Comments
On Scientific Trust, Loose Summaries, and Henrich's WEIRDest People in the World has some useful comments on the accuracy of the book.
I recently finished reading Henrich's 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. I would highly recommend it, along with Henrich's 2015 book The Secret of Our Success; I've roughly ranked them the 8th and 9th most useful-to-me of the ~50 effective-altruism-related books I've read since learning about effective altruism (EA).
In this post, I'll briefly outline what I think are the four main ways in which WEIRDest People shifted my beliefs on relatively high-level points that seem potentially decision-relevant, as distinct from specific facts I learned. And in a comment below the post, I'll also share the Anki cards I made for myself when reading the book.
My hope is that this will be a low-effort way for me to help some people to quickly (1) gain some key insights from the book, and (2) work out whether reading/listening to the book is worth their time.[1]
I wrote this quickly and only after finishing the book; take it all with a grain of salt.
[1] In other words, I intend this as a lower-effort alternative to writing notes specifically for public consumption or writing a proper book review. See also Suggestion: Make Anki cards, share them as posts, and share key updates.
On Scientific Trust, Loose Summaries, and Henrich's WEIRDest People in the World has some useful comments on the accuracy of the book.
Readers may also be interested in:
Here's a google doc comment I wrote expanding on my reasoning related to key takeaway 1, i.e. that "The book made me a bit less concerned about unrecoverable collapse and unrecoverable dystopia (i.e., the two types of existential catastrophe other than extinction, in Toby Ord's breakdown)".
This comment was in the context of what implications Henrich's argument might have for whether impartiality in the moral sense will be more common among future agents, as one sub-question of whether the long-term future will be good or bad in expectation. (Caveats: The comment is definitely going beyond just what Henrich explicitly says, and it's also possible it's based on some misremembering on my part.)
I think Henrich does show that some cultures have higher levels of things like "impartiality" than others (though he doesn't talk about precisely that), in particular higher levels of universalism. But we already know that most people don't have very impartial values, including within Western cultures. So I don't think this is really a surprising update from Henrich that pushes against how likely future agents are to be impartial - we already knew that most people aren't very impartial, and Henrich just tells us that again.
But then Henrich also says that some clusters of values and norms contributed to greater economic and scientific progress in some places, and allowed those places to become dominant, and then the values have started to spread elsewhere as well via imitation etc. And that cluster of values and norms includes the impartiality-like stuff. So Henrich actually implies those things have higher "fitness" in the cultural evolutionary sense.
So I think Henrich should mostly update us from "some people are more impartial, but most aren't, and we don't know why, so who knows what the future brings" to "some people are more impartial, but most aren't, but the former seems to have to do with things that are more culturally fit and thus may typically multiply themselves, 'conquer' other things, and/or be imitated, so we have weak reason to believe the future will have more of that."
My Anki cards
See the bottom of this shortform for caveats about my Anki cards.[1]
The indented parts are the questions, the answers are in "spoiler blocks" (hover over them to reveal the text), and the parts in square brackets are my notes-to-self.
If you want to download the cards themselves to import them into your own deck, follow this link.
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Higher, more equal
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those that buyers can't easily assess for quality (e.g. a steel sword, whose carbon content is hard to determine)
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Silent trade; divine oaths; and a single, widely scattered clan or ethnic group handling all aspects of moving goods through a vast trade network
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[Some of these things were measured by proxies I'm somewhat skeptical of the relevance/significance of.]
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Percentage of land under rice paddy cultivation
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Exposure to natural disasters
Nonviolent intergroup competition (e.g. between firms) [though he suggests this'll likely have smaller or no effects on religious devotion]
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[He may have also mentioned other things. E.g., I think maybe he sees scientific thinking, universities, and more rational legal systems as also fitting that bill.]
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[I learned of this study via Henrich's WEIRDest People.]
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Rates of Protestants relative to Catholics in an area
[He says historical Protestantism rates increased suicide rates at that time. I can't remember if he also says historical P rates increase present suicide rates, or that present P rates increase present suicide rates. But I'm guessing he believes those things.]
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Yes
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Charter cities, monasteries, apprenticeships, universities
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[So people and groups could escape oppression by moving to other places.]
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Interfirm competition; impersonal trust
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Henrich seems to provide strong evidence that key trends started long before 1750 (some starting in the first millennium CE, most starting by 1200-1500)
[See caveats in the "My four main updates" section.]
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Intensification
[This led to norms related to things like cousin marriage, corporate ownership, patrilocal residence, segmentary lineages, and ancestor worship.]
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East-West;
Eurasia;
the ease with which crops, animals, ideas and technologies could spread between areas of similar latitude
[Quoting a PBS webpage on Guns, Germs and Steel.]
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Henrich's arguments essentially pick up where Diamond's arguments leave off
[I.e. Diamond's arguments explain global inequality up to ~1000CE well, but don't explain things like why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain, whereas Henrich's arguments can explain those later events.]
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Says daughters should inherit half of what sons inherit (rather than nothing/very little), which likely drove the spread of and/or sustained a custom in which daughters marry their father's brother's sons, or more broadly a custom of marrying within clans. [This is to keep wealth within a family/clan.]
This encourages intensive forms of kinship, which favours certain ways of thinking and institutions that don't mesh well with democracy.
[I may be slightly misrepresenting the ideas.
]
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agriculture and state-level governance;
fostered the evolution of cultural values, customs, and norms encouraging formal education, industriousness, and a willingness to defer gratification.
[These can be seen as pre-existing cultural institutions that happened to dovetail nicely with the new institutions acquired from WEIRD societies.]
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top-down orientations;
helped them rapidly adopt and implement key kin-based institutions acquired from WEIRD societies (e.g. abolishing polygamy, clans, arranged marriages).
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Evolution by natural selection reduced that time by about 8 months over the 20th century
[And by about 1.5 months per generation - maybe just more recently.
But this was very much offset by cultural evolution increasing the length of time in school by a larger amount.]
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[1] Caveats about these Anki cards: