4 ms·

The whole concept of memetics is anti-intellectual pseudoscience. The analogy between idea and gene is an extreme stretch, and the pop understanding of this spe

by api 6y ago

The whole concept of memetics is anti-intellectual pseudoscience. The analogy between idea and gene is an extreme stretch, and the pop understanding of this speculation loses whatever more subtle context might be there. The pop understanding robs ideas of their context in systems of ideas, rendering them isolated sound bites with no integration or higher level thought. It promotes a kind of Orwellian "duckspeak" and the utmost short attention span culture. I don't think it's a coincidence that meme culture dominated forums originate all the worst ideas and culture on the Internet. I am looking at Twitter with its ideological lynch mobs, 4chan, and the popular Reddit forums. Richard Dawkins originated the concept, and for him it was only a speculation anyway. In any case Dawkins has never impressed me. He's not the greatest thinker in evolutionary theory by any measure, and he's among a collection of people who lost their minds after 9/11. I have no idea why he is so high profile.

cameronbrown 6y ago
> he's among a collection of people who lost their minds after 9/11. I have no context here. What do you mean?
- JoelMcCracken 6y ago
  I think they are referring to his well-know islamophobia
ethanbond 6y ago
You don’t believe that ideas reproduce (transmit between people), mutate (get re-interpreted during transmission), and then compete against other ideas (fail or succeed to transmit further/persuade)? That’s essentially the extent of the analogy to genes and is basically self-evident.
- api 6y ago
  Cars move down paths, run on energy transport molecules, and carry other objects. Therefore cars are the same thing as cell transport proteins and roads are the same thing as cellular cytoskeletons. The coarse structure of known space resembles brain tissue when rendered in a certain way, therefore the universe is a giant brain. I could go on forever. Reason from first principles, not by analogy.
  - ethanbond 6y ago
    Maybe you ought to re-read The Selfish Gene. It first distills evolution down to first principles: there are classes of chemicals that tend to construct copies or near-copies of themselves; the chemicals that do not do this but consume raw material from the same finite pool will gradually decrease in frequency; meaning over time chemical variants/combinations that are more successful at duplicating themselves propagate while those who fail to secure resources do not propagate. At a certain degree of chemical complexity, things start behaving like organisms, and in fact soon thereafter we just call those groupings/combinations of chemicals “organisms.” The distillation to first principles is: anything that reproduces with some error then must compete for finite resources, where failure precludes propagation, will “evolve” toward higher fitness (given the particular context/environment). This first principles explanation of evolution can be readily applied to ideas, thus: memetics. Memetics was not arrived at by analogy to genetics. Both were derived from the same first principles of replication and selection.
    - api 6y ago
      I have read that book. His first principles explanation of evolution is not bad. Then he just takes that template and moves it over to ideas because analogy. You can't just glibly do that. What he does there is only a few steps above stoners saying space time looks like a big brain maaaaaaaan. Duuuuude... (bubble bubble) it's like a reflection of the mind of god (bubble bubble). To really do that you would have to show that the brain works like a genetic/evolutionary system, and that does not appear to be the case (or at least we do not know enough to say that). There is so much context there. You can't just do superficial pattern recognition and then force fit an entire theoretical model. It's lazy. I am not saying ideas are nothing like genes, just that they are not the same thing. You can't just steal theory from another field without context. Seriously... name one case in science where that has worked. Things are what they are, and not necessarily what they superficially look like when viewed from a certain angle and lots of details are ignored. Also as I said the pop understanding of memes is far less interesting than Dawkins speculation and basically reduces ideas to isolated grunts. It's a form of "conceptual thought denialism."
- varjag 6y ago
