Definition of a "fair split" varies across cultures

[Pishtaco]

What Peter Wiggin said. The question isn't asking "are you wearing a hat", it's asking "is the following implication true: if X then Y?"

[Admiral Yi]

What Peter Wiggin said. The question isn't asking "are you wearing a hat", it's asking "is the following implication true: if X then Y?"

I actually was reading it wrong the first time, but now that you put it that way, I still don't see how the correct answer is "yes."

[DGuller]

I never really intuitively got the "if false, then true" is true logic either.  Seems like you need a "maybe" besides "true" and "false".  The only way of thinking about it that made sense to me is that you assume that a statement is true unless you can disprove it, which is why only "if true, then false" logic is false.

[Jacob]

And that's exactly the point, isn't it? The formal rules of logic sometimes diverge from common sense observational truth; while common sense observational truth often rests on cultural components, and thus they vary across cultures.

[Pishtaco]

What Peter Wiggin said. The question isn't asking "are you wearing a hat", it's asking "is the following implication true: if X then Y?"

I actually was reading it wrong the first time, but now that you put it that way, I still don't see how the correct answer is "yes."

The truth-value of "if A then B" is calculated from the truth-values of A and B by the following table:

Code Select Expand

A  B   if A then B
------------------
T  T         T
T  F         F
F  T         T
F  F         T

That's the complete semantics of "if ... then ..." in classical logic.

This captures very well how "if ... then ..." is used in mathematics. Many mathematical theorems have the form "for every object x from some collection S, if x satisfies some property P, then x satisfies some other property Q". To prove that the "if ... then ... " part is true for every x, by the table above you only need to do some work for the xs which satisfy P, since for the ones that don't satisfy P, the implication is true automatically.

[fhdz]

This is my favorite Languish thread in a long while.

[Admiral Yi]

I don't doubt Pishtaco that it is axiomatic mathematically, but no, the concept that X implies Y when X is false is not true does not rest on a cultural assumption in my opinion. 

[alfred russel]

I never really intuitively got the "if false, then true" is true logic either.  Seems like you need a "maybe" besides "true" and "false".  The only way of thinking about it that made sense to me is that you assume that a statement is true unless you can disprove it, which is why only "if true, then false" logic is false.

I think Pishtaco is just being a dick.

[alfred russel]

And that's exactly the point, isn't it? The formal rules of logic sometimes diverge from common sense observational truth

They aren't going to diverge from observational truth. Observational truth may diverge from what someone thinks they know, or "common sense", but that seems more of a case of ignorance rather than cultural difference, even if universal in some population.

[alfred russel]

Reading more on this topic online, I found this bit of speculation particularly plausible.

http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/10/we-agree-its-weird-but-is-it-weird-enough/

My own candidate for one source of the oddity

Although Henrich and colleagues are laudably restrained in speculating about the sources of differences between WEIRD populations and other groups, I want to put another candidate on the table that's discussed by Lana B. Karasik, Karen E. Adolph, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and Marc. H. Bornstein in one of the responses that I enjoyed a lot. They talk about 'WEIRD walking,' the way that WEIRD populations are also outliers in terms of motor development in ways that many people in the field overlook.

Karasik and colleagues describe how WEIRD children's patterns of motor development became enshrined in psychology through testing procedures, test items and norms into an understanding of universal 'stages' of motor development (see 2010: 95). Even when cross-cultural research was conducted, these culturally-specific criteria, derived from examining WEIRD developmental pathways, meant that researchers were often carrying with them tools that were ill-suited to study other sorts of children. Or these psychologists were simply comparing diverse children to WEIRD ones on standards set by the WEIRD children.

One example of this that I have discussed is overhand throwing, a task that has been used in some tests of motor coordination in spite of the fact that different cultural groups demonstrate enormous variability in the activity because it is a skill, not a universally-acquired entailment of being human. Some children learn to throw in environments that support, model and reward the activity; others never really learn to throw particularly well because their activity patterns simply do not include the opportunity to learn (I've written in a book chapter that will soon appear about 'throwing like a Brazilian,' an analogue to 'throwing like a girl').

Karasik and colleagues point out that even such 'basic' motor abilities at crawling are susceptible to manipulation: the trend to put newborn children on their backs to sleep in the West, for example, has retarded the development of crawling in a population where children formerly would routinely sleep on their bellies. In some groups, normal development may not even include crawling, children skipping the stage entirely or using some other intermittent form of locomotion, like 'bum-shuffling' or scooting about while seated.

