Techno-Puritanism / The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI

TPG 23.25 · 1,898 words · 9 min read · Appendix

Hofstede’s Other Cultural Dimensions

There was this guy, Geert Hofstede, who came up with a bunch of things he called “cultural dimensions.” These include things like indulgence vs restraint, power distance, individualism vs collectivism, long-term vs short-term orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity vs femininity. You can search online to find heat maps (or just check this link)[[20]](#_ftn20) showing how these dimensions relate to different geographic cultures and various life outcomes.

Though we almost never give shout-outs to intellectuals without reservations, this model (while not comprehensive) is pretty solid and it presents a useful way to understand culture. We have covered analogs for many of his cultural dimensions already, so this section will act as a catch-all for those which we neglected to address in other sections of the book.

An example of otherwise-hard-to investigate dynamics on which Hofstede’s cultural dimensions shed light: Why is the obesity rate 37.3% in the U.S. and 31.1% in Egypt, but only 4.3% in Japan and 4.7% in S. Korea? Traits tracked by some of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions may be at play! Specifically, “We find that, adjusting for undernourishment and other potential confounds, individualism is associated with higher obesity prevalence in the male population, but not among the female population.”[[21]](#_ftn21) “A further novel finding is that flexibility (vs monumentalism), a national cultural trait that emphasizes humility, self-control, and restraint of desires, is a strong negative predictor of obesity in both genders.”

Power Distance

Power distance refers to the extent to which less powerful members of a culture (be they family, business, or institutional) are comfortable with and willing to reinforce unequal power distributions. Basically, it is a measure of whether questioning your boss or parents is a normal thing to do (vs something that would trigger gasps of horror).

A mandatory class at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business used one of Malcolm Gladwell’s books to showcase how one can lie to people with statistics while making them look interesting. Each class session focused on one chapter and there was sufficient misleading information in each chapter to reliably fuel two hours of analysis. Despite how primed we are to dislike Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, his book Outliers actually does make an interesting argument about power distance in Korean Airlines.

In this chapter, Gladwell—aka “Evil Malcolm,” if you will—argues that Korean Airlines’ unusually high crash rates are a product of poor communication between pilots and co-pilots who were afraid to question their superiors even when those superiors were doing obviously wrong things. In this one particular case, he is probably right: A 2017 Outliers-inspired study by Carl Enomoto and Karl Geisler[[22]](#_ftn22) demonstrated pretty convincingly that higher-power-distance cultures do have more plane crashes. This is impressive: To have put together a theory in a pop-science book as a random example, then have that theory tested by academia and verified.

Having worked in South Korea, “Good Malcolm” can say that the nation is well aware of its extremely high power distance in communication. You have to change the structure of your language when talking to someone even a single year older than you or a modicum more powerful than you. As we already mentioned earlier in the book, this can cause so many problems that companies like Kakao (sort of like the Alphabet of Korea) force their employees to take American-style names while at work, which changes the way their language relates to power distance.

Generally speaking, a culture with a high power distance will have a high level of reverence for people in positions of power and people will typically know their relative power level when interacting with others of the same culture. Those in high-power-distance cultures often put a great deal of effort into determining their relative power level if it is not obvious in their first meeting. Back when England was a higher-power-distance culture than it is now, they even had a book you could buy—Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage—that listed the top families by level of social prestige so there could never be any confusion. Historically many Southern cities in the U.S. that had something of an “aristocracy” also had books like this; in fact, I (Malcolm) have a book published in the 80s among my keepsakes listing the top thousand most important families in Dallas (though it does not strictly order them).

Despite being well aware of how important power distance is, we fell flat on our faces when we started running a company with a large staff in Peru (a very high-power-distance and collectivist culture). About a year into running it, one of our employees told us the team was unhappy because we “never talked to them” and they felt uncomfortable that we kept taking them out for one-on-one lunches. To us, from a low-power-distance culture, taking an employee out for a solo lunch with the CEO of the company and asking for their feedback counted as really high-quality communication, but to them it felt like—well, just weird. What they wanted us to do was have all the employees sit in front of us and have us “talk to them.” From our perspective, this kind of communication was dehumanizing, but it was what they wanted.

Differing power distances in Peru and the U.S. caught us off guard again when we needed to fill a managerial role. Hoping to promote from within, we systematically approached all our best employees and offered the position. Each and every one threatened to quit if given the managerial role. In the States, people are so hungry to gain more power that the very idea we’d encounter hesitation in the face of promotion felt absurd to us—and yet, in Peru, the additional power was construed as coming with enough additional responsibility that most of our employees did not want to shoulder even if it came with a salary boost. As one of our team members explained to us, in Peru, extra responsibility isn’t immediately seen as “more power” but rather “more things that are my fault.” That sort of drawback barely flits across the average U.S. worker’s mind.

