[psidium]

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 discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that.

There are so many interest studies mentioned there, one that really stuck with me is how Protestant-raised Americans will work harder for the next day after having (reasearch-led) incestuous thoughts when compared to Catholics and Atheists.

He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man).

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. Mostly in connection to the spread of read/write to the public being a core tenant of Protestantism.

Anyway, this is not a summary of the book but instead a few points from it that really stuck with me after reading it. Fascinating stuff

[PeterHolzwarth]

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?

[psidium]

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]

> 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.

[psidium]

But I said the book does offer replication studies in different populations in different continents, albeit from the same author

[adwn]

I know, and I guess it's better than nothing, but replications by the original author don't exactly grant the same level of confidence as independent replications.

[adwn]

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

[sho_hn]

I know we are not supposed to talk about karma (and therefore a downvote ironically may be appropriate on this comment), but I agree vote behaviour on HN lately shows a still-small but growing tendency toward suppressive downvoting.

This seems to happen generally for two reasons: Even a neutral comment is evaluated for what stance it most closely aligns with, and then downvoted to suppress the opposing view just in case. Or alternatively, a comment that appears low-key combative (but really isn't directly so) gets downvoted in an attempt to ensure harmony.

Both moves to me have "culture war vibes", and come from either adopting those habits or feeling very tired from strife.

I think it's increasingly easy to fall into either bracket, but let's not do that on HN! If a comment is generally polite enough, the only bar to meet is adding new information or new thought into a conversation. None of us come here to be pandered to, and getting challenged by viewpoints that force you to consider the corner cases of your own views is half the fun.

[_DeadFred_]

Not to call you out for your post but I think this is a result of the 'just asking questions' culture we live in where asking questions online has been weaponized/agenda driven. Even the person asking the question admits their question could be interpreted this way first thing: "and I don't mean this combatively)" and even their caveat these days is sadly easily interpreted as 'I'm just asking questions'. Just look at how the start of my first sentence changes the tone.

The question asker doesn't know the work, doesn't respond to what OP said, but instead challenges OP about methodology, and leads with 'I know this question can seem combative'. Then falls to 'do you think, in your heart of hearts'... how does that question and asking for assessment align with the 'I'm all about methodology' stance of the question asker? It sounds a like a 'core values' assessment/assignment not a 'the room for error in this study' assessment is being asked for. The question on the whole:

'I know this can sound combative but I'm just asking questions. Given other things have been bad and knowing nothing of this being talked about, but pointing out it's probably completely wrong (based on nothing but X other thing is wrong).... really, in your heart, do you believe you are coming from integrity?'

That sounds toxic AF.

Personally as a relative newcomer here it seems like there is a lot of this 'just asking questions' on HN.

Edit: Throttled. I pointed out how I saw the post could be (mis)interpreted. Yeah, that necessitates me replaying it back how it could be (mis)interpreted. That is valid when my point is about... how posts could be (mis)interpreted resulting in a poorer quality of discussion. Sorry if you didn't understand the point I was trying to get across. I didn't say the interpretation was valid, I said here is how posts like the one the person I responded to referenced can derail discussion in an era of 'just asking questions'. Zero disingenuousness nor unconstructive on my part and it's wild you can't see that. My post was about better quality discussion using the message the person I responded to used. Yours is about calling me specifically out. Which is more 'constructive'?

[dc10tonite]

This is why I have enjoyed not having downvote powers yet. It's made me check why I downvote things - and re-evaluate what I upvote. I've found myself upvoting things I don't really agree with but make interesting points that I find myself dialoguing with. Perhaps this is why I mostly lurk

[bonoboTP]

People are very sensitive to sensing politically threatening undertones in any take. If you truly aren't sure why: it's probably related to certain funding decisions and certain discourse around certain academic fields.

[CaptWillard]

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]

This is probably only true when the "pithy take" upholds accepted dogma.

[CaptWillard]

This has been my experience, yes. Although dogma implies long held beliefs.

The rate of adoption has accelerated along with the news cycle.

[ludicity]

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.

[gherkinnn]

https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

Here are the cocktail ideas. Hits the spot.

