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 · 11m 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 climates. Which can be upstream of all sorts of things, culturally. Places that have different climates support different types of economic activity; that then evolve different cultures, reflecting the social realities of living within those different economies.
Also, southern Italy is almost entirely coastline, in a part of the world where everyone was constantly invading everyone else by sea. Northern Italy was relatively-more immune to amphibious assault. (This was likely part of why the Holy Roman Empire was interested in holding northern, but not southern, Italy — holding southern Italy would have been too much trouble!)
simonw · 1h ago
WEIRD here stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic".
derektank · 54m ago
Interesting that the responses from ChatGPT on the World Values Survey correlated most closely with the responses from Australians and New Zealanders.
jdlshore · 3m ago
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 · 42m ago
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.
DaveZale · 53m ago
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 · 41m ago
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.
klooney · 3m ago
And the RHLF was directed by Californians, and so the "values" are likely very California.
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 would note that the north and south of Italy have very different climates. Which can be upstream of all sorts of things, culturally. Places that have different climates support different types of economic activity; that then evolve different cultures, reflecting the social realities of living within those different economies.
Also, southern Italy is almost entirely coastline, in a part of the world where everyone was constantly invading everyone else by sea. Northern Italy was relatively-more immune to amphibious assault. (This was likely part of why the Holy Roman Empire was interested in holding northern, but not southern, Italy — holding southern Italy would have been too much trouble!)
There are parts of the world where constant person-electronic connection isn't a thing. Is that your point?
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.