We wonder if this difference in framing highlights a key mechanism used to enforce high power distances in certain cultures: Making people highly aware of the drawbacks of other social strata. It reminds us of sayings repeated by the highly-stratified society’s denizens in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid.”

Beyond that, power distance appears to be either reinforced or weakened through language and upbringing. Interestingly, power distance does not appear to have a genetic component while things like collectivism do.[[23]](#_ftn23)

Uncertainty Avoidance

The uncertainty avoidance dimension indicates the level of comfort with unstructured situations or otherwise novel situations and more generally encompasses a culture’s tolerance for ambiguity. Someone from a high uncertainty avoidance culture may, for example, demand a specific prognosis with timelines and treatment options from a clinician even when one is not available. Uncertainty avoidance also seems to affect things like brand loyalty and how much people see teachers as having “all the answers,” with low uncertainty avoidance cultures trusting teachers much less to “know things.”[[24]](#_ftn24)

It is important to keep the double-edged sword nature of uncertainty avoidance in mind when crafting culture. High uncertainty avoidance cultures pass themselves to future generations with more fidelity when they are in the majority but also, as shown in a study by David Baker and Kerry Carson,[[25]](#_ftn25) increases the rate at which an individual feels the need to convert to a new culture when surrounded by said culture. Any culture that plans to be in the minority for a long time and have its members interact with the “normal world” (e.g., get jobs at companies that are not majority that culture—something many cults try to prevent members from doing for this very reason) needs to cultivate a low uncertainty avoidance.

Uncertainty avoidance can affect all sorts of political and social outcomes. For example, citizen protests are both less likely to happen and more likely to be violently suppressed in uncertainty avoidance cultures because they might bring about changes the majority would be uncomfortable dealing with. Such cultures also have more specific laws.[[26]](#_ftn26) In fact, in high uncertainty avoidance cultures. there is less of an interest in politics more generally.[[27]](#_ftn27)

Terrorism is much more common in countries with high uncertainty avoidance because “uncertainty avoidance, related to stress, may provide important prerequisites for group-induced aberrant behavior when formerly alienated group members find comfort in adhering to a collective belief system where dissent is discouraged, a sense of group purpose is reinforced, and rules are strictly imposed—apparently confirming the writings of terrorism psychologists.”[[28]](#_ftn28)

Uncertainty avoidance attitudes do not just cluster regionally but also in cultivars, with high uncertainty avoidance cultures including Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, and Shintoism and low uncertainty avoidance cultures being Protestantism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism.[[29]](#_ftn29)

While the general understanding is that children in low-uncertainty-avoidance cultures are taught the world is benevolent and children from high-uncertainty-avoidance cultures are taught that it is hostile, this is a bit of a misunderstanding. A better way to put it is that children from high-uncertainty-avoidance cultures are taught the world represents a threat to them and those from medium-uncertainty-avoidance cultures are taught the world is not a threat to them, while those from ultra-low-uncertainty-avoidance cultures (like those from which we hail) are taught they are a threat to the world.

If you want to raise your family to have a low uncertainty avoidance threshold, raise them to believe the world is mostly full of barely sentient idiots and that they will always have to handle every situation personally. If you want to raise them to hate uncertainty, then raise them to believe there are people out there who know better than them and can guide them to “correct” outcomes so long as they follow the rules.

Long-Term vs Short-Term Orientation

Long-term vs short-term orientation refers to whether a society exhibits a pragmatic, future-oriented perspective or a conventional historical point of view.

More generally, a long-term culture is marked by:

And a short-term culture is marked by:

Most short-term oriented cultures are in North Africa while most American cultures are somewhere in the middle (outside of Venezuela, which is short-term oriented) and China is seen as being very long-term-oriented.[[30]](#_ftn30) We find it harder to notice short-term or long-term orientation much in daily life—perhaps because our cultural position is in the middle of the scale.

Short-term vs long-term cultural orientation may be something of a moot point as the preference appears to be heavily genetically influenced. What is cool is that we even know the method of action—specifically 5-HTTLPR VNTR in the serotonin-transporter gene.[[31]](#_ftn31) This implies that long-term vs short-term orientation may be manipulated using pharmaceuticals if you absolutely want to control it in your family.

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