[itissid]

Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters.

If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.

One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.

[bufferoverflow]

> People are the same everywhere

That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great environments, some create hells on earth.

Source: I lived in 3 different countries + an isolated island.

But you don't even need my biased opinion on the matter. We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures that celebrate them.

[mr_toad]

> We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures that celebrate them.

And you could take single individuals from either culture and drop them in the other culture, and most of them would happily act and think just like the new culture, and swear blind that they’d always thought that way.

It would be an interesting experiment to see how many individuals you could replace one-by-one before the culture changed. Or perhaps, like a Ship of Theseus, you could replace all the people, but have the culture endure.

[ANewFormation]

And so if you went to Saudi Arabia you'd pretend to be down with executing people for apostasy?

Obviously it's an extreme example but many of the norms of a Western mindset would be no less offensive to billions of people in this world.

What bias of moderation exists is that you probably wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already mostly ok with their values.

And if e.g. economic opportunity drove you there you'd probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would fundamentally change.

I will only add - I speak from experience here.

[bsoles]

> What bias of moderation exists is that you probably wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already mostly ok with their values... you'd probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would fundamentally change.

Then, how do you explain, for example some people who migrates to France from a majority Muslim country and decides all French people are infidels and deserve death? Similarly, I know a lot of people who would curse America, yet still chooses to live in America. They were never mostly OK with the values on their current countries...

[ANewFormation]

You ellipsed out the answer - economic opportunity.

[legacynl]

The thing is that both ideas come from the same place. People try to create a save and livable place, but they have different opinions on how to get to that place. Some more right than others, but the fact is that both have their root in the same desires.

At the end of the day, most people just want to be able to live a life, work, have children, some friends, family and health. Most difference come from the way people think they best achieve those goals.

[neaden]

If you grew up in Saudi Arabia raised by a typical family then yeah sure, you probably would be fine with it. Culture of course shapes people and I think it's silly to pretend you could freely swap adults but that doesn't mean that people are fundamentally different.

[bufferoverflow]

That's not what he asked you. You answered some other question.

[janderson215]

The question that was asked was not to confirm what GP said, it was combative to try to position GP as a bad person. Basically the equivalent of saying “so you’re saying you would be okay killing Jews if you lived in Nazi Germany.”

GP answered to clarify their position and answered the only question that should have been asked, the equivalent of, “if during my childhood I was indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth program, yes I probably would have done this horrible thing and so would you.”

[jajko]

Hahaha. Take a look at western Europe. Vast majority of the immigrants from neither Africa or Middle east didn't adopt any of the core values of their host country even after decade+. More often than not, even second generation has very different values. What happens is isolated or connected silos of original values surviving a lot of generations.

Just ask Germans or French or Belgian folks, or go there. The idea was exactly what you write, and it failed miserably with no solution in sight.

Just to explain - we have friends among those communities. We like them a lot, but the difference is there even after couple of generations. Its not talked about much, but if you look for it, it shows up. Nobody will talk about this with strangers of course, thats just polite facade.

[lukan]

"Vast majority of the immigrants from neither Africa or Middle east didn't adopt any of the core values of their host country even after decade"

Depends. I think in their home countries, Muslim youth does not hang around drunk in the park, that is more of a european thing, erm. cultural value. So they clearly adopted.

Ok, so that was satirical. But they are the ones bothering me. I am not bothered by women wearing a Hijab and I don't see that hurting our values.

[inglor_cz]

The Hijab is the least problem. The polls among European Muslims that show their attitudes towards secularism and various human rights that we take for granted (such as "abandoning your religion") are the problem. As are the consequences, such as parallel societies and the visible tip of the iceberg = actual terrorists and the whole infrastructure for recruiting them and sending them to jihadist hotspots.

[jjani]

They were arguably never placed in fact never placed in the culture. There are 24 hours in a day. In what culture does one spend most of those hours?

Imagine if those same people would have been adopted as newborns, by a rural family on a farm in Belgium, France or Germany.

This isn't inherent to Europe, nor to any particular background. I live in Korea. Most Western immigrants here spend most of their time not inside the culture. They both work and relax outside of the dominant culture. If they have children here, and raise them similarly, those children will also have different values. But if they put their child in environments where everyone else is from the dominant culture, for >8 hours per day ever since kindergarten, then that's the values they'll take on.

It all does come down to culture. For what it's worth, I'm originally from Europe, and very familiar with the phenomenon you're talking about.

Someone else here rightly mentioned the internet as changing this somewhat, which has some truth in it - it does affect the probability distribution. But by and large, it still holds.

[bufferoverflow]

Absolutely not. You can move me to any place on earth, I will not be okay with throwing gay people off the roofs for being gay.

The fact that you think like that is kind of insane to me.

[rafaelmn]

> and most of them would happily act and think just like the new culture, and swear blind that they’d always thought that way.

If that was true you wouldn't have minority communities isolated within larger ones, they would just naturally mix - but the ones that do are the outliers.

