Cultivating minds: The psychological consequences of rice versus wheat farming | Hacker News Reader

Cultivating minds: The psychological consequences of rice versus wheat farming

marginalrevolution.com

139 pointsimpish920869 comments

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

The rice-farming areas of southern China have been economically dominant (more often than not) since around the Song dynasty, about a millennium ago.

Using economic output in that argument is absurd since collectivist China has the most economic output in the world.

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.

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.

Comparatively, with irrigation and good weather you could harvest rice usually 3 and up to 4 times a year in south of India.

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.

Peer review does not critique the plausibility of hypothesis, just the structure and quality of the paper's argument. At best, reviewers might say that the section on alternative explanations might be lacking.

You can make any and all kinds of criticisms in peer review.

Sure, but gatekeeping ideas you disagree with is not the purpose of peer review, and distorts its true purpose of ensuring the research and it's presentation passes some minimal quality threshold such that the community can understand and debate it.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, the acceptability of the hypothesis in the current paradigm is central.

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.

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.

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.

Any book recommendations?

Not offhand.

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.

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.

> 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.

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).

I think to some people it seems fairly simple to pass Jared Diamond off as a reductionist, and I guess it appeals to people to do that in order to seem intelligent at some social affair, but I think the reality is a little more difficult to understand than him just being a reductionist.

Wow, the cocktail parties in this thread must be fantastic. A bunch of people accusing each other of intellectual groupthink, only to get accusations in return.

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.

"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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Shouldn’t the replication crisis cause the reuse to fail? ;)

If the experiment is re-run, but it'd never be noticed if it the results were simply cited and taken as proved.

*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.

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

> This was in about 1935 or so

It is not so anymore, psychologists are taught to design experiments showing that changes in an independent variable correlate with a dependent variable. I'm not sure when the change came, but I'd guess that in 1970s it was so already.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

Wasn't the Incan empire highly organized?

> 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."

So was Tsarist Russia and Maoist China, so I’m not super sold on the grain->government pipeline in any direction

They grew corn in addition to potato’s, I believe.

They also had quinoa, amaranth, peanuts, sweet potatoes, chilis and plenty of other stuff. They had quite a colorful cuisine.

[... wrong parent comment...]

Are you sure you’re replying to the right comment?

Heh, I'm not, not sure what happened.

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.

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

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.

Excellent point. I'm not sure which came first, intensive animal husbandry or grain-based agriculture. Maybe livestock was the basis for the state.

I think storable food predates agriculture. Nuts keep quite well for very extended periods of time. Smoking and drying fish appears to also have been known for many thousands of years.

The problem with raiding before the domestication of the horse is that it's a lot of risk for not a lot of reward. How much can you carry on your back? Maybe you can carry more on some sort of wheel-barrow, but the wheel was invented after the domestication of the horse (for quite obvious reasons).

Still, while the horse is thought to have been domesticated around 3500 BC, there were fortified settlements before 4000 BC, a sign that raiding or even warfare was common. Sheep and goats were domesticated already at the time, and cheese was known. Maybe raiders were trying to steal cheese? Otherwise, there were luxury items, or status items, like polished maces, glazed and painted pottery, adornments made of animal teeth, and early artifacts made from copper. But I'm not sure it ever made sense to risk your life and raid a village just to run away with a bag of wheat.

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.

this is a poor comparison because they're doing quite different things in ether environment and the environments themselves are quite different, the comparison in the context of chinese to chinese works smoothly because they more closely share a background, environment, culture, evolutionary history, and other probably even diet.

Not every causal relationship has a predictable dose-response. Past a certain dose, an effect may be achieved, and the effect from any dose below that threshold is not detectable or even the opposite. For instance, some poisons and toxins.

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.

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

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.

More probably due to constant exposure to so many people who don't know how to do our jobs, determinedly telling us how they want us to do our jobs...

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."

Dutch canal-building is (one of) the counter-examples to the claim that large-scale coordination of water systems creates collectivist societies.

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

very interesting! i wonder if there's been evolutionary impacts of this, if hypothetically repeating the same experiment with westerners who have survived on wheat for thousands of years would yield similar yet quantitatively differentiable results

i would also argue that there's a hidden selection going on here in the background, once humans pick up a crop they harvest: the crop that can better influence human psychology on a civilization scale so that those humans become better at harvesting more of that crop, would thereby grant the crop more evolutionary success

so i think the psychological aspects of EATING the food are actually important to study in this context. ie have people cultivate wheat and eat rice, vise versa and also compare against wheat-cultivating groups that eat wheat, and so on

although this does get messy as if there's already been selection on the human side for traits that better cultivate these crops, then the effects might take generations to show in any meaningful kind of study -- in this case cross-cultural comparisons would be more viable

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

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.

> 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

Makes me wonder about software development and libertarianism... ;-)

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