatic life. Sometimes I suspect my father wasn't that hetero himself, and was only ensuring the next generation inherited his cultural legacy/trauma.
I could consider an argument that a majority (heterosexual) imposes a cultural canon on a non heterosexual minority. But the problem with that is that we don't really know if that majority/minority split would exist without the very strong cultural conditioning. And, as I said before, I don't really believe that homophobia is something the Canaanites invented out of spite. Most likely, it was a cultural trait that conferred advantages to groups, particularly after the agricultural revolution locked human population in a cycle of growth and war for land--but that's just a pet theory of mine.
There are even theories (read the controversial book "Sex at Dawn" if you want the details) that our current cultural canons about sexuality run against what was our nature for hundreds of thousands of years.
> Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood.
"Could be" is not "probably is".
All the observable evidence points to "fighting for mates being purely instinctual".
The opposite, is in fact, true: not engaging in violence for mates is, in fact, purely a cultural construct.
Culture enforces that, via laws, norms, etc.
i don't think it's a valid way to think about society/religion/culture what your formulazation reflects.
up until just 2-3 centuries ago, people did not think about these questions in a self-deterministic way, i mean they trusted the ancestors to sorted out most of the things over the centuries, and they were not suposed to take huge social/cultural reforms, only minor adjustments. did not even have so huge view on the spacial and temporal panorama of different cultures and societies over the whle word like us today. today even just binging up this statement makes people angry like "oh those silly old people. they _unconditionally_ obeyed to whatever their parents and superiors told them. this is the way to opression and tiranny, etc, etc. not like us! we are truely grown ups today. humanity is out of the dark child days. now! now disagree to _everything_. default is «i deny»". i mean … who do you think want to fool you? i think, on average, parents wants to leave the well-tested and proven-to-be-stable fundamental ideas about the world to their children. and those dont change very often; the more fundamental the less changing world-properties are.
but changes in society started to accelerate, so came social and economic revolutions which all want to redefine as much as possible. with really big improvements in the sociology, antropology and other culture-related disciplines, people started to believe that we are watching ourself from the outside, so able to manipulate the norms and the law to "make society better". only noone has the same definiton what is "better".
Sounds a lot like Tom Holland - Dominion (to help the robots - "...broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.").
> > women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man
> This seems like a bit of a tautology; how are they 'ranking' these men?
I am not seeing the tautology. Can you explain?
Well, if their success with multiple women is used as a factor in the ranking….
Let's assume for the sake of argument that success literally is how many wives someone has.
> women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a man with more than one wife than being the only wife of a man with a single wife
How is that statement tautological?
> This seems like a bit of a tautology
I don't think it is? A priori it's not at all obvious which option women would be expected to prefer.
a woman can rank you in sub-second time, just as you can her.
There is undoubtedly a real effect here, but IMHO one problem with the original article is that it treats the US as the only reference point.
On the one hand, this reflects the US dominant position in world affairs and the fact that probably most of the training materials come from there.
But on the other hand, there are some outlier results that are left unexplained. For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US.
> For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US
I have no expertise in this field.
Is it actually even more aligned? Or is it simply aligned with the elements of Japanese culture and/or media that are exported to the West?
By the same graph, Japan is rated as more culturally distant from the US than Singapore, Russia, and Zimbabwe.
I think the comment is basing it on the graphic from the article.
One possibility is that alignment isn’t just about cultural distance in values, but also about textual representation in the training data
WEIRD here stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic".
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I’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of ‘weird’ as an insult (charitably because all the old insults get you shadowbanned on social media, less charitably because conformism is what the mainstream values more than anything), so the author isn’t even pretending to hide their agenda here.
I think they chose the WEIRD acronym to challenge the western centrism. For most of the readers of the book, the culture described by the WEIRD acronym is not only the normal culture, but is in many ways considered universal.
By calling it WEIRD, the author is trying to drive home the point that the vast majority of people in the world are NOT in that culture that many westerners feel is 'normal', which would make it 'weird' in the sense that it isn't actually the norm.
Now, I have a lot of problems with the book and his arguments, but I don't think there is anything sneaky or nefarious about the word choice, it is very up front and straightforward as to the reasoning behind it.
> challenge the western centrism
The authors had a perfect opportunity to use Chinese models to see if their trend held up. Instead, they treated ChatGPT as the “default”. Sound familiar?
WEIRD is not pejorative in TFA. There's no problem being WEIRD. I am WEIRD. What's alleged in TFA is that AI, as it's currently deployed, is implicitly chauvinistic towards perspectives other than WEIRD. This sort of thing has historically been a problem with AI/ML and automation in general. The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times).
