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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

#51

Post by dsign »

smelendez wrote: post #44
cortesoft wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man This seems like a bit of a tautology; how are they 'ranking' these men?

I haven’t read it but I think that’s genuinely interesting and not obvious. 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 arrange…

The first level "why" at least is straightforward: Christianism. Even when not directly imposed, it's still the basis of the Western system of values and morals.

But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? Was it property and rules about property? Was it to maximize the number of children, so that the group/tribe/kingdom would be militarily stronger than the neighbor? Or maybe it was to prevent some sort of very specific and concrete problem, real or perceived, that arose from tolerating free love, and that we today have no clue about?

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#52

Post by red369 »

blululu wrote: post #45
raincole wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After finding out even Think Fast, Slow (a book from a very creditable researcher and nobel laureate) is full of replication crisis, I approach pop-sci as entertainment instead of self-education.

*nobel memorial laureate. This is exactly why people get annoyed with the branding of the bank of Sweden’s economics prize. We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.

I suppose to be fair to the field of economics, the replication issues were mainly with research in psychology (as I recall).

On the other hand, does economics have less of a replication issue because it’s basically unreplicable?

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#53

Post by PeterHolzwarth »

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 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 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?

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#54

Post by justlikereddit »

Social media reflects a silicon valley perspective and US domestic news have contaminated the entire eurozone since over a decade.

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.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#55

Post by balder1991 »

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.

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-Goods-Wealth-Nations/dp/... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives...

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#56

Post by lmm »

blululu wrote: post #45
raincole wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After finding out even Think Fast, Slow (a book from a very creditable researcher and nobel laureate) is full of replication crisis, I approach pop-sci as entertainment instead of self-education.

*nobel memorial laureate. This is exactly why people get annoyed with the branding of the bank of Sweden’s economics prize. We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.

> We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.

Maybe, but e.g. Millikan's prize for physics was on the basis of results that appear to have been at least partially fabricated.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#57

Post by 2dvisio »

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…

Let’s not forget another data point. South was richer before unification than the north. The north regions regularly at war with France and Austria were pretty much debt fuelled, whilst the south was considered the bank of Italy, solvent and very rich due to flourishing economy. After unification, Piedmont dumped its war debts on the whole country and drained the south’s cash reserves, using them to modernise the north while the south was left weakened.

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#58

Post by cpursley »

PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #53
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 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]

Re: AI tools are making the world look weird

#60

Post by hackable_sand »

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…

Anthropologists have a couple centuries to go before they earn any credibility.
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