I don't know, dude. I think too many people aren't engaged in practices where their knowledge is relevant to their work or genuine creativity.
I think the entire concept is suspect covering for what is people just faking it. I'd impeach the idea of culture in the first place.
Dawkins is great but he gets other things wrong, like Catholicism. He seems to treat it as a primitive Anglicanism.
I can see why he abandons Anglicanism, but he seems to fail to appreciate that it's the metaphorical overeach and provincial myopia that are what are problematic.
Memetics seems to cling to administrative strategies that even Nietszche employs. It's the dogma of annointing story that seems to hold things up, in my opinion.
I think it's more about why people seem to or appear to conform and the trouble with consensus and critical theory.
I've occasionally been intrigued by memetics, but I don't think it's a scientifically testable theory. Hofhuis and Boudry's article on witch hunts doesn't change my mind. They conclude that witch hunts had no intelligent designer. Even if that's true, and I'm skeptical, how does it establish that memes themselves have interests that are different from those of the humans that the memes inhabit? How could one test whether any cultural phenomenon reflects the interests of human beings or the interests of autonomous memes? What empirical observation could disprove the memetic theory?
I don't think it's impossible in principle to test the theory. We'd just need to come up with convincing evidence of a meme spreading at the expense of those who adopt it - the situation that memetics alone predicts.
Sure, failure to find such evidence in any particular area wouldn't falsify the theory, because the theory doesn't predict that memes will always be bad for us. But it could still be a useful approach, and could still help to guide scientific research.
I actually think that a significant fraction of ideas or human creations that do not promote the survival of their hosts/users still have features that promote the survival of that idea/artifact. Consider Twinkies, Jihadism, high-carb diets, etc.
I don't know, dude. I think too many people aren't engaged in practices where their knowledge is relevant to their work or genuine creativity.
I think the entire concept is suspect covering for what is people just faking it. I'd impeach the idea of culture in the first place.
Dawkins is great but he gets other things wrong, like Catholicism. He seems to treat it as a primitive Anglicanism.
I can see why he abandons Anglicanism, but he seems to fail to appreciate that it's the metaphorical overeach and provincial myopia that are what are problematic.
Memetics seems to cling to administrative strategies that even Nietszche employs. It's the dogma of annointing story that seems to hold things up, in my opinion.
I think it's more about why people seem to or appear to conform and the trouble with consensus and critical theory.
You're really taking off in 2025 - Steve ;-)! Kudos for all the work you put into your Substack while writing your book!
Thanks! Speaking of the book, I'm getting close to having a rough first draft...
I've occasionally been intrigued by memetics, but I don't think it's a scientifically testable theory. Hofhuis and Boudry's article on witch hunts doesn't change my mind. They conclude that witch hunts had no intelligent designer. Even if that's true, and I'm skeptical, how does it establish that memes themselves have interests that are different from those of the humans that the memes inhabit? How could one test whether any cultural phenomenon reflects the interests of human beings or the interests of autonomous memes? What empirical observation could disprove the memetic theory?
All reasonable questions.
I don't think it's impossible in principle to test the theory. We'd just need to come up with convincing evidence of a meme spreading at the expense of those who adopt it - the situation that memetics alone predicts.
Sure, failure to find such evidence in any particular area wouldn't falsify the theory, because the theory doesn't predict that memes will always be bad for us. But it could still be a useful approach, and could still help to guide scientific research.
I actually think that a significant fraction of ideas or human creations that do not promote the survival of their hosts/users still have features that promote the survival of that idea/artifact. Consider Twinkies, Jihadism, high-carb diets, etc.
Good examples - I agree!
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