5 ms·

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 reflect

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?

cpursley 1y ago
[flagged]
- PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
  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.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    > 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.
    - svieira 1y ago
      Magna Carta (1200s) was issued 300 years before England defected from Catholicism (1500s), so I think we may be looking at the wrong thing as "the cause" here.
      - fidotron 1y ago
        No, that's my point. Generally speaking places that view things in a bottom up way became Protestant. The others stayed Catholic.
- guappa 1y ago
  If only the protestant countries' secret services would stop arming rebels every time they democratically elect someone that wants to stop funneling riches to said protestant countries…
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  The cause is the Spanish Armada did not conquer England.
- sofixa 1y ago
  > 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 hundred years more under a faraway empire milking them, and as a frontier for lots of fighting with the French, and occupied by the Germans. And Belgium is also smaller in land and population, and had a very different colonial way of working. It also had resources (coal) that allowed it to industrialise quickly, while the Netherlands didn't so focused mostly on trade and trade posts. And... Belgium has a slightly worse economy by most classic metrics (GDP, GDP per capita, etc.). Maybe the only other even remotely comparable countries with different religions are the Baltics (Estonia was Lutheran when they were religious, Latvia is very mixed, Lithuania is mostly Catholic). Estonia and Lithuania have pretty similar GDP per capita, with Latvia a bit behind. But seeing this through a religious lens is missing the forrest for the trees at best.
  - viggity 1y ago
    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.
  - 131012 1y ago
    Trust by Francis Fukuyama explores this relation if you want more meat than comments on a board.
- viggity 1y ago
  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.
- addcommitpush 1y ago
  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.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  When you think of countries that are protestant, are you imagining Denmark, Sweden, Germany? What about Central African Republic, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea?
trabant00 1y ago
> 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. 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.
gherkinnn 1y ago
https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/ https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/ Here are the cocktail ideas. Hits the spot.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  >No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction. it is a common rhetorical device to phrase something as an absolute when the negation of it is only an edge case. hence >Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge! Of course, civil engineers don't move bridges as frequently as programmers deal with changes in software but,
  - fluoridation 1y ago
    Not to be that guy, but where can I read those interviews? I got as far as the blog (https://www.hillelwayne.com/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/) and looked around October of 2019 and can't seem to find anything. As it stands this isn't even anecdata, this is some guy saying some other guy said he talked to a few guys who say something happens from time to time.
    - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
      no idea but it stands to reason people will need to move bridges at times, we're in the middle of building a bridge, earthquake happens, stuff no longer like it was, gotta move that bridge is just the initial obvious situation that I can imagine from outside. Similar other natural disasters would also affect it, flash flooding etc.
      - fluoridation 1y ago
        I'll grant that, but that's not a "they don't do this as often as that, but", that's a "it's not unheard of". That was meant to be a response to a Tao of Programming-like post about why programming work has so much improvisation.
psidium 1y ago
I do not have the time now to craft you a full answer as I don’t have the book on hand and have only been commenting from memory so far. But to give you a quick answer: I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. Most of the authors claims are backed by actual papers for reference on the footnotes. As for replication it seems that the author himself replicated some of his studies with different hunter gatherer societies in the world. It’s been a good while since I read it. 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
- adwn 1y ago
  > I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. That's not the issue. The replication crisis is the phenomenon that many scientific results and conclusions which originate from serious, peer-reviewed research, couldn't be replicated by other researchers, and sometimes not even by the original scientist. This is especially concerning because many results with strong statements – unintuitive ones as well as bias-confirming ones – turned out to be non-existent [1]. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "shallowness" or "cocktail-party takes", although the strength of the purported effects, combined with pop-science simplifications and reductions, lend themselves well to such memetically spreading factoids. [1] The "softer" sciences tend to be much more affected by this than the "harder" sciences.
  - adwn 1y ago
    No idea why this is getting downvoted. Everything I wrote is true and directly on topic. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
rjsw 1y ago
The book has been recommended and discussed here before.
TimByte 1y ago
You're right to be cautious, especially given how many pop-psych books have aged like milk after the replication crisis came into full view. Henrich’s work feels a bit different to me. He’s not just stringing together catchy one-off studies; he’s pulling from a mix of anthropology, economics, history, and cross-cultural psych
ludicity 1y ago
From my own time in psychology, the thrust of the book might be good, but that specific point about Protestant work ethic sounds exactly like all the other "just so" studies that didn't replicate. 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.
CaptWillard 1y ago
I'd never heard of the replication crisis, but it mirrors what I think is a core problem with modern political discourse. 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.
- titanomachy 1y ago
  This is probably only true when the "pithy take" upholds accepted dogma.
  - CaptWillard 1y ago
    This has been my experience, yes. Although dogma implies long held beliefs. The rate of adoption has accelerated along with the news cycle.

cpursley 1y ago

[flagged]

PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
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.
- fidotron 1y ago
  > 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.
  - svieira 1y ago
    Magna Carta (1200s) was issued 300 years before England defected from Catholicism (1500s), so I think we may be looking at the wrong thing as "the cause" here.
    - fidotron 1y ago
      No, that's my point. Generally speaking places that view things in a bottom up way became Protestant. The others stayed Catholic.
guappa 1y ago
If only the protestant countries' secret services would stop arming rebels every time they democratically elect someone that wants to stop funneling riches to said protestant countries…
bryanrasmussen 1y ago
The cause is the Spanish Armada did not conquer England.
sofixa 1y ago
> 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 hundred years more under a faraway empire milking them, and as a frontier for lots of fighting with the French, and occupied by the Germans. And Belgium is also smaller in land and population, and had a very different colonial way of working. It also had resources (coal) that allowed it to industrialise quickly, while the Netherlands didn't so focused mostly on trade and trade posts. And... Belgium has a slightly worse economy by most classic metrics (GDP, GDP per capita, etc.). Maybe the only other even remotely comparable countries with different religions are the Baltics (Estonia was Lutheran when they were religious, Latvia is very mixed, Lithuania is mostly Catholic). Estonia and Lithuania have pretty similar GDP per capita, with Latvia a bit behind. But seeing this through a religious lens is missing the forrest for the trees at best.
- viggity 1y ago
  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.
- 131012 1y ago
  Trust by Francis Fukuyama explores this relation if you want more meat than comments on a board.
viggity 1y ago
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.
addcommitpush 1y ago
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.
IncreasePosts 1y ago
When you think of countries that are protestant, are you imagining Denmark, Sweden, Germany? What about Central African Republic, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea?

trabant00 1y ago

> 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. 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.

gherkinnn 1y ago

https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/ https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/ Here are the cocktail ideas. Hits the spot.

bryanrasmussen 1y ago
>No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction. it is a common rhetorical device to phrase something as an absolute when the negation of it is only an edge case. hence >Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge! Of course, civil engineers don't move bridges as frequently as programmers deal with changes in software but,
- fluoridation 1y ago
  Not to be that guy, but where can I read those interviews? I got as far as the blog (https://www.hillelwayne.com/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/) and looked around October of 2019 and can't seem to find anything. As it stands this isn't even anecdata, this is some guy saying some other guy said he talked to a few guys who say something happens from time to time.
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    no idea but it stands to reason people will need to move bridges at times, we're in the middle of building a bridge, earthquake happens, stuff no longer like it was, gotta move that bridge is just the initial obvious situation that I can imagine from outside. Similar other natural disasters would also affect it, flash flooding etc.
    - fluoridation 1y ago
      I'll grant that, but that's not a "they don't do this as often as that, but", that's a "it's not unheard of". That was meant to be a response to a Tao of Programming-like post about why programming work has so much improvisation.

psidium 1y ago

I do not have the time now to craft you a full answer as I don’t have the book on hand and have only been commenting from memory so far. But to give you a quick answer: I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. Most of the authors claims are backed by actual papers for reference on the footnotes. As for replication it seems that the author himself replicated some of his studies with different hunter gatherer societies in the world. It’s been a good while since I read it. 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

adwn 1y ago
> I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. That's not the issue. The replication crisis is the phenomenon that many scientific results and conclusions which originate from serious, peer-reviewed research, couldn't be replicated by other researchers, and sometimes not even by the original scientist. This is especially concerning because many results with strong statements – unintuitive ones as well as bias-confirming ones – turned out to be non-existent [1]. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with "shallowness" or "cocktail-party takes", although the strength of the purported effects, combined with pop-science simplifications and reductions, lend themselves well to such memetically spreading factoids. [1] The "softer" sciences tend to be much more affected by this than the "harder" sciences.
- adwn 1y ago
  No idea why this is getting downvoted. Everything I wrote is true and directly on topic. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

rjsw 1y ago

The book has been recommended and discussed here before.

TimByte 1y ago

You're right to be cautious, especially given how many pop-psych books have aged like milk after the replication crisis came into full view. Henrich’s work feels a bit different to me. He’s not just stringing together catchy one-off studies; he’s pulling from a mix of anthropology, economics, history, and cross-cultural psych

ludicity 1y ago

From my own time in psychology, the thrust of the book might be good, but that specific point about Protestant work ethic sounds exactly like all the other "just so" studies that didn't replicate. 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.

CaptWillard 1y ago

I'd never heard of the replication crisis, but it mirrors what I think is a core problem with modern political discourse. 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.

titanomachy 1y ago
This is probably only true when the "pithy take" upholds accepted dogma.
- CaptWillard 1y ago
  This has been my experience, yes. Although dogma implies long held beliefs. The rate of adoption has accelerated along with the news cycle.