[bryanrasmussen]

>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]

Not to be that guy, but where can I read those interviews? I got as far as the blog (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]

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]

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.

[godelski]

It's hard to infer what you're exactly saying here, but I've worked in physics (my undergrad), aerospace engineering (first job), and programming (my phd and onwards), so I think I can bridge whatever gap is being discussed here.

In programming, engineering, and hard science your goals evolve during development. There's always discovery during the doing process that necessitates pivots, and sometimes hard pivots. The main difference I've seen is just how much time goes into planning. Software has an advantage in that when working with physical things mistakes are incredibly costly both in money and time. You fuck up a tolerance and you might need you wait a few weeks for the part to be remade and you might have an expensive paperweight (hopefully you can use for some testing).

So what that leads to is more planning stages. That's not just make a plan and go, but make a plan, go, regroup, replan, go, repeat. It often means gathering people who are the owners of different parts of a project because you can't just duct tape things together and the most permanent solution is a temporary solution that works. This greatly affects how I go about programming and is something I notice I do differently from my peers. I spend a lot more time at the whiteboard while most people I know never visit one. I'm not spending all my time there, or even most, but I couldn't do my job without "pen and paper".

In programming the "laws of physics" aren't constantly changing and you're not "building a plane while flying it" (how would it even get off the ground lol), but your requirements are constantly changing. That's... normal engineering and normal in both experimental and even theoretical science. That's because we're not omniscient and you don't know the full answer from the get go lol.

This isn't to say in trad engineering and science we doing also "move fast and break things". Just like in programming you'll build toy models or scaled down versions. But I do think programmers could benefit a lot more and make a lot fewer mistakes (substantially reducing future workloads) would they spend a bit more time at the drawing board. It's great that in programming we can jump in and poke around and experiment so much faster than the physical world allows us, but it seems that this feature is overused instead of being used in addition to planning and designing. That's what actually made me come over to this side, was the ability to iterate faster. But sometimes you gotta take a step back and look at things. Sometimes you gotta move the bridge. Sometimes you gotta tear it down to build an entirely new one. The latter is actually much easier in programming and honestly I feel like it's used less frequently. But that's like being unwilling to throw away your first draft when writing a report (or anything). Why hold on? The first draft's job is to get the stuff out of your head and see it in a more physical form. It's so easy to rebuild, magnitudes easier than doing it the first time, but it always hangs on as if losing it is losing work.

[TimByte]

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

[trabant00]

> 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.

[rjsw]

The book has been recommended and discussed here before.

[Waterluvian]

> 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.

[bitexploder]

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.

[balder1991]

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...

[some_random]

That explanation sounds great until you find out that Gladwell is more than willing to misrepresent events to fit into whatever point he's trying to make. The most egregious example I know of being the Korean Air Line Flight 801 crash.

https://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell...

[bitexploder]

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 :)

[meindnoch]

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

[raincole]

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.

[blululu]

*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.

[avdelazeri]

As one of the professors I had undergrad classes with liked to say "Economics is the only field where you can be awarded the Nobel prize for showing A and then next year someone gets a Nobel prize for showing not A".

[guappa]

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

[throw9123123100]

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.

[guappa]

Obama.

[red369]

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?

[lmm]

> 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.

[mitthrowaway2]

Was it? I thought Millikan's measurement had a minor error from an incorrect viscosity of air, and several other researchers' subsequent measurements were fabricated to agree with Millikan's.

[lmm]

That also happened, but there are suspicious patterns in Millikan's data considered in isolation.

[suddenlybananas]

It's not completely insane, the part of the brain that gets used for recognising words is very close to the part of the brain that recognises faces. The brain likely cannibalises the part of the cortex that's used to recognise faces to recognise words and letters instead. See this study[1] where the visual word form area reacts much more strongly to faces in illiterates than in people who have learnt to read.

[1] https://www.unicog.org/publications/1-s2.0-S1364661311000738...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_word_form_area

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area

[ACCount37]

There are people who have face-blindness (inability to discern faces) or dyslexia (visual processing disorder that leads to severe difficulties with reading). The two aren't strongly correlated.