Poorly considered automation can create frictionless experiences for some and Kafkaesque experiences for the rest, where systems refuse to accept your atypical name, your atypical style of speaking is flagged as an indicator of fraud, etc. Automating processes involving people necessarily makes assumptions about those people, and such assumptions are often brittle.
For example, it's easy to imagine a resume filtering AI being implicitly prejudiced against people from Fictionalstan, because it was only trained on a few resumes from Fictionalstan and most of those happened to be classified as "unqualified". This is a danger anytime you have a small number of samples from any particular group, because it's easy for small sample sizes to be overwhelmed by bad luck.
In general I think these types of issues are best viewed as software bugs. It's a clearer and more actionable perspective than as ideological issues. If the software isn't serving some of our end users properly, let's just fix it and move on.
> The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times).
I'm a Caucasian living in Asia and the facial recognition systems that they recently required all banking apps to use struggles massively with my face.
I fully agree with you here that this isn't systemic racism, it's just a bug. It only becomes racism if they don't put any effort into fixing it.
When a member of a group says that a term used to refer to them is pejorative, is it now an acceptable response to simply say ‘no it isn’t’? That hasn’t been the case for decades.
You know, are you seeing it as pejorative or just want to silence the whole idea? Because people who came up with WEIRD acronym were ... WEIRD. They were literally talking about themselves and about weakness of studies that were made.
WEIRD isn’t insulting to be because it’s simply descriptive of you take the terms themselves.
However. No one gave them the right to speak for everyone, and in regular parlance “weird” isn’t a super nice thing to say about someone. They could’ve chosen something else like WESTED “Western, Educated, Stable, Technologically-advanced, Economically Developed” but didn’t. And they don’t get to choose how people will react when they’re called weird.
The claim at issue isn't, "I find the term WEIRD insulting." As you say, everyone is entitled to feel that way. It's "the term WEIRD is intended by the authors of TFA as an insult and reveals their agenda as being 'anti-west' [1]". I can understand how someone would find it insulting, but in the article we are discussing, it is descriptive and not pejorative.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45298741
Keep in mind that I am also WEIRD. Please help me to understand by referring to the specific part of the article where WEIRD was used in the pejorative.
Are you saying that self-hating westerners aren’t real? It’s an entire industry at this point.
No, I never said that. To be perfectly clear: if you want to argue that a text says X, you need to provide evidence from the text. Everything I see you commenting in this thread appears to be based your preconceptions around this acronym, nothing you've said even indicates you've read the article.
Read it or don't, it's your business, but if I ask you for evidence from the article and your response is to try to put words on my mouth (on an irrelevant tangent, at that), I'm going to write off your argument entirely.
Another acceptable response is "take a break, go touch grass".
There is too much victim mentality going on nowadays, and we continue rewarding that behavior so I am not surprised.
Could you explain the agenda to those of us like me, who missed it anyway?
It’s pretty simple. ‘West => weird = bad.’
Not everyone in the west is educated
The idea that “mainstream” values “conformism” seems like a relic of the 1980s. Have you looked around at public figures in the news? There’s less Debbie Boone and more Dennis Rodman going on. The freaks are flying their flags out there for everyone to see.
There are no ‘freaks’ flying flags. There are highly polarised groups signalling their in-group identity, each backed by their own billionaires.
I heard a congressman in a town hall meeting last night call a colleague "crazy liberal" - a psychotherapist called in and said don't use that word "crazy" - language is being perverted here
That is crazy.
unprofessional and divisive, for sure
We've been here before. The ‘Goldwater Rule’ says that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
Maybe I should have elaborated further. Her point was that the term "crazy" is in itself destructive and counterproductive. Although I use the term all the time, gotta fess up to that. So now I am naval gazing too.
The etymology was begging to be looked at, so I did. My understanding from undergrad was that it came from Greek "akrasia" as I recall but it's worth looking at:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/crazy
The use of language by leaders in the US lately sometimes seems reckless and inflammatory, even shocking and provocative, and I'll stop there before getting flagged for who knows what.
The headline should retain the caps, since WEIRD here is not the same as regular weird.
>In fact, this paper found that more than that, it thinks American.
I think that's because it seems to be primarily trained on reddit and therefore mirrors everything reddit stands for. Not a good thing considering just how overrun the site is with bots and political activists of all kinds.
You're absolutely right! Social media like Reddit are overrun with bots, sycophants, and trolls trying to provoke reactions by engaging in controversial topics. This forms echo chambers, which is a sub-par source for training data, and reflects those biases in LLM responses.