[bsoles]

> If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize... People are the same everywhere.

> That is absolutely not true. People aren't the same even in adjacent neighborhoods sometimes. Some create great environments, some create hells on earth.

Sure. People are not the same in their current behaviors. People are the same in how they acquire their behaviors or change their behaviors based on the conditions of their environments. And sometimes these changes are very quick.

To give a very simple example, many people in my native country who would throw burning cigarette butts on the ground, stop doing so immediately when they, say, immigrate to the US. They didn't really change all of a sudden; what remains the same is the people's opportunistic ability to adapt to the conditions of their environment, regardless of what is moral, just, etc.

[alternatex]

Your example is a popular trope in the Balkans about how Balkan people behave when they go to work in Germany vs how they behave when they come back home in the Balkans.

Incentives are everything in a civilized society and anyone who cannot wrap their mind around this is most likely privileged.

[hnhg]

Some of those cultures that apparently celebrate gay people were also chemically castrating them not that long ago, and also have a lot of locals who still hate gay people and cannot wait to get back to the old ways.

The rise of the far right in Europe and USA might challenge your idea of fixed regional cultures quite soon.

[tomp]

The main drive of who you call “far right” is precisely to import less people that want to throw gays off roofs.

[hnhg]

Some of them, maybe. Some others are just not tolerant of LGBT lifestyles and equality at all.

Also, I don't think someone who wants limited immigration is necessarily far right.

[FirmwareBurner]

*)limiting ILLEGAL immigration, emphasis on the word illegal.

Nobody in Europe has a problem with LEGAL immigration, but the left wing parties and MSM keeps ignoring this and sweeping illegal immigration along the legal immigration banner to drive the narrative that Europeans are racists who hate all immigrants in order to justify (social) media censorship and restrictions on free speech to fight the "right wing extremist nazi" boogie man, which ironically, actually fuels the swing towards the extremist right wing, because the regular public discourse and communication channels for criticizing illegal immigration in public are censored/disabled.

[decimalenough]

A lot of people in Europe absolutely have a problem with legal immigration, with asylum seekers particularly maligned.

Specifically, the rise of far-right parties in Scandinavia, Germany and France is very much a reaction to legal immigration from Arab and African countries. The argument is not "they're stealing our jobs", but "they're abusing our welfare benefits, driving up crime and raping our women".

[amanaplanacanal]

They always say that, until you talk about legalizing more immigration, then you find out that no, they don't want any more immigration period.

[like_any_other]

That same far right might challenge your idea of the far right. E.g. Germany's AfD is headed by a lesbian in a relationship with a Sri Lankan, and the party enjoys disproportionate support by gay men:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-do-so-many-gay-men-s...

[defrost]

In a world where Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, the Nazi Party's stormtroopers, was openly gay, and Reich uniforms and Hugo Boss feature heavily in gay iconography ... that would suprise us why?

[like_any_other]

I was replying specifically to a post that equated the far right with anti-gay views. Ask them.

[defrost]

Fair point, I was chaining in general and not specifically having a go at yourself.

People are complicated and there's no shortage of head scratching examples of seemingly mismatched fellow travellers.

[itissid]

My idea was to convey was that the sense of identity attached to a people is weird. And that people are just people. You can get the same set of people(genetically, demographically same) to kill millions in a war and become pious afterwards and vice versa.

When I said people are the same it means the same people who created great environments can in all likelihood create hell within a generation span.

[kaveh_h]

Distribution of Culture is way different now that internet enables virtual cultures to exist which have less physical barrier.

[Gormo]

Individuals are drastically different from each other. Populations of humans, however, regress to the mean fairly readily, and even small groups (at least if they aren't grouped according to precise selection criteria) will tend to reflect very similar emergent patterns.

[only-one1701]

Would love to know your thoughts on what differentiates people. Perhaps race?

[K0balt]

People are motivated by genetics and memetics. Genetics makes us get hungry when we don’t eat, gives us sexual urges, things like that that we share with even the simpler forms of life. How we are affected and influenced by those stimuli is largely a matter of genetics.

How we react to those stimuli is governed by culture, or memetics. Like genes, memetic frameworks are also passed on generationally, but with a much higher mutation rate.

Genetics is hardware, which defines possible behaviors. Memetics is operating system and applications, defining actual behaviors.

[ANewFormation]

Similar experience/perspective as the gp. People in different places are, in many if not most cases, just fundamentally different in countless ways.

I think both genetics (personality, among endless other characteristics is significantly to majority heritable and going to have different distributions in different areas) and environment/culture play significant roles.

But an interesting thing is that by the time people are adults, perhaps even before, the environmental factors have irreversibly changed them so marginalising cultural factors as "just" environmental doesn't really paint a fair picture.

For a person who's happy to travel/live just about anywhere this makes having children doubly fun, because you basically get to decide the 'cultural mold' for your children, which is really neat!

