As I write this, the HN title is "Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World"... it's not justified because this article is more <i>that</i> Americans are the "weirdest", <i>why</i> is still very speculative at this point. Considering we just came to grip with it, in academic terms, and still have only the fuzziest pictures as to the details, "why" is a bit premature.<p>I also find it intriguing that even as we finally identify that cultures may in fact be profoundly different and not merely superficially different, which calls the entire liberal idea of fundamental American evil into question by cutting away the most foundational assumptions it is based on, the author still can't resist leaping to the assumption that Americans are somehow <i>wrong</i>. It's most clear in this bit: <i>Is my thinking so strange that I have little hope of understanding people from other cultures? Can I mold my own psyche or the psyches of my children to be less WEIRD and more able to think like the rest of the world? If I did, would I be happier?</i><p>I'll accept the last question as at least a bit of humility, but, well, before one goes socially engineering one's own child, shouldn't we first explore this matter more deeply and ask whether it's even a <i>good idea</i>? And the idea casually underlies several other bits of prose, too. It will take long to purge this poisonous idea from academia, but perhaps now we can finally start.<p>This is deeply revolutionary stuff if academia actually comes to accept this (to the point that I would not be surprised this becomes one of those "the old guard must die before this can be accepted" sorts of things), and even as the article sort of brushes on this topic, I don't think it really captures just how <i>foundational</i> the assumptions this destroys are. It's not merely a sort of accepted doctrine of modern academic liberalism, the fundamental lack of diversity in human cognition is one of the most foundational foundations, sunk so deep that you can't even notice it unless you go looking.<p>One of the worries I think would come up is the fear that this might turn into a new judgment of which cultures are "better", but this article does, thankfully, already get into the right of thinking about that question, which is, better for <i>what</i>? Dropping a comfortable western person into a primitive, tribal environment and watching their maladaptive behaviors has long been a topic for movies, for instance (even if it is usually followed up by Mighty Whitey storyline [1]... follow that link if the phrasing concerns you, the racist overtones of that phrase are <i>quite</i> deliberate and derogatory of what it is describing). Cultures are different for reasons, and "better" requires context... but, correspondingly, so therefore does "worse".<p>[1]: <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhitey" rel="nofollow">http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhitey</a>