Dyslexia seems to be tied to some broader visual processing issues, which impair the ability to discriminate faces somewhat. But not the other way around.

If the two skills were strongly related, you'd expect a very strong and obvious link. Maybe in form of both performing poorly, if damage to the same pathways impairs both. Or as one performing poorly while another performs unusually well (super-recognizers? children who learn reading at 2?) - if the two skills compete for brain real estate and create a performance tradeoff, as claimed.

[nonameiguess]

It's the one that immediately set off my alarm bell. I always try to put myself in the shoes of a scientist and imagine how it would be possible to design a study to test a claim. To me, this one implies humans of today are worse at recognizing faces compared to humans of the past who did not read as much or at all. That one cannot possibly be tested because you cannot test the cognitive capabilities of people of the past who no longer exist.

On the more productive side, this suggests we might develop standardized tests of human capabilities and limits that would allow people of the future to compare themselves to us.

[suddenlybananas]

There are people who are illiterate today who you can test.

[Terr_]

I'm struggling to think of any way to test the hypothesis which is (A) practical and (B) accurate.

For example, suppose you sampled a group today and found an inverse-correlation between "good at recognizing many faces" and "good at recognizing written text"... That still wouldn't show that one facility grew causing the other to shrink, because maybe people are just born (or early-development-ed) with a certain bias.

[suddenlybananas]

The part of the brain that recognises faces quite literally shrinks in literates compared to illiterates

https://www.unicog.org/publications/1-s2.0-S1364661311000738...

[Terr_]

I'm quite willing to believe that human brains do Weird Stuff with respect to reusing circuits and development, but I still don't see how they concluded "the skill encourages the brain state" by disproving "the brain state encourages the acquisition of the skill."

It would be ethically difficult to randomly assigned children to groups (A) taught to read versus (B) forced to remain illiterate while ensuring both groups had the same number of people's faces in their social circles.

[psidium]

IIRC the author compares brain scans and recognition abilities of children of hunter gatherers that where sent to school vs same age relatives that were not. I’m bringing this up from memory now and I’m not so sure of this, but this claim stems from some studies of the author

[psidium]

The author uses mostly hunter-gatherers tribes/societies in different continents as the control groups, usually. Most of his work is in anthropology.

[dgeep]

It seems that there is an study in which the part of the brain used to recognize words is also used for recognizing letters, and when one increases taking more space the other shrink. That study used brain scanners to measure and detect brain activity.

[coldtea]

Or perhaps something that it's true even after we "debunked" it

[derefr]

> 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 support different types of economic activity; and the social realities of living within these different economies, naturally evolves into major differences in culture. (Compare/contrast: the differing cultures of coastal vs midwestern America. Now imagine that split with a few thousand more years for the divergence to take hold.)

History happens once; but geography is always affecting a nation, all throughout its evolution. 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."

That being said: geography can also constrain history.

Southern Italy is almost entirely coastline, in a part of the world where, for much of the last ~2000 years, everyone was constantly invading everyone else by sea. Northern Italy was relatively-more immune to amphibious assault, as its capitals could be situated more inland. (Rome itself — the exception that proves the rule — was located in south Italy, but was defended from amphibious assault mostly by the Roman Empire's huge naval home-fleet being docked to the southern-Italian coast; not by anything inherent to its location. Once the Roman Empire itself went away, big rich cities in southern Italy suddenly became juicy targets for conquest and/or sacking.)

[bootsmann]

> 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.

[2dvisio]

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.

[marcus_holmes]

Also that Italy has only been a single country for a couple hundred years [0], so there will obviously still be regional differences.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Italy

[psidium]

Yes, your point and other points around the web I’ve seen make his argument about north and south Italy very controversial to say the least. He does have data to back it up, where he presents distance to nearest church as a predictor for how well a population will fare, and south Italy didn’t have the churches that north the Italy had

[sethammons]

All the basketball players are tall. Ergo, if we want to be taller, we should all play basketball.

[psidium]

Yes, maybe I was not clear but I’m in doubt of the Italy claim in the book and that’s why I remember it

[cortesoft]

This would only work as evidence if church placement was random. Could be a correlation with a different cause.

