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AI tools are making the world look weird

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Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#131

Post by meindnoch »

bitexploder wrote: post #31
Waterluvian wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Are you saying the theory of igon values is not so universal after all?

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#132

Post by viggity »

sofixa wrote: post #128
cpursley wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I noticed years ago that majority Catholic and Orthodox countries are generally less prosperous than Protestant countries Based on what? I can't think of a single pairing of Protestant and Catholic/Orthodox countries that genuinely had a similar enough history, geography, geopolitical situation to be able to compare them easily. Maybe the closest would be Belgium and Netherlands, but even then Belgium spent a few h…

The book examines this in multiple different ways, not just at the national level, but even within countries (provinces that are more catholic vs more protestant, and even within Germany, how far the city was from Wittenberg), as well as comparing third world countries that encountered catholic missionaries vs protestant missionaries.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#133

Post by fidotron »

PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #66
cpursley wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't think that is a fruitful line of reasoning, given that the vast majority of the world is not Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant! You should consider digging deeper for underlying causes that go beyond localized religions. Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause.

> Put another way - that would seem to be an effect, not a cause.

Protestantism does seem to become the preferred variant of Christianity in areas of bottom-up power systems, such as the UK (at least wrt Magna Carta), which does make perfect sense given the Vatican being the ultimate in top-down thinking.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#134

Post by guappa »

throw9123123100 wrote: post #123
guappa wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The peace prize is awarded to warmongers all the time though.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. You can find, maybe, three or four such recipients out of 100. And they usually did make peace, even if they previously or later made mistakes.

Obama.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#135

Post by viggity »

cpursley wrote: post #58
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 call…

[flagged]

The book suggests two main reasons for this.

1. The reformation increased literacy/education in the populace to a greater extent in protestant areas, because you no longer needed clergy to talk to God, or understand the bible. Protestant countries have had better education for longer and it has a compounding effect.

2. The "Marriage and Family Program" (the "MFP")... protestant areas discouraged cousin marriage and levirate marriage much earlier than catholic countries, and it is still very common in the rest of the world. Consanguineous marriage is ludicrously prevalent in the middle east, it makes most of the rest of the world more tribal and you end up with compounding genetic defects. By making cousin marriage taboo, it encouraged children to move to a different town and made people less clannish.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#136

Post by bitexploder »

balder1991 wrote: post #55
bitexploder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the “secret explanation” can simply be things you don’t know (or that most people don’t know) because they’re not interesting per se, but when combined they make an interesting whole. I enjoyed some books that don’t have anything unknown in its parts but that brought a lot of shift in perspectives for me, such as “Man’s Worldly Goods”[1] and “The Drunkard’s Walk”[2]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Worldly-Go…

There are plenty of great books that treat a topic right for a lay reader while still leaving you satisfied at having learned something interesting and novel. But there are also a lot of books like I described that cash in on the desire for such experiences but it ended up being more of a sugary treat than a full meal :)

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#137

Post by bootsmann »

derefr wrote: post #10
psidium wrote: post #5

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 discer…

> 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 suppo…

> 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.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#138

Post by addcommitpush »

cpursley wrote: post #58
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 call…

[flagged]

I don't know if it's a joke I didn't, but it's the topic of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#140

Post by TimByte »

psidium wrote: post #5

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 discer…

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