[jjani]

Culture is everything. Culture being the people you're surrounded with on a daily basis, not the culture of an arbitrary geography. The people you interact with in your home, at school, at work, at the church/sports club. What is the distribution of their actions, values, practices?

It is the major decider from the way one talks, one walks, one acts, one decides, everything.

Can it be overruled by nature? Yes, very rarely. There's always a very small percentage of people (often thought of as neurodivergent, or witches, or simply free-spirited or eccentric, all case by case) who's neurogenetics cause them to partiaLly diverge. But these are the exceptions.

[like_any_other]

> Culture is everything.

This has been proven false. To name just one measure of human behavior, the Big Five personality traits are 40-60% heritable: https://www.nature.com/articles/tp201596

[jamiek88]

Seeing how the concept of race is a social construct with absolutely zero science behind it then no.

[ANewFormation]

This is commonly stated but seems more driven by ideology than science. People's racial identity is near to perfectly correlated with their genetic identity as can be ascertained with a very limited number of genetic markers.

And essentially all of species related biology would be a 'social construct' by such logic. The difference between entire species is often poorly defined. Different species can even interbreed and produce fertile offspring such as a liger. Or take the Australian Dingo which is literally just a wild dog, but it's not classified as one for quite arbitrary reasons.

[vladms]

I would call it culture. How you are educated, what you see around since day 0 on. It is very hard to escape it and unless you travel and live in another country you will not even be aware of such things (and even then you need a certain level of introspection).

[intrasight]

We all differ in nature and nurture - in subtle and major ways.

We're knowledgeable people here, so we know there's no such thing as race other than as a human artifact. As human artifact, it can certainly affect how we think and therefore how we behave.

[mmooss]

Siblings raised together in the same family can vary greatly.

[Aurornis]

More accurately, I think it's just confusion about the Law of Large Numbers.

People confuse population-scale average behaviors with guarantees about individuals.

In any country you can find outliers that don't match the country's norms.

The hard part is that the devious ones can leverage their country's (or culture, or state, or relgious affiliation, etc.) norms to disguise their bad behavior. It's easier to scam someone if you pretend to blend in with groups known for being trustworthy.

[r3trohack3r]

> People are the same everywhere

This is not true in general. Environment does not only influence behavior, it selects for it.

As evidenced by our ability to breed behavior traits in domesticated animals - I.e. ragdoll cats, retrievers, rat terriers, etc. have distinct behavioral traits that have been intentionally selected for.

[cenamus]

Those dog breeds differ by like a factor of 10 in size, way more than humans basically in any aspect.

But yeah, depending on how strong the selective force is... Ashkenazy Jews have an average IQ of what, around 130 points? But on the other side also suffer a lot more genetic disorders.

Interesting are also the altitude tolerance of Sherpa, body morphology of the Kenian runners and the dive endurance of a particular South east asian tribe (if I remember correctly), some organ is able to store a lot more blood than usually

[fumufumufumu]

Culture has a large influence.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12785802.amp

[toast0]

You are saying humans are unpredictable, but then you make predictions.

I think you are saying that people's behavior changes based on stimulus. That doesn't mean they're unpredictable, just that the prediction shouldn't be unchanged behavior regardless of stimulus.

[d4mi3n]

I read it as the GP saying there's often confusion about assuming behavior about individuals as opposed to making predictions based on trends of large groups of individuals.

For some population, you can safely state that some portion of them will contract appendicitis. You cannot make that same assertion about an individual person. This likewise carries to specific behaviors (theft, charity, becoming a pet owner, etc).

[toast0]

The same is true of say washing machine motors. You can predict that ~ 10% of them will fail in a certain amount of time (and even go into how they fail), but that doesn't tell you much about a specific motor. Or sports events, if you say there's a 25% chance of team A winning a single match; the results of the match don't support or refute your prediction... you'd have to run many matches to see if your prediction was empirically correct.

[ashoeafoot]

If you have a really well working economic system you can bribe everyone to be nice and you declare yourselves saints and history ended. Still makes those that upend these economic systems the evil ones. Even if paradise burns away the candle earth on both ends.

but i digress, and its hard to communicate that its better to end good times with ability to move, then to be caught in paradise, when the resource window falls shut. you want to be able to wiggle and act in the dark times, keep it together , have tech thats maintainable but not existence ending , while wild hordes fight for the last glimmering bits of the golden era.

[nilslindemann]

What you say seems to be an exaggerated view of the world ("It's just people"). You confuse a few people with sociopathic trails with the average normal human with a heart and a conscience.

The examples you give come from environments which are likely to attract sociopaths. You yourself are with a higher probability a narcissist than the average human [1].

[1] https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/96cff233-cefd-45...

[hoseyor]

I disagree that people are unpredictable systems. The ruling class very much knows that people are not only predictable, but even programmable. It’s just the aspirational middle and some lower classes that have internalized the idea that there is no way to predict and that every human is the same and all different groups and people are equal in characteristics and qualities. For example, liars will lie, predictably, even if expressed as a function of probability.