  We used to call that 'culture'. In practice now, memes are exactly what the GP says: manifestation of simpletons communicating on the Internet.
  - ethanbond 6y ago
    While a culture is just a collection of memes, I think considering it as memes and not a static/permanent “culture” gets you a lot more leverage to think about the world. For example, if you just say, “that’s our culture,” it’s very tempting to accept it as an intrinsic property of your society/company/team. If you say, “that’s the collection of dominant memes for this particular environment at this particular time,” it gives you some avenues to start 1) decomposing a monolithic culture into its component pieces and 2) explore why those particular memes are so dominant in the particular environment. The latter route, IMO, will expose many more levers for you to play with if you were to want to, say, modify a culture.
  - baddox 6y ago
    We also knew that children tend to look like their parents long before we knew about genes.
    - varjag 6y ago
      Genetics is a falsifiable scientific theory with predictive force. Memetics, or whatever you are willing to call it, is not. Mostly a way for people with frog avatars to sound important.
- thrownaway9001 6y ago
  The problem isn't so much the /concept/ of memetics as how it's implicitly used to sweep details under the rug. Consider a mathematical "culture" where proofs are generated by some AI, propagated between nodes, and each node that receives a proof checks if it seems valid before propagating it to the next node. What kind of proof survives that kind of culture has a lot more to do with the nature of mathematics and the proposer AI than it has to do with the dynamics that every replicator system has in common. In other words, it's very easy for pop memetics to go back and forth between a position where "it's all replicators, the memes are just using you to replicate themselves" and where "obviously, the objective content of the idea matters more than their replicability". How much the spread of ideas in a society is one compared to the other depends on parameters that differ from system to system. Treating them all alike does a big disservice to the grand variety of systems that exist, and using the concept of replicator dynamics to pretend that the intellect is always a servant to the system is worse still.
- catalogia 6y ago
  It may be the case that a phenomenon is real but the extant field of inquiry into that phenomenon is pseudoscience. For an example, consider alchemy. Alchemists were observing real phenomena, but their methods and theories weren't sound. api is right that memetics as a field is in disrepute, considered pseudoscience by many. That doesn't mean the premise of ideas propagating through the population, surviving or dying based on various criteria, is totally bunk. But you have to be willing to distinguish the concept of memes from 'memetics as a science.' I think it's a useful analogy, but it has limitations. One hazard of memetics mirrors a common hazard in discussions about genetics. Anthropomorphizing genes by saying things like "the gene wants to replicate" or "the gene is selfish" is common for obvious reasons, but you have to be careful to not take it literally. When you make the analogy between genes and ideas, that habit of anthropomorphization comes along for the ride, and in the process ideas are given agency of their own. Saying that the idea has agency of it's own, that it self-replicates, is in some sense tantamount to questioning the agency of the humans participating in the spread of the idea. In brief, memetics steps on the third rail of free will.
  - ethanbond 6y ago
    Totally agree on basically all points. api however said the concept of memetics, not the field of study, is bunk.
klyrs 6y ago
Dawkins may have coined the term, but memes predate him. A substitute teacher of mine was fond of the "Kilroy Was Here" meme, popular among american soldiers during WWII. He was a kind and gentle soul, and I only understood the depth of this expression as an adult: he survived the trenches, and still cherished a happy memory that carried him through the experience. Today, I propagate that meme in honor of him, even though I've forgotten his name.
- Nursie 6y ago
  A meme is any thought pattern that can spread and replicate, so of course they pre-date Dawkins! They've been around as long as there have been humans with the ability to communicate them. Thousands of years.
fortran77 6y ago
/r/LOLHackerNews

