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I'm not saying that memes have no impact, I'm saying that Memetics have no impact. As in, the scholarly academic study of memes. Obviously memes have had an eno

by xamuel 7y ago

I'm not saying that memes have no impact, I'm saying that Memetics have no impact. As in, the scholarly academic study of memes. Obviously memes have had an enormous impact on everything ever since the first cavemen invented the art of grunting and pointing at things. As for Memetics having an impact, well, that would be like a professor of theoretical musicology releasing a #1 charting pop album.

mistermann 7y ago
> I'm not saying that memes have no impact, I'm saying that Memetics have no impact. As in, the scholarly academic study of memes. Ah ok, I'm glad I was misunderstanding rather than disagreeing. > As for Memetics having an impact, well, that would be like a professor of theoretical musicology releasing a #1 charting pop album. Here I'm quite certain we actually do disagree. If we take the definition as: "Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is factual." Would it be fair to say this is consistent with the notion that people don't think in facts, they think in ideas (aka memes), which aren't necessarily true? Do you significantly disagree with this notion?
- xamuel 7y ago
  You're casting an over-broad definition of Memetics. Long before Dawkins, we had things like "archetypes" in Jungian psychology, "gestalts" in gestalt psychology, "signs" in semiotics. And many other similar notions that would fit what you're describing. Memes became a "thing", academically, because Dawkins was a successful pop writer. They've had about as much genuine scholarly impact as Deepak Chopra! That's on the academic side. On the practical side, sure, marketing firms and political campaigns have attempted to hijack image captions, with varying (usually low) success. (It's not like Trump employs a bunch of scientists to post image captions on r/T_D. Love it or hate it, that's grass roots.) All of this would have been done whether people had decided to latch it to Memetics or not. It's not like image macros wouldn't have become a thing if "Selfish Gene" hadn't been written.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    > You're casting an over-broad definition of Memetics. I am, or the author of the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics) where I quoted that definition from? > Long before Dawkins, we had things like "archetypes" in Jungian psychology, "gestalts" in gestalt psychology, "signs" in semiotics. >> Archetypes were a concept introduced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who believed that archetypes were models of people, behaviors, or personalities. Archetypes, he suggested, were inborn tendencies that play a role in influencing human behavior. >> Gestalt psychology is an attempt to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world. The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies through the law of prägnanz. This principle maintains that when the human mind (perceptual system) forms a percept or "gestalt", the whole has a reality of its own, independent of the parts. >> In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste. Regardless, refer to this phenomenon using whatever words you'd like. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. > They've had about as much genuine scholarly impact as Deepak Chopra! I don't disagree with your assertion that ~"multiple people have recognized and described this phenomenon within human psychology and assigned it a variety of labels", or that there has so far been little noteworthy impact. My interest is about the potential of this knowledge. I initially wrote: "I believe memetics is one of the most impactful but underappreciated ideas out there today, and plausibly explains the bizarre polarization of opinions on a wide variety of hot button current topics. Everyone perceives that their opinion/knowledge is based on facts, but very few are even slightly aware that their knowledge is actually based on a hodge podge of memes, each with varying levels of truthiness." If I had more accurately described my beliefs like so: "I believe memetics is one of the most important but underappreciated ideas out there today, and plausibly explains the bizarre polarization of opinions on a wide variety of hot button current topics. Everyone perceives that their opinion/knowledge is based on facts, but very few are even slightly aware that their knowledge is actually based on a hodge podge of memes, each with varying levels of truthiness. If we could somehow manage to get a significant portion of the population to truly realize that much of what they believe, what they consider to be fact, their mental model of reality, is largely made up of meaningfully incorrect approximations, the impact on the world could be substantial." ....would you still disagree? If so, could you note which specific parts of my words you disagree with?

by xamuel 7y ago

mistermann 7y ago

> I'm not saying that memes have no impact, I'm saying that Memetics have no impact. As in, the scholarly academic study of memes. Ah ok, I'm glad I was misunderstanding rather than disagreeing. > As for Memetics having an impact, well, that would be like a professor of theoretical musicology releasing a #1 charting pop album. Here I'm quite certain we actually do disagree. If we take the definition as: "Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is factual." Would it be fair to say this is consistent with the notion that people don't think in facts, they think in ideas (aka memes), which aren't necessarily true? Do you significantly disagree with this notion?

xamuel 7y ago
You're casting an over-broad definition of Memetics. Long before Dawkins, we had things like "archetypes" in Jungian psychology, "gestalts" in gestalt psychology, "signs" in semiotics. And many other similar notions that would fit what you're describing. Memes became a "thing", academically, because Dawkins was a successful pop writer. They've had about as much genuine scholarly impact as Deepak Chopra! That's on the academic side. On the practical side, sure, marketing firms and political campaigns have attempted to hijack image captions, with varying (usually low) success. (It's not like Trump employs a bunch of scientists to post image captions on r/T_D. Love it or hate it, that's grass roots.) All of this would have been done whether people had decided to latch it to Memetics or not. It's not like image macros wouldn't have become a thing if "Selfish Gene" hadn't been written.
- mistermann 7y ago
  > You're casting an over-broad definition of Memetics. I am, or the author of the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics) where I quoted that definition from? > Long before Dawkins, we had things like "archetypes" in Jungian psychology, "gestalts" in gestalt psychology, "signs" in semiotics. >> Archetypes were a concept introduced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who believed that archetypes were models of people, behaviors, or personalities. Archetypes, he suggested, were inborn tendencies that play a role in influencing human behavior. >> Gestalt psychology is an attempt to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world. The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies through the law of prägnanz. This principle maintains that when the human mind (perceptual system) forms a percept or "gestalt", the whole has a reality of its own, independent of the parts. >> In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can communicate through any of the senses, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste. Regardless, refer to this phenomenon using whatever words you'd like. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. > They've had about as much genuine scholarly impact as Deepak Chopra! I don't disagree with your assertion that ~"multiple people have recognized and described this phenomenon within human psychology and assigned it a variety of labels", or that there has so far been little noteworthy impact. My interest is about the potential of this knowledge. I initially wrote: "I believe memetics is one of the most impactful but underappreciated ideas out there today, and plausibly explains the bizarre polarization of opinions on a wide variety of hot button current topics. Everyone perceives that their opinion/knowledge is based on facts, but very few are even slightly aware that their knowledge is actually based on a hodge podge of memes, each with varying levels of truthiness." If I had more accurately described my beliefs like so: "I believe memetics is one of the most important but underappreciated ideas out there today, and plausibly explains the bizarre polarization of opinions on a wide variety of hot button current topics. Everyone perceives that their opinion/knowledge is based on facts, but very few are even slightly aware that their knowledge is actually based on a hodge podge of memes, each with varying levels of truthiness. If we could somehow manage to get a significant portion of the population to truly realize that much of what they believe, what they consider to be fact, their mental model of reality, is largely made up of meaningfully incorrect approximations, the impact on the world could be substantial." ....would you still disagree? If so, could you note which specific parts of my words you disagree with?