[HN Gopher] Cultivating minds: The psychological consequences of...
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Cultivating minds: The psychological consequences of rice versus
wheat farming
Author : impish9208
Score : 103 points
Date : 2024-04-08 12:26 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marginalrevolution.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (marginalrevolution.com)
| gmuslera wrote:
| This could had been a chapter of Guns, Germs and Steel, at least
| as factor on how the East and West cultures managed to differ,
| and, maybe, one ended dominating the world and not the other.
|
| Anyway, I don't think it applies to modern world and agriculture
| as new cultural factor, but as proof as for how long cultural
| traits are carried on even if the original reasons may not be so
| important anymore.
| yafetn wrote:
| I had a professor who hated Jared Diamond for being
| reductionist, and I've been skeptical of him ever since.
| However, I see the immense appeal of his theories (and the one
| linked here) because they're so simple to understand. They make
| for good History Channel documentaries, and tidbits you can
| repeat at a cocktail party to make yourself sound smart.
| adamc wrote:
| Former anthropologist (through to PhD, anyhow) here. I think
| there is benefit in having simpler theories, because they are
| easier to test. There are so many limitations in getting
| adequate data to test historical theories anyway... I am
| always skeptical that what we have is a "just so" story that
| of course fits the data, since people knew the general shape
| of the data before proposing the theory.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Any book recommendations?
| adamc wrote:
| Not offhand.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Indeed, it's interesting to think about how rice production
| might have influenced the culture.
|
| But to do so without mentioning Buddhism or Confucian
| thought at least in passing is weird. I assume his take
| would be that these philosophies were emergent from the
| culture of rice farming.
| gmuslera wrote:
| I don't see this kind of single factors deterministic, just
| that things are not perfectly random anymore, a bias is
| introduced, on similar circumstances the dice may have more
| probabilities to fall in a particular direction. At least
| that is how I see complex systems in general and it may apply
| for this.
| tivert wrote:
| > However, I see the immense appeal of his theories (and the
| one linked here) because they're so simple to understand.
|
| Theories like that also make excellent propaganda. Take a
| messy subject (like the economy), drain that away with some
| oversimple theory that supports your political goals, then
| push that onto the citizenry in books and articles, and watch
| the converted start to vote your way. Personally, I think
| that's the mechanism for how so many laborers have come to
| believe in rather extreme forms of free market capitalism.
| wisty wrote:
| I don't think Diamond was a reductionist, he often considers
| multiple factors, as many as most academics IMO.
|
| Did the professor have a single factor who they tried to
| reduce anything to (and was mad that Diamond didn't share the
| same favourite hobby horse), or consider multiple factors
| (like Diamond, but maybe with a different set of factors),
| was the only way to solve a problem "study it lots and trust
| the expert", or is the solution "not everything can be
| solved, sometimes Donald Trump's guess is as good as mine"
| (but with more fancy words I'm assuming).
| bandrami wrote:
| For some reason all the discourse about that book has forgotten
| that he treated China, India, and Europe together as parts of
| Eurasia and contrasted them with Oceania and the Americas, not
| with each other.
| LanguageGamer wrote:
| "When asked to draw circles representing themselves and friends
| or family, for example, people tend to self-inflate their own
| circle but they self-inflate more in individualist cultures."
|
| This sort of methodology sounds sketchy to me - how much can we
| really learn from this? Does it reproduce? If it does, how do we
| know there isn't some other cause?
| michaelt wrote:
| I wondered exactly the same thing - how have they controlled
| for ideographic vs alphabetic writing systems? - so I looked at
| the paper's citations.
|
| It turns out this paper from Talhelm & Dong supports its
| methodology by citing a paper by Talhelm et.al. and one by Dong
| et.al.
| debacle wrote:
| > It turns out this paper from Talhelm & Dong supports its
| methodology by citing a paper by Talhelm et.al. and one by
| Dong et.al.
|
| This should be the top comment. This thread is chock full of
| pop sociology, to the degree that I really wasn't sure how to
| respond to much of it.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While other methodological aspects may be more doubtful, in
| the paper of Talhelm of Dong there was no "ideographic vs
| alphabetic" problem.
|
| That paper compared Chinese people with Chinese people, where
| both groups had been assigned randomly and forcibly by the
| communist authorities to become agricultural workers in
| wheat-cultivating regions or in rice-cultivating regions.
|
| The only confounding factors could be other geographic
| differences besides their major crops.
|
| The point of the paper was to exploit this unusual historical
| fact as a social experiment that has eliminated most
| confounding factors that exist in other comparisons, like the
| factor mentioned by you.
| hennell wrote:
| It does sound kinda sketchy, but the preceding sentence to your
| quote mentions it 'has been shown in earlier work' so
| presumably there are some studies somewhere showing the
| experiment, links and how much we can learn from it etc.
|
| It still might have flaws, but it's not like they just got
| people to draw charts and interpreted it as 'collectivist' and
| 'individualist' for the first time in this study.
| throwup238 wrote:
| There's a replication crisis in sociology and psychology and
| these stupid drawing tests are exactly why.
|
| They're just reusing flawed techniques from flawed research.
| layer8 wrote:
| Shouldn't the replication crisis cause the reuse to fail?
| ;)
| mmcdermott wrote:
| If the experiment is re-run, but it'd never be noticed if
| it the results were simply cited and taken as proved.
| Terr_ wrote:
| *taps finger to forehead* You can't have a replication
| crisis if every paper is a _new_ thing without retesting
| old conclusions. :p
|
| From my brain's obsessive make-a-fun-analogy circuit:
|
| 1. Our research shows we can count umbrellas in aerial
| photos to predict future rainfall. This Predictive
| Aggregate Umbral Coverage will revolutionize climatology!
|
| 2. Our new research using PAUC [1] shows the country of
| Elbonia will become a desert in a decade.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| A story by Feynman [1]
|
| > ... Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of
| poor science. When I was at Cornell [1945-1950], I often
| talked to the people in the psychology department. One of
| the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that
| went something like this--I don't remember it in detail,
| but it had been found by others that under certain
| circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious
| as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y,
| they would still do, A. So her proposal was to do the
| experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still
| did A. I explained to her that it was necessary first to
| repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other
| person--to do it under condition X to see if she could
| also get result A--and then change to Y and see if A
| changed. Then she would know that the real difference was
| the thing she thought she had under control. She was very
| delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor.
| And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the
| experiment has already been done and you would be wasting
| time. This was in about 1935 or so, and it seems to have
| been the general policy then to not try to repeat
| psychological experiments, but only to change the
| conditions and see what happens.
|
| [1] https://gwern.net/maze
| metalspoon wrote:
| Their first paper on rice theory was cited like 2000 times,
| so you can check if anybody debunked this theory. I
| haven't.
|
| I was also surprised to see that this theory has been
| published in reputable journals (like Science and Nature
| Communications). So, odds are that critics haven't made
| strong arguments on this theory so far.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Does it reproduce? If it does, how do we know there isn't
| some other cause?
|
| Same way as always in the non-physical realm: we don't.
| Luckily, perfection may not be required, adequacy may be
| adequate.
| roughly wrote:
| Something else that's been noted about wheat farming which would
| also apply to rice farming - wheat is a visible crop with a
| defined harvest date, and thus is quite amenable to taxation and
| state formation, whereas, say, potato farming is harder to make
| legible to the state.
|
| I wonder if similar studies have been done on farmers' attitudes
| towards the validity of authority.
| cafard wrote:
| Wasn't the Incan empire highly organized?
| tivert wrote:
| > Wasn't the Incan empire highly organized?
|
| And also pretty totalitarian. IIRC, to the point of
| resettling and mixing communities to discourage rebellion.
|
| But I could also see that as a reaction to potato farming
| being "harder to make legible to the state."
| roughly wrote:
| So was Tsarist Russia and Maoist China, so I'm not super
| sold on the grain->government pipeline in any direction
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| They grew corn in addition to potato's, I believe.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| [... wrong parent comment...]
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Are you sure you're replying to the right comment?
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| Heh, I'm not, not sure what happened.
| throwup238 wrote:
| When wheat is taxed it's usually done by centralizing the
| milling. Once water and windmills were invented, they became
| communal resources and starting with the middle ages that's
| where taxation was calculated. Keeping track of everyone's
| wheat fields was never practical, especially since yield is an
| independent variable.
| perrygeo wrote:
| There's a fantastic paper on this topic, "The Origin of the
| State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?" [1]
|
| Grain has a predictable harvest time, long storage time, easy
| to transport dry, etc. This makes it an ideal target for
| bandits and rouge states alike. Tubers are heavy, harvestable
| year-round, can be grown in small patches, and parish easily.
| Who wants to steal 100lbs of potatoes when you can steal 50lbs
| of rice? Tubers don't require complex hierarchy to defend your
| stores.
|
| Growing grain is apparently a devil's bargain between fending
| off bandits and fending off the tax man who promises defense
| against bandits.
|
| [1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/718372
| credit_guy wrote:
| It does not look like the article you linked to mentions
| that, but the easiest thing to steal is livestock. Cattle and
| horses move on their own feet, you don't need to carry them.
| A few raiders can come back from a raid with a few thousands
| pounds worth of meat, and very little effort. Getting the
| same amount of calories in grains is many times more
| difficult and riskier.
| perrygeo wrote:
| Excellent point. I'm not sure which came first, intensive
| animal husbandry or grain-based agriculture. Maybe
| livestock was the basis for the state.
| yobbo wrote:
| Dutch canal-building is (one of) the counter-examples to the
| claim that large-scale coordination of water systems creates
| collectivist societies.
| adolph wrote:
| Is the VOC also an early example of collectivization, or is it
| an example of coordination among people with an individualistic
| outlook? Or maybe both?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
| adolph wrote:
| Some of the interesting things: a natural randomized experiment
| between wheat and rice farmers as a Cultural Revolution outcome
| and how long cultural traits imprint on the minds of people who
| are moved from one culture to another.