I wonder how much of that actually survives token filtering during training
“Do non-American LLMs (e.g. DeepSeek, Mistral, Apertus) perform better or worse here? Do they have their own cultural biases in-built?”
I'm wondering the same thing, in addition to the related question of “Would an LLM perform better or worse if prompted with languages other than English?”.
ChatGPT is worse in Russian. Example: after accurately noting that a name appeared in a particular Russian book, it asked if I wanted the direct quote in Russian. I said yes. At this point it switched to Russian output but could no longer find the name in that book, and then apologized for having used what seemed to have been "approximations" about the book before.
(I did then go and check the book myself; ChatGPT in English was right, the name is there)
I was using Qwen3 locally in thinking mode, and noted that even if it is talking to me in Japanese, it is doing it's "thinking" steps in English. Not having a full understanding of how the layers in an LLM handle language connections I can't say for sure, but for a human this would result in subpar outcomes.
For example (not actual output):
Input: "こにちは"(konichwa) Qwen Thinking: "Ah, the user has said "こにちは", I should respond in a kind and friendly manner.
Qwen Output: こにちは！
It quiiiickly gets confused in this, much quicker than in English.
I'm kind of wondering when will it become a universal understanding that LLMs can't be trained with equal amounts of Japanese and Chinese contents in training data due to Han Unification, making these two languages incoherent mix of two conflicting syntax in one. It's remarkable that Latin languages is not apparently facing issues without clear technical explanation as to why, which I'm guessing has to do with the fact of granularity of characters.
That said, in my tiny experience, LLMs all think in their dataset majority language. They don't adhere to prompt languages, one way or another. Chinese models usually think in either English or Chinese, rarely in cursed mix thereof, and never in Japanese or any of their non-native languages.
Would they not quickly bocome divergent vectors? In the same way that apple and Apple can exist in the same vector set with totally different meanings?
So all information gleaned reading a glyph in the context of japanese articles would be totally different vectors to the information gleaned from the same glyph in Chinese?
I don't know, but at least older Qwen models were a bit confused as to what words belong to which languages, and recent ones seem noticeably less sure about ja-JP in general. Maybe it vaguely relates Hanzi/Kanji character being more coarse grained than Latin alphabets so that there aren't enough character counts to tell apart or something.
Why would that be an issue?
I don’t think this can be solved until there is massive investment to train LLM in native Japanese. The current ChatGPT tokenizer still use BPE and you can’t even present a Japanese character with a single token
Perhaps it knows most users who misspell こんにちは are English speakers?
Ah nah, that was just me here, I'm no good with the phone IME. I tried a bunch of different sentences. It always thought in English.
It was pretty good at one shot translations with thinking turned off however, I imagine thinking distracts it from going down the Japanese only vector paths.
Quite a few reasoning LLMs do reasoning in English only. Because the RL setup specifically forces them to do so.
Why?
Because the creators want the reasoning trace to be human readable. And without a pressure forcing them to think in English, they tend to get weird with the reasoning trace. Wild language-mixing, devolved grammar, strange language-mixed nonsense words that the LLM itself seemingly understands just fine.
I assume the training dataset is mostly the same anyway. I imagine prompting in different language could have a huge effect though.
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I have saved instructions for Gemini to translate queries into the local language then retranslate the output back to English, when asking about non-English speaking countries/cultures. It seems to work fairly well, but I think it's just due to the different content trained in that language; obviously there would be more in depth discussion of Indonesian cuisine in Indonesian. Whether the country is rich or democratic shouldn't really affect the output.
That's interesting! I manually do the same by prompting in the target language, since it drastically changes the results.
This has been true of web search since forever mind you. The wev has always been culturally delineated by language, and the English Web as I call it is not the only web.
It seems like almost all contexts might get value from specialized training. People often vary radically depending on where they were raised and where they live, their occupation and social class, and a range of other factors. Even workers from essentially identical backgrounds but practicing different trades can have very different perceptions and framing for what might appear to be shared tasks.
Interesting that the responses from ChatGPT on the World Values Survey correlated most closely with the responses from Australians and New Zealanders.
I expect (as TFA says) that they would most closely align with Californians, but that isn't in the data.
I imagine the culture of HRLF trainers affects things. Maybe there’s disproportionally more of them from Oz/NZ, as native English-speaking countries with possibly lower wages?
I had heard that a lot of human feedback was being provided by people in Nigeria, as it has a very large English speaking population (owing to its history as a British colony) while also having low wages. This was the explanation given as to why ChatGPT seemed to use the word "delve" so often, apparently it's used much more frequently in business contexts there.
Possible that they're using different sources of feedback for different training though
I wonder how ChatGPT and the like would do if you asked it to give a response as if they were a person from one of those other cultures.
In other words, is the issue in the defaults or is it impossible for AI to respond from other cultures?
There may be a real point here but this post and paper are not good evidence for it.
The blogpost doesn't have a date, but links to a 2023 preprint, which is hard to evaluate b/c it doesn't actually have a methods section, despite referring to it multiple times. (Did this ever get published?)
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5b26t_v1
But it _sounds_ like they asked GPT via API to do the same survey 1000 times, without telling it to attempt to model the preferences of any particular country, but both the blog and the paper are interpreting a correlational analysis as evidence that it's bad at modeling local values.
> The greater the cultural distance between a country and the USA, the less accurate ChatGPT got at simulating peoples’ values.
> This correlation represents the similarity between variation in GPT and human responses in a particular population; in other words, how strongly GPT can replicate human judgments from a particular national population.
And to some degree, this is more a portrayal of the difference in human responses than anything about GPT; given the survey data, no matter what responses the LLM gives, it's going to be closer to some national averages than others.
LLMs also have a characteristic default voice/style which we're annoyed by, but _when instructed_ it can mimic another style. If you have some multi-dimensional style space, yes you could find the group that it's closest to, but it would be misleading to say it does a poor job "simulating" or "replicating" others if you didn't actually test that.
For those interested, you can see the World Values Survey Questionnaire here: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWV7.jsp
(For Wave 7 (2017-2022), which the paper used)
Some of the questions don't really make sense to ask an LLM (being about the survey taker's personal financial situation and such), but the paper doesn't seem to go into detail of what questions were used.
They should have run the same experiment against a Chinese model like Kimi to see if the same trend holds up.
I would imagine chatgpt is more similar to Kimi than the US is to China which suggests a different trend.
Oh it’s an arcronym. I was very confused for a good portion of the article
Another paper that echoes similar concerns — AI Suggestions Homogenize Writing Toward Western Styles and Diminish Cultural Nuances (https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11360)
Social media reflects a silicon valley perspective and US domestic news have contaminated the entire eurozone since over a decade.
Movies are also a distillate of a local culture often with a rather uniform ideological slant.
AI being a clone army of corporate spokesmen from the US west coast brings sparsely little new cultural homogeneity to the already very smoothed table.
> The greater the cultural distance between a country and the USA, the less accurate ChatGPT got at simulating peoples’ values.
I'd be somewhat concerned that what is actually reflected is a cultures willingness to adopt US (west coast) values over its own. We see this constantly in some European countries where we're willing to adopt US view points and problems over our own. Either because we're constantly exposed the US problems online or because the US problems are simply more "interesting", in the sense that they are more decisive and easier for us to split into right and wrong.
>We see this constantly in some European countries where we're willing to adopt US view points and problems over our own.
'Some', being which countries?
Sooo it's like training a robot to "think like a human," but all the reference humans are Silicon Valley product managers and undergrads from elite universities
Ummm... doesn't the AI have to scrape the data of those non- WEIRD cultures to work then? What am I missing here?
There are parts of the world where constant person-electronic connection isn't a thing. Is that your point?
I don’t have the data but I assume the corpus available to train an LLM is majorly in English, written by Americans and western counterparts. If we’re training the LLMs to sound similar to the training data, I imagine the responses have to match that world view.
My anecdote is that before LLMs I would default to search Google in English instead of my own native language simply because there was so much more content in English to be found that would help me.
And here I am producing novel sentences in English to respond to your message, further continuing the cycle where English is the main language to search and do things.
In my experience, ChatGPT, at least, seems to have had multiple languages used to train its corpus. I am guessing this based on its interaction with me in a different language, where it changed English idioms like "short and sweet" to analogous versions in that language that were not direct translations.
But my guess is that the data sets used from the other languages are smaller (and actually, even if it had perfect access to every single piece of data on the internet, that would still be true, due to the astonishing quantity of English-language data out there compared to the rest. Your comment validates that). With less data, one would expect a poorer performance in all metrics for any non-Anglophone place, including the "cultural world view" metric.
And the RHLF was directed by Californians, and so the "values" are likely very California.
english is the lingua franca ;-)
“Fancy autocomplete better at completing documents similar to ones it has seen before” isn’t as headline-worthy.
Well said. It's so odd that this isn't just the general societal talking point when it comes to LLM's
interesting
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