Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The world's most toxic value system (2001)

uwgb.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 209 posts

Re: The world's most toxic value system (2001)

#51

Post by xelxebar »

sullyj3 wrote: post #39
leohutson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's illogical to make value judgements about cultures, there is no objective way to do it. What makes one culture "better" than another? Survival? Virality? Honor? Piousness? Lawfulness? Every culture values these things differently. Calling it politically correct shows your own failing to comprehend something outside of your own cultural frame of reference. Notably I could make the same point about morality as the…

What you're gesturing at is that it's illogical to make value judgements, period, without a standard that your object of interest is being judged against. This fact, which is blatantly obvious once pointed out, is obscured by the shortcomings of our language. Usually the standard is implicit, but obvious from context, for instance if we were talking about racing, we could say that a Mclaren is better than a Volkwagen…

Even more concretely, the terms better and worse are only capable of encoding relative positions on a linear scale.

I find it instructive to look for those scales directly--e.g. rates of violent crime, GDP, life expectancy, etc. This also makes it more natural to recognize specific problems with such linear reductions.

Re: The world's most toxic value system (2001)

#53

Post by sooheon »

The author's Japanophilia masquerading as social insight is laughable. His cute anecdote illustrating the self aware remorse of the Japanese is of one doctor who has a shrine in his living room. I wonder if in his extensive travels he's ever visited Yasukuni shrine.

Re: The world's most toxic value system (2001)

#54

Post by toomanyrichies »

This reminds me of a passage I read from "Hillbilly Elegy" by JD Vance, where he talks about growing up in the Scots-Irish parts of West Virginia, and the almost pathological devotion to family honor.

One anecdote (the details of which I'm mis-remembering slightly) involves an incident he witnessed in a Walmart or Kmart or some such store, where a mother whose out-of-control kids were scolded by an employee for their behavior. The mother proceeded to physically threaten the employee for the perceived affront against her family's honor.

The canonical example of "vendetta" behavior among Scots-Irish is the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, which I believe Vance also mentions.

Throughout the book, the author intertwines anecdotes of self-limiting (or even anti-social) behavior like the above with descriptions of the worsening economic climate that the region's residents find themselves in. He makes a great case (sometimes subtly and sometimes bluntly) for the idea that the two reinforce each other.

It's amazing what kind of mental gymnastics people will go through to convince themselves that they're "honorable", especially when that honor is the only asset they think they have left.

Re: The world's most toxic value system (2001)

#55

Post by yorwba »

narrator wrote: post #25
yorwba wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could replace "honor" by any other kind of value system and you could still interpret is as a points system. That's because of the Von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem [1], which basically says that any kind of well-behaved (i.e., not self-contradictory) preferences can be modeled as a points system (called utility function ). Heaven points. Money points. Sex points. Altruism points. Whatever you are trying to achieve…

Well let's say that someone criticizes a "honor" system person for being violent. Someone interested in the truth would not react violently to that criticism because they would acknowledge that as a contradiction and that doing so would prove their critic correct. Someone only interested in "honor" points would react violently toward the critic because that's how you get "honor" points, by getting revenge for insults…

> Someone interested in the truth would not react violently to that criticism because they would acknowledge that as a contradiction and that doing so would prove their critic correct.

But wouldn't proving their critic correct give them "truth" points?

Presumably, you actually mean "someone I'd call a reasonable person, who can recognize the truth; but who has other aims beyond making things true". That person's actions will still follow some kind of points system, although it might be slightly more complicated. But "honor" points can be complicated as well, since they need to encode which actions are "honorable".

Ultimately, the only difference is that you agree with one kind of behavior over the other. But what you think is a flaw in someone's utility function, they'll think is a flaw in yours. That doesn't mean all value systems are equally good, just that their relative ranking depends on the person doing the evaluation.

Re: The world's most toxic value system (2001)

#56

Post by baybal2 »

Declanomous wrote: post #7

This is interesting. At the risk of being lambasted for this view, I've often felt that this is the issue with a lot of places within the United States. For instance, I've always considered personal interactions in the South to be largely dictated by honor. I do not think it is coincidental that the poorest and least-educated areas of the country are the same area. I think a similar problem is at play in inner-city v…

I read it, and think it is a so so writing. The author piles too many things together.

martythemaniak gets more of what it is to it.

There are no such thing as an honour based society, and the author is imagining things.

