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
> 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'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.
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.
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
> 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.)
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
I have saved instructions for Gemini to translate queries into the local language then retranslate the output back to English, when asking about non-English speaking countries/cultures. It seems to work fairly well, but I think it's just due to the different content trained in that language; obviously there would be more in depth discussion of Indonesian cuisine in Indonesian. Whether the country is rich or democratic shouldn't really affect the output.
There is undoubtedly a real effect here, but IMHO one problem with the original article is that it treats the US as the only reference point.
On the one hand, this reflects the US dominant position in world affairs and the fact that probably most of the training materials come from there.
But on the other hand, there are some outlier results that are left unexplained. For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US.
I’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of ‘weird’ as an insult (charitably because all the old insults get you shadowbanned on social media, less charitably because conformism is what the mainstream values more than anything), so the author isn’t even pretending to hide their agenda here.
I think they chose the WEIRD acronym to challenge the western centrism. For most of the readers of the book, the culture described by the WEIRD acronym is not only the normal culture, but is in many ways considered universal.
By calling it WEIRD, the author is trying to drive home the point that the vast majority of people in the world are NOT in that culture that many westerners feel is 'normal', which would make it 'weird' in the sense that it isn't actually the norm.
Now, I have a lot of problems with the book and his arguments, but I don't think there is anything sneaky or nefarious about the word choice, it is very up front and straightforward as to the reasoning behind it.
WEIRD is not pejorative in TFA. There's no problem being WEIRD. I am WEIRD. What's alleged in TFA is that AI, as it's currently deployed, is implicitly chauvinistic towards perspectives other than WEIRD. This sort of thing has historically been a problem with AI/ML and automation in general. The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times).
Poorly considered automation can create frictionless experiences for some and Kafkaesque experiences for the rest, where systems refuse to accept your atypical name, your atypical style of speaking is flagged as an indicator of fraud, etc. Automating processes involving people necessarily makes assumptions about those people, and such assumptions are often brittle.
For example, it's easy to imagine a resume filtering AI being implicitly prejudiced against people from Fictionalstan, because it was only trained on a few resumes from Fictionalstan and most of those happened to be classified as "unqualified". This is a danger anytime you have a small number of samples from any particular group, because it's easy for small sample sizes to be overwhelmed by bad luck.
The idea that “mainstream” values “conformism” seems like a relic of the 1980s. Have you looked around at public figures in the news? There’s less Debbie Boone and more Dennis Rodman going on. The freaks are flying their flags out there for everyone to see.
I heard a congressman in a town hall meeting last night call a colleague "crazy liberal" - a psychotherapist called in and said don't use that word "crazy" - language is being perverted here
I imagine the culture of HRLF trainers affects things. Maybe there’s disproportionally more of them from Oz/NZ, as native English-speaking countries with possibly lower wages?
I had heard that a lot of human feedback was being provided by people in Nigeria, as it has a very large English speaking population (owing to its history as a British colony) while also having low wages. This was the explanation given as to why ChatGPT seemed to use the word "delve" so often, apparently it's used much more frequently in business contexts there.
Possible that they're using different sources of feedback for different training though
It seems like almost all contexts might get value from specialized training. People often vary radically depending on where they were raised and where they live, their occupation and social class, and a range of other factors. Even workers from essentially identical backgrounds but practicing different trades can have very different perceptions and framing for what might appear to be shared tasks.
I don’t have the data but I assume the corpus available to train an LLM is majorly in English, written by Americans and western counterparts. If we’re training the LLMs to sound similar to the training data, I imagine the responses have to match that world view.
My anecdote is that before LLMs I would default to search Google in English instead of my own native language simply because there was so much more content in English to be found that would help me.
And here I am producing novel sentences in English to respond to your message, further continuing the cycle where English is the main language to search and do things.
This is some WEIRDO twist on the grievance olympics. AI is just software, is not alive, and most importantly, it is the current thing with which we can dissolve ourselves into.
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
> 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'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.
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!
yeah I just ordered a copy of "We Survived the Night" based on a post here. Never would have heard of it otherwise.
Mind linking to the post for the curious?
> 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 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.
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
> 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.)
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
This would only work as evidence if church placement was random. Could be a correlation with a different cause.
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
I have saved instructions for Gemini to translate queries into the local language then retranslate the output back to English, when asking about non-English speaking countries/cultures. It seems to work fairly well, but I think it's just due to the different content trained in that language; obviously there would be more in depth discussion of Indonesian cuisine in Indonesian. Whether the country is rich or democratic shouldn't really affect the output.
There is undoubtedly a real effect here, but IMHO one problem with the original article is that it treats the US as the only reference point.
On the one hand, this reflects the US dominant position in world affairs and the fact that probably most of the training materials come from there.
