Astral Codex Ten

Henrich

5 min read

Henrich

Article

Henrich is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 20, 2021 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Criticism of Henrich’s WEIRDest People In The World argument”; “I’d love to see a debate between Pinker and Henrich”; “Henrich’s answer to the most important question in the world”. It most often appears alongside Aztecs, Donald Trump, New York.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: September 20, 2021
  • Last seen: July 15, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For September
September 20, 2021 · Original source
36: Criticism of Henrich’s WEIRDest People In The World argument.
Inline links: Criticism of Henrich’s
Links For October
October 14, 2021 · Original source
5: Harvard Gazette reviews Stephen Pinker’s new book on rationality. Someone sent this to me for the contrast with Secret Of Our Success - Pinker argues that hunter-gatherer tribes use critical thinking all the time, are skeptical of arguments from authority, and “owe their survival to a scientific mindset”. I’d love to see a debate between Pinker and Henrich (or an explanation of why they feel like they’re really on the same side and don’t need to iron anything out).
Inline links: reviews Stephen Pinker’s new book on rationality
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
The difference between Greece and Rome on the one hand, and Babylon and Egypt on the other, was that Greeks and Romans had written down their stories for us. Their stories had become our story. History was a narrative. Each of its chapters had a beginning, middle and end. How else would you tell it? Now, as we go farther back, we have less and less writing to rely on. Even when we have writing, on papyrus or stone, it isn’t self-interpreting – it’s not history the way Herodotus and Livy tell us history, with the explicit goal of recounting the past. Earlier still the texts die out completely, and we are left with stones and bones. Our knowledge of this history has to come from science: from archeology, anthropology (in the hope of using present societies to learn about past societies), and now also the new science of historical population genetics. Joe Henrich has done more than most to teach us our history using these tools. His marvelous book The Secret of Our Success told the human narrative from the point of view of the unique human capacity for cumulative culture1.
Inline links: book, 1
The question was always going to arise: how do we fit the big story of humanity, told by modern social science, together with the story of Europe told by narrative history? Henrich's latest book, The Weirdest People in the World, goes there2.
Inline links: 2
Coming as he does from the scientific side of the aisle, Henrich isn't just going to tell a story. He has a hypothesis about an empirical puzzle. The puzzle is the most important question, the big one, the one that once you think about it's hard to think about anything else, the economists' Holy Grail since Adam Smith: why are some countries rich and others poor?
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines
July 15, 2025 · Original source
But my own thoughts on anthropology have been shaped by two letter-S-intensive books. First, The Secret Of Our Success by Joseph Henrich (reviewed by me here). Second, Sick Societies by Robert Edgerton (reviewed by Jane Psmith here).
Inline links: reviewed by me here, reviewed by Jane Psmith here
The former chronicles the wonders of cultural evolution. Seemingly “primitive” societies’ seemingly “barbaric” practices turn out to be brilliant beyond “civilized” man’s ability to comprehend. For example, the Montagnais-Naskapi tribe performs a divination ritual using an animal’s shoulder bones to decide where to hunt. This sounds stupid, but Henrich chronicles how the divination ritual actually has useful mathematics-of-randomness properties that makes it more likely to generate efficient hunting patterns than the tribesmen would get through normal decision procedures. The Aztecs performed a complicated series of rituals to corn before they ate it, mixing it with powdered shells; only in the 1900s did Westerners realize that this process activates vitamins; without it, anyone who eats too much corn risks dying of niacin deficiency. Henrich’s conclusion is that primitive tradition is a repository of wondrous practices selected by millennia of trial-and-error, and we pooh-pooh it at our peril.
The latter says: nah, actually primitive tradition is often just dumb. Edgerton goes through just as many examples as Henrich, but with the opposite moral: some primitive tribe had done something since time immemorial, but it was stupid and cruel and made their lives worse or, in some cases, pushed them into extinction. So for example (both quotes from the Psmith review, content warning for graphic violence applies to everything between here and section II):