by api 6y ago

cameronbrown 6y ago

> he's among a collection of people who lost their minds after 9/11. I have no context here. What do you mean?

JoelMcCracken 6y ago
I think they are referring to his well-know islamophobia

ethanbond 6y ago

You don’t believe that ideas reproduce (transmit between people), mutate (get re-interpreted during transmission), and then compete against other ideas (fail or succeed to transmit further/persuade)? That’s essentially the extent of the analogy to genes and is basically self-evident.

api 6y ago
Cars move down paths, run on energy transport molecules, and carry other objects. Therefore cars are the same thing as cell transport proteins and roads are the same thing as cellular cytoskeletons. The coarse structure of known space resembles brain tissue when rendered in a certain way, therefore the universe is a giant brain. I could go on forever. Reason from first principles, not by analogy.
- ethanbond 6y ago
  Maybe you ought to re-read The Selfish Gene. It first distills evolution down to first principles: there are classes of chemicals that tend to construct copies or near-copies of themselves; the chemicals that do not do this but consume raw material from the same finite pool will gradually decrease in frequency; meaning over time chemical variants/combinations that are more successful at duplicating themselves propagate while those who fail to secure resources do not propagate. At a certain degree of chemical complexity, things start behaving like organisms, and in fact soon thereafter we just call those groupings/combinations of chemicals “organisms.” The distillation to first principles is: anything that reproduces with some error then must compete for finite resources, where failure precludes propagation, will “evolve” toward higher fitness (given the particular context/environment). This first principles explanation of evolution can be readily applied to ideas, thus: memetics. Memetics was not arrived at by analogy to genetics. Both were derived from the same first principles of replication and selection.
  - api 6y ago
    I have read that book. His first principles explanation of evolution is not bad. Then he just takes that template and moves it over to ideas because analogy. You can't just glibly do that. What he does there is only a few steps above stoners saying space time looks like a big brain maaaaaaaan. Duuuuude... (bubble bubble) it's like a reflection of the mind of god (bubble bubble). To really do that you would have to show that the brain works like a genetic/evolutionary system, and that does not appear to be the case (or at least we do not know enough to say that). There is so much context there. You can't just do superficial pattern recognition and then force fit an entire theoretical model. It's lazy. I am not saying ideas are nothing like genes, just that they are not the same thing. You can't just steal theory from another field without context. Seriously... name one case in science where that has worked. Things are what they are, and not necessarily what they superficially look like when viewed from a certain angle and lots of details are ignored. Also as I said the pop understanding of memes is far less interesting than Dawkins speculation and basically reduces ideas to isolated grunts. It's a form of "conceptual thought denialism."
varjag 6y ago
We used to call that 'culture'. In practice now, memes are exactly what the GP says: manifestation of simpletons communicating on the Internet.
- ethanbond 6y ago
  While a culture is just a collection of memes, I think considering it as memes and not a static/permanent “culture” gets you a lot more leverage to think about the world. For example, if you just say, “that’s our culture,” it’s very tempting to accept it as an intrinsic property of your society/company/team. If you say, “that’s the collection of dominant memes for this particular environment at this particular time,” it gives you some avenues to start 1) decomposing a monolithic culture into its component pieces and 2) explore why those particular memes are so dominant in the particular environment. The latter route, IMO, will expose many more levers for you to play with if you were to want to, say, modify a culture.
- baddox 6y ago
  We also knew that children tend to look like their parents long before we knew about genes.
  - varjag 6y ago
    Genetics is a falsifiable scientific theory with predictive force. Memetics, or whatever you are willing to call it, is not. Mostly a way for people with frog avatars to sound important.
thrownaway9001 6y ago
The problem isn't so much the /concept/ of memetics as how it's implicitly used to sweep details under the rug. Consider a mathematical "culture" where proofs are generated by some AI, propagated between nodes, and each node that receives a proof checks if it seems valid before propagating it to the next node. What kind of proof survives that kind of culture has a lot more to do with the nature of mathematics and the proposer AI than it has to do with the dynamics that every replicator system has in common. In other words, it's very easy for pop memetics to go back and forth between a position where "it's all replicators, the memes are just using you to replicate themselves" and where "obviously, the objective content of the idea matters more than their replicability". How much the spread of ideas in a society is one compared to the other depends on parameters that differ from system to system. Treating them all alike does a big disservice to the grand variety of systems that exist, and using the concept of replicator dynamics to pretend that the intellect is always a servant to the system is worse still.
catalogia 6y ago
It may be the case that a phenomenon is real but the extant field of inquiry into that phenomenon is pseudoscience. For an example, consider alchemy. Alchemists were observing real phenomena, but their methods and theories weren't sound. api is right that memetics as a field is in disrepute, considered pseudoscience by many. That doesn't mean the premise of ideas propagating through the population, surviving or dying based on various criteria, is totally bunk. But you have to be willing to distinguish the concept of memes from 'memetics as a science.' I think it's a useful analogy, but it has limitations. One hazard of memetics mirrors a common hazard in discussions about genetics. Anthropomorphizing genes by saying things like "the gene wants to replicate" or "the gene is selfish" is common for obvious reasons, but you have to be careful to not take it literally. When you make the analogy between genes and ideas, that habit of anthropomorphization comes along for the ride, and in the process ideas are given agency of their own. Saying that the idea has agency of it's own, that it self-replicates, is in some sense tantamount to questioning the agency of the humans participating in the spread of the idea. In brief, memetics steps on the third rail of free will.
- ethanbond 6y ago
  Totally agree on basically all points. api however said the concept of memetics, not the field of study, is bunk.

klyrs 6y ago

Dawkins may have coined the term, but memes predate him. A substitute teacher of mine was fond of the "Kilroy Was Here" meme, popular among american soldiers during WWII. He was a kind and gentle soul, and I only understood the depth of this expression as an adult: he survived the trenches, and still cherished a happy memory that carried him through the experience. Today, I propagate that meme in honor of him, even though I've forgotten his name.

Nursie 6y ago
A meme is any thought pattern that can spread and replicate, so of course they pre-date Dawkins! They've been around as long as there have been humans with the ability to communicate them. Thousands of years.

fortran77 6y ago

/r/LOLHackerNews