AI tools are making the world look weird

[psidium]

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

[PeterHolzwarth]

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?

[Waterluvian]

> 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.

[derefr]

> 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.)

[notjoemama]

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.

[TimByte]

I get the general point about institutional divergence, but thousand-year historical causal chains always make me a bit cautious

[tobyhinloopen]

> 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

[jancsika]

> 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."

[cjauvin]

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!

[hackable_sand]

Anthropologists have a couple centuries to go before they earn any credibility.

[titanomachy]

TIL that Rome wasn't part of the Holy Roman Empire. "Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" according to Voltaire.

[kjkjadksj]

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.

[SiempreViernes]

The acronym was coined in a paper with the same title about 10 years before the book.

[snickerdoodle14]

"better" man?

[cortesoft]

> 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?

[felipeerias]

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.

[coherentpony]

> 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?

[TimByte]

One possibility is that alignment isn’t just about cultural distance in values, but also about textual representation in the training data

[simonw]

WEIRD here stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic".

[YurgenJurgensen]

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.

[decimalenough]

The headline should retain the caps, since WEIRD here is not the same as regular weird.

[yellowapple]

“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?”.

[tropdrop]

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)

[Miraltar]

I assume the training dataset is mostly the same anyway. I imagine prompting in different language could have a huge effect though.

[ManlyBread]

>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.

[rollcat]

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.

[TimByte]

I wonder how much of that actually survives token filtering during training

[barnabyjones]

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.

[ehnto]

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.

[derektank]

Interesting that the responses from ChatGPT on the World Values Survey correlated most closely with the responses from Australians and New Zealanders.

[marcus_holmes]

I expect (as TFA says) that they would most closely align with Californians, but that isn't in the data.

[jdlshore]

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?

[m0llusk]

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.

[cortesoft]

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?

[abeppu]

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.

[blargey]

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.

[janalsncm]

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.

[qwertytyyuu]

Oh it’s an arcronym. I was very confused for a good portion of the article

[rishi_rt]

Another paper that echoes similar concerns — AI Suggestions Homogenize Writing Toward Western Styles and Diminish Cultural Nuances (https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11360)

[justlikereddit]

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.

[mrweasel]

> 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.

[DaveZale]

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?

[psidium]

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.

[YurgenJurgensen]

“Fancy autocomplete better at completing documents similar to ones it has seen before” isn’t as headline-worthy.

[TimByte]

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

[thedudeabides5]

interesting