In my own research, the physical abilities of WEIRD university students stand out more clearly as strikingly odd than many of their other traits, and I'm convinced that the extraordinary inactivity of this population, coupled with their high calorie diets, has more diverse and wide-ranging effects than simply leading to an epidemic of obesity, Type-II diabetes, and other diet-related health problems. For example, capoeira instruction, a subject close to my heart, has to start at a much different place for American youth than it does with Brazilian kids in Salvador where I did my field research. Even teaching salsa lessons at a Midwestern US university drove home the profoundly different motor starting point, prior to the lessons, of young adults in the US compared to Brazilians (and I suspect, to many populations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere).

The point is not just to rehearse the typical alarmist discussion of the 'obesity epidemic,' but also to point out the profound potential implications of radical differences in activity environments for children during their development. I don't think most WEIRD theorists realize just how powerful an influence sedentary living is on our psychological, physiological, metabolic, endocrine, and neural development because most of us, subjects and researchers alike, are SO sedentary. WEIRD bodies have so much unused energy from their diets, especially with their levels of activity plummeting, that I find it hard to believe we understand metabolic patterns that would have dominated much of human prehistory.

To argue that WEIRD subjects are a good window in on 'human nature' is difficult when, from the perspective of metabolic energy and expenditure, the WEIRD are such outliers in the whole history of our species. We know that this radically unusual metabolic situation — massive energy surplus with less and less expenditure — is profoundly affecting mortality patterns: in WEIRD societies, most of the leading causes of death are, arguably, directly linked to the human body's difficulty of coping with this situation, and that's even after generations of sedentary life in which to adapt. But the psychological and neurological consequences of sedentarism are less well understood in part, in my opinion, because most WEIRD researchers have a hard time even imagining how arduous life would have been. Throughout human existence, most humans likely have been phenomenally active, and athletic, compared to WEIRD populations, out of necessity.

I'm going to have to write something more in depth on this, but I just feel the need to flag it. If I had written a response, I probably would have focused on this trait because it runs against WEIRD researchers' self understanding. The WEIRD tend to think of themselves as unusually healthy, and by measures of things like infectious disease rates, death from accident, and infant mortality, they certainly are. But from a broad, cross-cultural view, the extraordinary inactivity of the WEIRD, coupled with their access to very energy dense, highly processed food sources, makes them outliers in ways that I'm not sure we fully comprehend.

This is going back a bit in the thread, but labeling the populations as WEIRD seems a bit misleading. All the US, Canada, western and central europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and probably a few others are going to be WEIRD. Plus significant portions of Latin America and Eastern Europe as well as non trivial parts of China and the rest of Asia.

[jimmy olsen]

With the exception of Japan and S. Korea, the countries you named are all Western, and what I think is important about the label is the individualist philosophy that goes with it.

I don't think that becoming educated, industrialized, rich and democratic will neccessarly lead to the population becoming as individualistic as Westeners in general and Americans in particular.

However the guy I quoted that from agrees with you, and writes about his criticsm of that quite a bit in the whole article if I remember right.

[Josquius]

My first thoughts were on how this game is warped with being played in such a poor place where they're dealing in days worth of wages where steady work is hard to come by vs. America where the money is nice  (of course) but not really needed for survival and can be spent in such frivolous ways as punishing dicks.

In no society did he find people who were purely selfish (that is, who always offered the lowest amount, and never refused a split), but average offers from place to place varied widely and, in some societies—ones where gift-giving is heavily used to curry favor or gain allegiance—the first player would often make overly generous offers in excess of 60 percent, and the second player would often reject them, behaviors almost never observed among Americans.

Now this is bizzare.

There, generous financial offers were turned down because people's minds had been shaped by a cultural norm that taught them that the acceptance of generous gifts brought burdensome obligations.

haha. Understandable. But this really sounds like a case of not quite getting the game.
.

[Jacob]

haha. Understandable. But this really sounds like a case of not quite getting the game.

They may get the game, but that doesn't isolate it from the rest of their lives. What would prevent the person deciding the split from approaching the person who accepted it afterwards for some favour? After all, they not only gave them free money but they gave them more than they took for themselves. Surely it's only fair that the recipient returns the selfless act in an appropriate fashion.

[Josquius]

haha. Understandable. But this really sounds like a case of not quite getting the game.

They may get the game, but that doesn't isolate it from the rest of their lives. What would prevent the person deciding the split from approaching the person who accepted it afterwards for some favour? After all, they not only gave them free money but they gave them more than they took for themselves. Surely it's only fair that the recipient returns the selfless act in an appropriate fashion.

Isn't one of the features of the game that you don't know who the other person is?

[Jacob]

Isn't one of the features of the game that you don't know who the other person is?

Not sure. But even if it is, there are plenty of places in the world where the "rules of the game" are more of a suggestion than a description of how things actually work