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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3326 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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What should I know about the genetics of empathy especially in regards to racial differences and the development of nations? If empathy is genetic, should this be as important as a metric to look at as IQ?

Read Joseph Heinrich's "The WEIRDest people in the world". It explains a lot of of the non-intelligence related reasons that humans differ in their cognition.

(full disclosure: I haven't actually read the book yet myself. It's working its way to the top of my reading list)

I’ve read it. Henrich writes a lot of plausible things- and can draw some support for most of them- but he very definitely avoids anything which would pit his cultural hypothesis against genetics hypotheses.

Also I really don't care for the audiobook narrator. Quite a mismatch.

That's Henrich

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