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'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 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
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.
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.
Here are the cocktail ideas. Hits the spot.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.unicog.org/publications/1-s2.0-S1364661311000738...
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.
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.
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 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.)
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.
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?
> 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.
Must suck to be a lower-ranking man lol
I bet you think "2nd" means "secondary."
I bet the parties to the marriage think "2nd" means "most recently allocated."
The Italian states started becoming more autonomous in the mid-1100s. It wasn't until the 1600s that they were fully independent.
This seems like a bit of a tautology; how are they 'ranking' these men?
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.
> This seems like a bit of a tautology; how are they 'ranking' these men?
I am not seeing the tautology. Can you explain?
I don't think it is? A priori it's not at all obvious which option women would be expected to prefer.
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 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 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.
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.
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?”.
(I did then go and check the book myself; ChatGPT in English was right, the name is there)
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 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.
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.
Possible that they're using different sources of feedback for different training though
In other words, is the issue in the defaults or is it impossible for AI to respond from other cultures?
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 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.
I would imagine chatgpt is more similar to Kimi than the US is to China which suggests a different trend.
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.
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.
'Some', being which countries?
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.
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.