Popular explanation: what seems as an "honour" things to people in the west are often just egregious displays of social status. It is hard for Americans to naturally arrive to the way of thought of this sort. I'll drop few examples for you:

Men killing their wives who were raped - it is not them any much recovering that "honour," but to show everyone that these men do not let the enemy to assert dominance over them, non-verbally stating "hey look, the enemy has no power over me, he will not diminish my status by forcing me to sleep with a woman raped by him"

Same for the extreme sensitivity to insult marty mentions - it is to show everyone "No one is allowed to place themselves above me"

Acceptance of personal revenge including retaliatory killing - is the thing from the same opera. It is to show that you do not let the assailant to assume social status above you. If you can't retaliate and kill, you show your weakness/inferiority/impotence.

Americans, you are fortunate enough to not to live in a society where ones social status is not determined by a principle of "the ones who have higher status than I am are the ones I can't kill"

Re: The world's most toxic value system (2001)

#57

Post by jacknews »

baybal2 wrote: post #56
Declanomous wrote: post #7

This is interesting. At the risk of being lambasted for this view, I've often felt that this is the issue with a lot of places within the United States. For instance, I've always considered personal interactions in the South to be largely dictated by honor. I do not think it is coincidental that the poorest and least-educated areas of the country are the same area. I think a similar problem is at play in inner-city v…

I read it, and think it is a so so writing. The author piles too many things together. martythemaniak gets more of what it is to it. There are no such thing as an honour based society, and the author is imagining things. Popular explanation: what seems as an "honour" things to people in the west are often just egregious displays of social status. It is hard for Americans to naturally arrive to the way of thought of t…

"No one is allowed to place themselves above me" .... "social status"...

This is exactly what the author means by "honor", as opposed to the western definition of integrity, trust, chivalry, etc, etc.

Re: The world's most toxic value system (2001)

#58

Post by uiri »

linkregister wrote: post #46
Nomentatus wrote: post #35

It's just not historically true that "northern European culture has been relatively free of the thar mentality." We weren't magically spared these traits. In fact few hundred years ago duels were the mainstay of the official justice system in England. These duels were, literally, trials. I wish I knew more about how we got away from all that.

I think that prosperity through the pursuit of opportunity leads to such changes. The author derides the continent of Africa, yet ignores enormous economic and public health improvement among most countries there in the last 30 years. Attitudes and “honor” culture have changed as well; nowadays commerce and transactions are the norm in cities, rather than violence based.

The article was originally written 16 years ago and last updated 6 years ago. How much of the improvement in the last 30 years has been over that time? How much of the improvement in the last 30 years has filtered its way into the popular perception of Africa? Or into how Africa looks from a statistical perspective? I am not surprised that the article gives a picture of Africa that is 20-30 years out of date.

Re: The world's most toxic value system (2001)

#59

Post by tibbetts »

nradov wrote: post #50
bryananderson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something this author gets that most people (of all political stripes) don’t: whether a culture is “better” than another is not even a well-formed question. We must ask “better at what?” We must define some criteria to measure, and speak in those terms, not in ill-defined terms like “just better”. The author speaks mostly in terms of specific consequences of different value systems. This is not the same thing as decl…

It's pretty easy to objectively measure which cultures are better. In general we can just look at long-term trends in voluntary migration rates by country / state / region (or whatever geographic area aligns with a particular culture). Sure there will be some noise in the data based on natural disasters and legal restrictions but those revealed preferences give a good first approximation.

Except historically migration to the US was driven by free land. And more recently by opportunities for wealth. These might be results of the non-thar culture, but they are confounded by natural resources and people are not clearly expressing a preference for the culture so much as a few correlated material benefits.

Re: The world's most toxic value system (2001)

#60

Post by tmnvix »

nradov wrote: post #50
bryananderson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something this author gets that most people (of all political stripes) don’t: whether a culture is “better” than another is not even a well-formed question. We must ask “better at what?” We must define some criteria to measure, and speak in those terms, not in ill-defined terms like “just better”. The author speaks mostly in terms of specific consequences of different value systems. This is not the same thing as decl…

It's pretty easy to objectively measure which cultures are better. In general we can just look at long-term trends in voluntary migration rates by country / state / region (or whatever geographic area aligns with a particular culture). Sure there will be some noise in the data based on natural disasters and legal restrictions but those revealed preferences give a good first approximation.

People often move not for cultural reasons, but because of resources. An example would be Nepalese migrant workers moving to Saudi Arabia - they aren't doing that for the culture.
Post reply on HN