But on the other hand, there are some outlier results that are left unexplained. For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US.
> For example, ChatGPT is even more aligned with Japan than with the US
I have no expertise in this field.
Is it actually even more aligned? Or is it simply aligned with the elements of Japanese culture and/or media that are exported to the West?
I think the comment is basing it on the graphic from the article.
I wonder how ChatGPT and the like would do if you asked it to give a response as if they were a person from one of those other cultures.
In other words, is the issue in the defaults or is it impossible for AI to respond from other cultures?
WEIRD here stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic".
I’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of ‘weird’ as an insult (charitably because all the old insults get you shadowbanned on social media, less charitably because conformism is what the mainstream values more than anything), so the author isn’t even pretending to hide their agenda here.
I think they chose the WEIRD acronym to challenge the western centrism. For most of the readers of the book, the culture described by the WEIRD acronym is not only the normal culture, but is in many ways considered universal.
By calling it WEIRD, the author is trying to drive home the point that the vast majority of people in the world are NOT in that culture that many westerners feel is 'normal', which would make it 'weird' in the sense that it isn't actually the norm.
Now, I have a lot of problems with the book and his arguments, but I don't think there is anything sneaky or nefarious about the word choice, it is very up front and straightforward as to the reasoning behind it.
WEIRD is not pejorative in TFA. There's no problem being WEIRD. I am WEIRD. What's alleged in TFA is that AI, as it's currently deployed, is implicitly chauvinistic towards perspectives other than WEIRD. This sort of thing has historically been a problem with AI/ML and automation in general. The classic example is cameras deploying autofocus features that fail on non-white faces (which has happened several times).
Poorly considered automation can create frictionless experiences for some and Kafkaesque experiences for the rest, where systems refuse to accept your atypical name, your atypical style of speaking is flagged as an indicator of fraud, etc. Automating processes involving people necessarily makes assumptions about those people, and such assumptions are often brittle.
For example, it's easy to imagine a resume filtering AI being implicitly prejudiced against people from Fictionalstan, because it was only trained on a few resumes from Fictionalstan and most of those happened to be classified as "unqualified". This is a danger anytime you have a small number of samples from any particular group, because it's easy for small sample sizes to be overwhelmed by bad luck.
The idea that “mainstream” values “conformism” seems like a relic of the 1980s. Have you looked around at public figures in the news? There’s less Debbie Boone and more Dennis Rodman going on. The freaks are flying their flags out there for everyone to see.
Could you explain the agenda to those of us like me, who missed it anyway?
I heard a congressman in a town hall meeting last night call a colleague "crazy liberal" - a psychotherapist called in and said don't use that word "crazy" - language is being perverted here
The headline should retain the caps, since WEIRD here is not the same as regular weird.
Interesting that the responses from ChatGPT on the World Values Survey correlated most closely with the responses from Australians and New Zealanders.
I expect (as TFA says) that they would most closely align with Californians, but that isn't in the data.
I imagine the culture of HRLF trainers affects things. Maybe there’s disproportionally more of them from Oz/NZ, as native English-speaking countries with possibly lower wages?
I had heard that a lot of human feedback was being provided by people in Nigeria, as it has a very large English speaking population (owing to its history as a British colony) while also having low wages. This was the explanation given as to why ChatGPT seemed to use the word "delve" so often, apparently it's used much more frequently in business contexts there.
Possible that they're using different sources of feedback for different training though
Oh it’s an arcronym. I was very confused for a good portion of the article
It seems like almost all contexts might get value from specialized training. People often vary radically depending on where they were raised and where they live, their occupation and social class, and a range of other factors. Even workers from essentially identical backgrounds but practicing different trades can have very different perceptions and framing for what might appear to be shared tasks.
Ummm... doesn't the AI have to scrape the data of those non- WEIRD cultures to work then? What am I missing here?
There are parts of the world where constant person-electronic connection isn't a thing. Is that your point?
I don’t have the data but I assume the corpus available to train an LLM is majorly in English, written by Americans and western counterparts. If we’re training the LLMs to sound similar to the training data, I imagine the responses have to match that world view.
My anecdote is that before LLMs I would default to search Google in English instead of my own native language simply because there was so much more content in English to be found that would help me.
And here I am producing novel sentences in English to respond to your message, further continuing the cycle where English is the main language to search and do things.
And the RHLF was directed by Californians, and so the "values" are likely very California.
english is the lingua franca ;-)
“Fancy autocomplete better at completing documents similar to ones it has seen before” isn’t as headline-worthy.
This is some WEIRDO twist on the grievance olympics. AI is just software, is not alive, and most importantly, it is the current thing with which we can dissolve ourselves into.
I support the current thing, as should everyone.