I recently finished reading Henrich's 2020 book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. I would highly recommend it, along with Henrich's 2015 book The Secret of Our Success; I've roughly ranked them the 8th and 9th most useful-to-me of the ~50 effective-altruism-related books I've read since learning about effective altruism (EA).
In this post, I'll briefly outline what I think are the four main ways in which WEIRDest People shifted my beliefs on relatively high-level points that seem potentially decision-relevant, as distinct from specific facts I learned. And in a comment below the post, I'll also share the Anki cards I made for myself when reading the book.
My hope is that this will be a low-effort way for me to help some people to quickly (1) gain some key insights from the book, and (2) work out whether reading/listening to the book is worth their time.[1]
My four main updates
I wrote this quickly and only after finishing the book; take it all with a grain of salt.
- The book made me a bit less concerned about unrecoverable collapse and unrecoverable dystopia (i.e., the two types of existential catastrophe other than extinction, in Toby Ord's breakdown)
- This is because a big part of my concern was based on the idea that the current state and trend for things like values, institutions, and political systems seems unusually good by historical standards, and we don't fully understand how that state and trend came about, so we should worry that any "major disruption" could somehow throw us off course and that we wouldn't be able to get back on course (see Beckstead, 2015).
- E.g., perhaps a major war could knock us from a stable equilibrium with many liberal democracies to a stable equilibrium with many authoritarian regimes.
- But WEIRDest People made me a bit more confident that our current values, institutions, and political systems would stick around or re-emerge even after a "major disruption", because they or the things driving them are "fit" in a cultural evolutionary sense.
- This is because a big part of my concern was based on the idea that the current state and trend for things like values, institutions, and political systems seems unusually good by historical standards, and we don't fully understand how that state and trend came about, so we should worry that any "major disruption" could somehow throw us off course and that we wouldn't be able to get back on course (see Beckstead, 2015).
- The book made me less confident that the Industrial Revolution involved a stark change in a number of key trends, and/or made me more open to the idea that the drivers of the changes in those trends began long before the Industrial Revolution
- My previous belief was quite influenced by a post by Luke Muehlhauser
- Henrich seems to provide strong evidence that some key trends started long before 1750 (some starting in the first millennium CE, most starting by 1200-1500)
- But I'm not sure how much Henrich's book and Muehlhauser's post actually conflict with each other
- E.g., perhaps Henrich would agree (a) that there were discontinuities in all the metrics Muehlhauser looked at, and (b) that those metrics are more directly important than the metrics Henrich looked at; perhaps Henrich would say that the earlier discontinuities in the metrics he looked at were just the things that laid the foundations, not what directly mattered
- The book made me less confident that economic growth/prosperity is one of the main drivers of various ways in which the world seems to have gotten better over time (e.g., more democracy, more science, more concern for all of humanity rather than just one's ingroup)
- The book made me more open to the idea that other factors (WEIRD psychology and institutions) caused both economic growth/prosperity and those other positive trends
- E.g., I felt that the book pushed somewhat against an attitude expressed in this GiveWell post on flow-through effects
- This is related in some ways to my above-mentioned update about the industrial revolution
- The book made me more inclined to think that it's really hard to design institutions/systems based on explicit ideas about how they'll succeed in achieving desired objectives, or at least that humans tend to be bad at that, and that success more often results from a process of random variation followed by competition.
- In reality, this update was mainly caused by Henrich's previous book, Secret of Our Success. But WEIRDest People drummed it in further, and it seemed worth mentioning here.
Disclaimers
- Each of those update was more like a partial shift than a total reversal of my previous views
- See also Update Yourself Incrementally
- E.g., I still tentatively think longtermists should devote more resources/attention should to risks of unrecoverable dystopia than they currently do, but I'm now a bit less confident about that.
- I made this list only after finishing the book, and hadn't been taking notes with this in mind along the way
- So I might be distorting these updates or forgetting other important updates
[1] In other words, I intend this as a lower-effort alternative to writing notes specifically for public consumption or writing a proper book review. See also Suggestion: Make Anki cards, share them as posts, and share key updates.