|
| Culture is many things, one of them as being a method of
| information transfer. Some of that knowledge is implicit and that
| part I imagine is transferred via mindset as defined by Alia
| Crum: "We define mindsets as core beliefs or assumptions that we
| have about a domain or category of things, that orient us to a
| particular set of expectations, explanations and goals."
|
| Are these "styles of thinking" or homomorphic cultural
| characteristics referred to by Taborrok the same as "mindset" as
| popularized by Dweck and others?
| xhevahir wrote:
| I don't think the author is talking about large-scale control of
| water (like in the theory of hydraulic civilization). He mentions
| "communal management" and "communities."
| kzz102 wrote:
| I buy the argument that work arrangements can significantly shape
| psychology. I am really annoyed by the culture to "sell" your
| findings using grandiose phrasing. It's a observation that
| confirms many people's prior, but it's very cool to have a
| definitive test for one specific manifestation of it. But
| breakthrough research it is not, and not really telling you
| anything about cultivating minds.
| mNovak wrote:
| To be fair, the actual paper is much less grandiose [1]. This
| is just the usual pop-science breathless reporting.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44770-w
| bjourne wrote:
| In the same vein some claim that miners were more socialist and
| fishermen more religious. Reason being that a miner's output is
| proportional to how much ore they mine, while a fisherman needs
| to get lucky to haul in a good catch. This was before industrial
| fishing. Hard to know if there is any truth to this or if it's
| all folklore. But perhaps this sort of thinking can explain why
| developers tend to be hyper-individualists -- most of their work
| (ie bug-fixing) is caused by other people screwing up.
| yedava wrote:
| I think this hypothesis quickly falls apart when you consider
| other places other than the US and China. To take India for
| example, the northern parts rely more on wheat and the southern
| parts on rice. One could easily make up an argument that the rice
| dominant south is more individualistic as it produces more
| economic output.
| tivert wrote:
| > To take India for example, the northern parts rely more on
| wheat and the southern parts on rice. One could easily make up
| an argument that the rice dominant south is more
| individualistic as it produces more economic output.
|
| I think that argument would fail due to the assumption that you
| can infer community's bias towards individualism vs
| collectivism from "economic output." If you want to turn India
| into a counterexample, I think you'd need to use similar kinds
| of psychological tests across the different regions.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| The Indian subcontinent has a major confounding variable in the
| caste system. Different castes have lived side by side with
| almost no genetic mixing for nearly 2k years. It's truly
| anomalous among genetic histories throughout the world.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) was/is a rice producing
| region, while Pakistan (formerly West Pakistan) was/is a
| largely wheat producing region.
|
| Is one or the other more individualistic?
|
| If the claimed hypothesis of these papers is true, did it have
| any impact on the development of the two regions? Bangladesh is
| certainly richer today.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The average person in Louisiana eats rice daily, and rice has
| been cultivated in the state since the first settlers because
| wheat doesn't grow well there. Tell me how they're not
| individualistic.
| walthamstow wrote:
| > rice has been cultivated in the state since the first
| settlers
|
| You say that like it's a long time, but it really isn't at all
| thePhytochemist wrote:
| Interesting topic, but the agronomy/plant science assumption that
| the article is based on is lacking.
|
| Rice doesn't require complex irrigation - dryland rice farming is
| common. Rice and wheat both give more yield when irrigated
| properly using complex irrigation systems. I don't see any reason
| to claim that growing wheat is just generally easier than growing
| rice.
| nbernard wrote:
| According to Braudel (in Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th
| Century, vol. 1), without irrigation rice farming depletes the
| soil much, much more than wheat. If I remember correctly, he
| states that if one waits for natural soil regeneration
| (fallowing and/or crop rotation) wheat can be grown at the same
| place every 2 to 3 years, whereas for rice it is only every 10
| to 30 years.
| metalspoon wrote:
| The authors have published this theory in Science, and this one
| is in Nature Communications. Probably any criticism we can come
| up with was provided during the review process.
|
| I'm also unconvinced, but it is very difficult to criticize
| this theory fairly and from the internet at the moment.
| XargonEnder wrote:
| If you like that article I think you'll really like this video.
| It's about the same thing but goes over a lot more data:
| https://youtu.be/8UAsN9wvePE?si=Kom5C1u4T7yX29jb
| cbsmith wrote:
| Makes me wonder about software development and libertarianism...
| ;-)
| iamthemonster wrote:
| I don't think this explanation exhibits a 'dose response'. The
| UK, industrialized for over a century, have had a very small
| proportion of their population engaged in wheat farming in the
| last few generations, yet it is a more individualistic society.
| Ukraine has wheat as a major export and has continually had a far
| far greater proportion of the population who are close to wheat
| farming or are at least conscious of its importance to the
| economy.
|
| Is Ukraine more individualistic than the UK? It appears to be the
| opposite.
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