It's an interesting theory, but I'm hesitant to give much weight to weakly-supported hypotheses intended to explain very broad and inclusive phenomena, like "murders (or a lack thereof) occurring within these arbitrary geographical borders." This is especially true when there's no shortage of plausible theories and a lot of potentially-useful information is missing.
The changeling myths seem to serve the purpose of guilt-relief only insofar as they also aid shame-relief, so I''m not sure they're all that helpful. (Am I missing something?)
Basically, this reads to me like an interesting but not particularly credible just-so story.
I was following along just fine until:
One way around this is to find some robust metric that most people would agree indicates guilt. One such measure, I believe, would be murder rate. If people in different cultures vary in the guilt they feel for committing murder, then this should hold them back and show up as a variation in the murder rate.
What? Is this an exercise in confounders? Could no longer suspend disbelief after that.
The idea here is interesting, but I wonder if anyone has tried to actually put it to the test. Not out of any personal desire to replace reasoned argument with statistics, mind, but simply because it's pretty clear now that anything short of repeatedly replicated psychometric data will be dismissed without consideration if it disagrees with the doctrine of HNU.
Apparently there are such things as a Guilt Inventory, so assuming it's actually as reliable as it's supposed to be it seems to reason that one could take Guilt Inventories of various populations and see what shakes out.
HNU
(In case anyone else reading the parent is scratching the head, that's “human neurological uniformity”. I correctly guessed from the context what concept it referred to, but it took me a few minutes' intensive use of Google's minus operator to find out what word each letter stood for.)
Without saying this is true, I'm not sure how much this would disagree with Human Neurological Uniformity. It seems to me that guilt would be present everywhere but if the culture is one where shaming is used a lot, it wouldn't get as much exercise, which could lead to this.
Not to mention that we don't know for sure that there even is a significant population difference here. It could just as easily be one of the things which humans seem to be generally consistent on as a species.
The point I was making, albeit ineptly, is that good research on the topic would be interesting and any potential ideological fallout shouldn't deter people from it.
I am a molecular biologist and tend to see genetic at places, where others do not. However, in this case, i find it more simple to explain observed things by memes, not genes. The same way the comparatively unrelated languages tend to borrow words from each other, if there is geographical proximity, the changeling stories and general attitude to killing babies can be borrowed and propagated.
This is a very poor post, full of almost comically bad arguments and rationalizations.
One way around this is to find some robust metric that most people would agree indicates guilt. One such measure, I believe, would be murder rate. If people in different cultures vary in the guilt they feel for committing murder, then this should hold them back and show up as a variation in the murder rate.
This borders on the idiotic. Since the author doesn't understand the obvious huge problem that it's impossible in this case to control for other factors, which are likely to be overwhelmingly important, none of their arguments should be taken seriously. It's the sort of cluelessness that makes it likely that in all other cases the author was merely fishing around for plausible correlations, rather than tried to judge the issue or build a convincing argument.
There is evidence that it [the distinction between modern and traditional] is caused by inbreeding and the accumulation of genes for familial altruism...
What evidence?
Since studies on this are non-existent as far as I know
Oh, OK.
– no doubt for political reasons
But political reasons didn't prevent people from publishing studies on race and gender and IQ, or the whole of evolutionary psychology from existing.
Really, the whole thing is very, very bad, and that even before they get to "gene variants for guilt proneness".
Downvoted for not providing a summary.
Here is my attempt at summarizing the quoted article:
Personal guilt is defined as shame aimed inward
Some cultures are based on guilt, others on shame
One way to measure guilt might be murder rate [the author provides little justification for this]
Another suggested metric is the corruption perception index. The author expects guilt-dominant cultures to have low corruption, and, unsurprisingly, finds the confirming evidence.
Changeling tales are conjectured to be a tool to relieve the guilt a family feels over abandoning a sickly newborn. The author gives a long and rambling comparison of changeling tales from different cultures and eras, from ancient Greece to modern Africa.
The author concludes with musings on genetic and cultural origins of the "guilt culture".
I must say that I have low confidence in amateurish research like this one, especially from a person proudly proclaiming "I actually believe in aliens and reincarnation". But it did make me think about guilt vs shame (and other cultural fictions controlling people behavior, like pride, honor etc.). Whether there is a reliable way to rate cultures by guilt prevalence and whether such a rating is an interesting metric remains to be seen. The author's case is certainly far from convincing.
Downvoted for not providing a summary.
Stories about changelings replacing babies and the recommended course of action being basically to expose the child is not a human universal, they are found only in European cultures. These rely more heavily on guilt and less on shame to regulate behavior than most other human societies. This may not be a coincidence. The stories may represent a ready made rationalization to reduce guilt from infanticide. Only common problems acquire common solutions like this.
Will you reverse your downvote? Also if I may ask when did writing a summary for a post, a link post even become a LW norm?
I don't know, but it kind of does seem to be a norm. Orthogonally, though, when did it become a norm that you should only downvote things that violate LW norms, as opposed to things that violate rules that you want to be norms?
An interesting thought, but I think this is one of those social science hypotheses that you're just not gonna be able to prove.
Your experimental measures are not strong enough to answer this question. And if we find some way of measuring society-wide guilt other than your subjective selection and interpretation of lines from ancient plays, and if we suppose hypothetically that this still backs up the conclusions of your incredibly subjective survey, there can very easily be a common cause (technological progress, increasing "liberal drift"), reverse causation (maybe cultural success allows for more guilt), or just random chance at work since the sample size is small.
In guilt cultures, social control is regulated more by guilt than by shame, as is the case in shame cultures that exist in most parts of the world. A crucial difference between these types of cultures is that while shame cultures require other people to shame the wrongdoer, guilt cultures do not.
I see a sentence like this, EXTREME OVERSIMPLIFICATION WARNING goes off in my head and I don't read further.
Related: The Psychological Diversity of Mankind, An African Folktale, many of the more interesting infanticide & abortion debates on this site
A fascinating post that however might need some background reading, most relevant material is linked in the article itself. I encourage reading up on the material.
Link to article.
Stories about changelings replacing babies and the recommended course of action being basically to expose the child is not a human universal, they are found only in European cultures. These rely more heavily on guilt and less on shame to regulate behavior than most other human societies. This may not be a coincidence. The stories look like they work as a ready made rationalization to reduce guilt from infanticide. Common problems often acquire common solutions like this.