[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?

[psidium]

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

[CaptWillard]

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.

[ludicity]

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.

[gherkinnn]

https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

Here are the cocktail ideas. Hits the spot.

[TimByte]

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

[trabant00]

> 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.

[rjsw]

The book has been recommended and discussed here before.

[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.

[bitexploder]

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.

[raincole]

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.

[suddenlybananas]

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

[ACCount37]

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.

[nonameiguess]

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.

[Terr_]

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.

[dgeep]

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.

[coldtea]

Or perhaps something that it's true even after we "debunked" 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.)

[bootsmann]

> 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.

[2dvisio]

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.

[marcus_holmes]

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

[psidium]

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

[kjkjadksj]

Don’t forget diseases like malaria in the south. That wasn’t dealt with until Mussolini drained some swamps.

[soiltype]

> (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?

[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.

[psidium]

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

[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!

[psidium]

Do you have some recommendations? I remember seeing Show HN tools gathering book recommendations from here, but I like specific experiences

[DaveZale]

yeah I just ordered a copy of "We Survived the Night" based on a post here. Never would have heard of it otherwise.

[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.

[TheCoelacanth]

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.

[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?

[guappa]

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.

[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?

[smelendez]

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.

[lelanthran]

> > 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?

[lmm]

> 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.

[barrenko]

a woman can rank you in sub-second time, just as you can her.