Here's a google doc comment I wrote expanding on my reasoning related to key takeaway 1, i.e. that "The book made me a bit less concerned about unrecoverable collapse and unrecoverable dystopia (i.e., the two types of existential catastrophe other than extinction, in Toby Ord's breakdown)".
This comment was in the context of what implications Henrich's argument might have for whether impartiality in the moral sense will be more common among future agents, as one sub-question of whether the long-term future will be good or bad in expectation. (Caveats: The comment is definitely going beyond just what Henrich explicitly says, and it's also possible it's based on some misremembering on my part.)
My Anki cards
See the bottom of this shortform for caveats about my Anki cards.[1]
The indented parts are the questions, the answers are in "spoiler blocks" (hover over them to reveal the text), and the parts in square brackets are my notes-to-self.
If you want to download the cards themselves to import them into your own deck, follow this link.
---
Higher, more equal
---
those that buyers can't easily assess for quality (e.g. a steel sword, whose carbon content is hard to determine)
---
Silent trade; divine oaths; and a single, widely scattered clan or ethnic group handling all aspects of moving goods through a vast trade network
---
---
[Some of these things were measured by proxies I'm somewhat skeptical of the relevance/significance of.]
---
Percentage of land under rice paddy cultivation
---
---
Exposure to natural disasters
Nonviolent intergroup competition (e.g. between firms) [though he suggests this'll likely have smaller or no effects on religious devotion]
---
[He may have also mentioned other things. E.g., I think maybe he sees scientific thinking, universities, and more rational legal systems as also fitting that bill.]
---
[I learned of this study via Henrich's WEIRDest People.]
---
Rates of Protestants relative to Catholics in an area
[He says historical Protestantism rates increased suicide rates at that time. I can't remember if he also says historical P rates increase present suicide rates, or that present P rates increase present suicide rates. But I'm guessing he believes those things.]
---
Yes
---
---
Charter cities, monasteries, apprenticeships, universities
---
[So people and groups could escape oppression by moving to other places.]
---
Interfirm competition; impersonal trust
---
Henrich seems to provide strong evidence that key trends started long before 1750 (some starting in the first millennium CE, most starting by 1200-1500)
[See caveats in the "My four main updates" section.]
---
Intensification
[This led to norms related to things like cousin marriage, corporate ownership, patrilocal residence, segmentary lineages, and ancestor worship.]
---
East-West;
Eurasia;
the ease with which crops, animals, ideas and technologies could spread between areas of similar latitude
[Quoting a PBS webpage on Guns, Germs and Steel.]
---
Henrich's arguments essentially pick up where Diamond's arguments leave off
[I.e. Diamond's arguments explain global inequality up to ~1000CE well, but don't explain things like why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain, whereas Henrich's arguments can explain those later events.]
---
Says daughters should inherit half of what sons inherit (rather than nothing/very little), which likely drove the spread of and/or sustained a custom in which daughters marry their father's brother's sons, or more broadly a custom of marrying within clans. [This is to keep wealth within a family/clan.]
This encourages intensive forms of kinship, which favours certain ways of thinking and institutions that don't mesh well with democracy.
[I may be slightly misrepresenting the ideas.
]
---
agriculture and state-level governance;
fostered the evolution of cultural values, customs, and norms encouraging formal education, industriousness, and a willingness to defer gratification.
[These can be seen as pre-existing cultural institutions that happened to dovetail nicely with the new institutions acquired from WEIRD societies.]
---
top-down orientations;
helped them rapidly adopt and implement key kin-based institutions acquired from WEIRD societies (e.g. abolishing polygamy, clans, arranged marriages).
---
Evolution by natural selection reduced that time by about 8 months over the 20th century
[And by about 1.5 months per generation - maybe just more recently.
But this was very much offset by cultural evolution increasing the length of time in school by a larger amount.]
---
[1] Caveats about these Anki cards:
On Scientific Trust, Loose Summaries, and Henrich's WEIRDest People in the World has some useful comments on the accuracy of the book.
Readers may also be interested in: