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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 explain
by psidium 1y ago
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
- derefr 1y ago> 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.)
- marcus_holmes 1y agoAlso 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Italy
- psidium 1y agoYes, 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
- cortesoft 1y agoThis would only work as evidence if church placement was random. Could be a correlation with a different cause.
- sethammons 1y agoAll the basketball players are tall. Ergo, if we want to be taller, we should all play basketball.
- psidium 1y agoYes, maybe I was not clear but I’m in doubt of the Italy claim in the book and that’s why I remember it
- 2dvisio 1y agoLet’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.
- notjoemama 1y agoI 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.
- psidium 1y agoI 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
- cjauvin 1y agoOne of my greatest pleasure of random walking the internet is building my list of possible next books to read.. thank you for this one!
- DaveZale 1y agoyeah I just ordered a copy of "We Survived the Night" based on a post here. Never would have heard of it otherwise.
- hiatus 1y agoMind linking to the post for the curious?
- minhaz23 1y agoWould 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.
- DaveZale 1y agoit was a link to paris review of books- here is the book https://pioneerworks.org/programs/julian-brave-noisecat-we-survived-the-night https://pioneerworks.org/programs/julian-brave-noisecat-we-s...
- psidium 1y agoDo you have some recommendations? I remember seeing Show HN tools gathering book recommendations from here, but I like specific experiences
- Waterluvian 1y ago> 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.
- bitexploder 1y agoYeah, 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.
- balder1991 1y agoI 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/1443736724 https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Worldly-Goods-Wealth-Nations/dp/... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0307275175 https://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives...
- bitexploder 1y agoThere 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 :)
- some_random 1y agoThat 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-and-airplane.html https://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell...
- cortesoft 1y ago> 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?
- smelendez 1y agoI 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.
- dsign 1y agoThe 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?
- barrenko 1y agoSounds 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.").
- lelanthran 1y ago> 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. Defaults matter.
- PeterHolzwarth 1y agoI 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?
- cpursley 1y ago[flagged]
- PeterHolzwarth 1y agoI 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.
- fidotron 1y ago> 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.
- 1y ago
- hackable_sand 1y agoAnthropologists have a couple centuries to go before they earn any credibility.
- jancsika 1y ago> 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."
- tgbugs 1y ago[flagged]
- guappa 1y agoGot 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.
- tobyhinloopen 1y ago> 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
- SiempreViernes 1y agoThe acronym was coined in a paper with the same title about 10 years before the book.
- TimByte 1y agoI get the general point about institutional divergence, but thousand-year historical causal chains always make me a bit cautious
- snickerdoodle14 1y ago"better" man?
- titanomachy 1y agoTIL that Rome wasn't part of the Holy Roman Empire. "Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" according to Voltaire.
- TheCoelacanth 1y agoIt 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kjkjadksj 1y agoFunny 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.