[kjkjadksj]

Don’t forget diseases like malaria in the south. That wasn’t dealt with until Mussolini drained some swamps.

[soiltype]

> (Rome itself — the exception that proves the rule

You really have to explain specifically what you mean by this phrase, or else it's typically just saying you don't actually understand the rule or the exception.

It sounds like you're claiming Rome succeeded for reasons that overcame its geographical disadvantages, and due to this growth protected itself from naval invasions. But Rome was not a maritime power during its early republic period, let alone earlier. So why didn't Carthage or anyone else just sail upriver (Rome was not on the coast, just to clarify the context) and destroy Rome? How did Rome succeed in the first place to become a maritime power capable of defying southern Italy's geography?

[notjoemama]

I haven't read the book but it sounds really interesting. Regarding tone though,

> monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today

Does the author use the word "blame" to mean "the reason for" or do they present it as a critique of monogamy? Not a big deal, just made me curious when I saw that.

[psidium]

I meant it as “is responsible for” or “explains”. The author doesn’t seem to make any judgement in over the other, but he presents polygamy in a society as a causation for male violence. Sorry for that, English isn’t my first language

[TimByte]

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

[tobyhinloopen]

> He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man).

Must suck to be a lower-ranking man lol

[jancsika]

> women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man

I bet you think "2nd" means "secondary."

I bet the parties to the marriage think "2nd" means "most recently allocated."

[cjauvin]

One of my greatest pleasure of random walking the internet is building my list of possible next books to read.. thank you for this one!

[psidium]

Do you have some recommendations? I remember seeing Show HN tools gathering book recommendations from here, but I like specific experiences

[DaveZale]

yeah I just ordered a copy of "We Survived the Night" based on a post here. Never would have heard of it otherwise.

[hiatus]

Mind linking to the post for the curious?

[minhaz23]

Would love to see that link and any other posts others might have run across here as well. I feel like pre covid it was common to see high Quality ask hn discussions with niche/prestigious book recommendations often. I dont see that as much now.

[DaveZale]

it was a link to paris review of books- here is the book

https://pioneerworks.org/programs/julian-brave-noisecat-we-s...

[hackable_sand]

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

[titanomachy]

TIL that Rome wasn't part of the Holy Roman Empire. "Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" according to Voltaire.

[TheCoelacanth]

It was part of the Holy Roman Empire for hundreds of years, but not at the end. The Holy Roman Empire started in 800 CE and Rome was part of it.

The Italian states started becoming more autonomous in the mid-1100s. It wasn't until the 1600s that they were fully independent.

[kjkjadksj]

Funny thing with the words. I remember before I could read and billboards just looked like designs. Then once I could read it was like reading was unavoidable, it could not be shut off and you are constantly reading instead of just appreciating the text as some design pattern. At the time I felt ripped off.

[SiempreViernes]

The acronym was coined in a paper with the same title about 10 years before the book.

[snickerdoodle14]

"better" man?

[cortesoft]

> 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?

[smelendez]

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 arrangement, and it’s interesting to think about why.

[dsign]

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?

[lelanthran]

> 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)?

I dunno about heterosexuality being encoded[1] into cultural canons, but for monogamy it's actually quite simple: violence.

Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.

===========

[1] As far as heterosexuality goes, it's not "encoded by wilful intention" so much as "this is the default". IOW, most people are happy going with the default, so if you make something opt-out, the majority won't opt-out. Same for opt-in. This is why countries that have opt-out organ donors have more organs donated, while countries that have opt-in organ donations have a fraction of he opt-out countries.

Defaults matter.

[psidium]

Literally one of the main points of the book: the church’s mandate and enforcement of monogamy in Europe lowered violence so much that a different kind of society emerged.

[rollcat]

> Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.

This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.

Monogamy is possessiveness, and possessiveness is what drives violence.

[fluoridation]

>If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.

There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.

* In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.

* It makes marriage intrinsically more complicated simply because of the more complex interactions. For example, if Alice is married to Bob, who is married to both Alice and Carol, who is married to both Bob and David, what are Alice and David to each other? Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?

* Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?

[lelanthran]

> This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.

Only if your argument is that this behaviour is nurture, not nature. IOW, if your argument is "this behaviour is completely disconnected from instinct and has nothing to do with evolutionary pressure", then sure, your argument makes sense.

Many of the great apes, and indeed, other animals, don't think in terms of political soundbites, though, so we can readily observe that the behaviour "violence over mating rights" is a thing that developed in those creatures that eventually evolved into other creatures which evolved into pre-hominids which evolved into hominids which evolved into us.

Some things are instinct. It's a very large stretch to claim that violence over mating isn't instinct, but political.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that...

[dsign]

You may be taking things from the wrong end.

Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood. I can say that I always, personally, considered the idea of controlling a person abhorrent, as much as I found uninteresting the idea of orbiting my intimate life around a single person with special and very high privileges over whatever I do and think, including outside of bed. However, all my relatives were very insistent that I should date girls and marry. 100% culture, 0% nature. Of course, this is just a single data point.

The heterosexuality part being the "default" is a bit naive, because it ignores the lengths to which some people go to force their kids to be heterosexual. Again, anecdotally, my father sired two gay sons, who had to go to great lengths to have a less traumatic life. Sometimes I suspect my father wasn't that hetero himself, and was only ensuring the next generation inherited his cultural legacy/trauma.

I could consider an argument that a majority (heterosexual) imposes a cultural canon on a non heterosexual minority. But the problem with that is that we don't really know if that majority/minority split would exist without the very strong cultural conditioning. And, as I said before, I don't really believe that homophobia is something the Canaanites invented out of spite. Most likely, it was a cultural trait that conferred advantages to groups, particularly after the agricultural revolution locked human population in a cycle of growth and war for land--but that's just a pet theory of mine.

There are even theories (read the controversial book "Sex at Dawn" if you want the details) that our current cultural canons about sexuality run against what was our nature for hundreds of thousands of years.

[lelanthran]

> Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood.

"Could be" is not "probably is".

All the observable evidence points to "fighting for mates being purely instinctual".

The opposite, is in fact, true: not engaging in violence for mates is, in fact, purely a cultural construct.

Culture enforces that, via laws, norms, etc.

[barrenko]

Sounds a lot like Tom Holland - Dominion (to help the robots - "...broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.").

[bandie91]

i don't think it's a valid way to think about society/religion/culture what your formulazation reflects.

up until just 2-3 centuries ago, people did not think about these questions in a self-deterministic way, i mean they trusted the ancestors to sorted out most of the things over the centuries, and they were not suposed to take huge social/cultural reforms, only minor adjustments. did not even have so huge view on the spacial and temporal panorama of different cultures and societies over the whle word like us today. today even just binging up this statement makes people angry like "oh those silly old people. they _unconditionally_ obeyed to whatever their parents and superiors told them. this is the way to opression and tiranny, etc, etc. not like us! we are truely grown ups today. humanity is out of the dark child days. now! now disagree to _everything_. default is «i deny»". i mean … who do you think want to fool you? i think, on average, parents wants to leave the well-tested and proven-to-be-stable fundamental ideas about the world to their children. and those dont change very often; the more fundamental the less changing world-properties are.

but changes in society started to accelerate, so came social and economic revolutions which all want to redefine as much as possible. with really big improvements in the sociology, antropology and other culture-related disciplines, people started to believe that we are watching ourself from the outside, so able to manipulate the norms and the law to "make society better". only noone has the same definiton what is "better".

[lelanthran]

> > 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 am not seeing the tautology. Can you explain?

[cortesoft]

Well, if their success with multiple women is used as a factor in the ranking….

[fluoridation]

Let's assume for the sake of argument that success literally is how many wives someone has.

> women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a man with more than one wife than being the only wife of a man with a single wife

How is that statement tautological?

[lmm]

> This seems like a bit of a tautology

I don't think it is? A priori it's not at all obvious which option women would be expected to prefer.

[barrenko]

a woman can rank you in sub-second time, just as you can her.