Joseph Henrich

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1,282 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 25 May

Joseph Henrich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · 12 Mar 2025 podcast

And we actually use immigration as a kind of way of showing the causal effect of this.

So what you want is a lot of cultural variation.

Now, if you get people from societies that are more distant from whatever the current U.S.

culture is at the time, it's going to take more time until they're able to fully integrate.

So if they're coming from a very distrusting society, they're not going to be able to latch into the collective brain immediately.

So you see this in early – around 1900.

There's data from people mostly coming from southern Italy and coming from Germany and Britain.

And the southern Italians are coming from a society that has a high distrust of strangers.

So their immediate effect on the patenting system is low.

But –

The strength of these cultural traits seems to go down by an order of magnitude each generation.

So the second generation, you can still see where they came from, but they're a lot more like the majority culture than their parents.

And then it goes down another order of magnitude.

So, yeah, so you just have to do more work essentially to assimilate people and culturate them.

But the potential value of having diverse ways of thinking, different ideas can be really valuable, I think.

assimilation uh has implications of whether we want uh immigration from non-weird societies what do you make of that idea so i mean i think that the spaghetti example is or the pizza pizza or spaghetti uh both good examples um is a great thing right because the the i mean american food is a fusion of like cuisine from lots of societies and that leads to quite good food um you can same thing you can see music so uh things like jazz come have african rhythms in them

And so rock and roll is along that lineage.

Well, but the question is, is do social interactional traits operate the same way as these things?

And if you have ethnic enclaves, then you're going to get low trust in those ethnic enclaves.

You get things like the mafia, right?

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