I think this hierarchy can be derived from the way that I’ve developed for thinking about this problem—considering the person’s beliefs as a “memeplex” (“memotype”?). Replacing a few memes within a creationst’s head—even if the new memes are better—can significantly increase the net cognitive dissonance going on within their own skull and prompt them to reject facts as something that must have been tampered with, or therwise being somehow invalid, protecting their more self-consistent, incorrect model.
Once the memeplex reaches a stable local minimum region in its dissonance landscape (analagous to fitness landscape), true information can seem worse. A well integrated memplex would be “truly part of you”.
EDIT: I realize this analogy is at risk of noticing “surface analogies” between genetics and memetics, which I’ve just been warned against in the article. I don’t think this is the case, but I’ll leave the caveat that my understanding of this idea may be as low as level 2.
I think this hierarchy can be derived from the way that I’ve developed for thinking about this problem—considering the person’s beliefs as a “memeplex” (“memotype”?). Replacing a few memes within a creationst’s head—even if the new memes are better—can significantly increase the net cognitive dissonance going on within their own skull and prompt them to reject facts as something that must have been tampered with, or therwise being somehow invalid, protecting their more self-consistent, incorrect model.
Once the memeplex reaches a stable local minimum region in its dissonance landscape (analagous to fitness landscape), true information can seem worse. A well integrated memplex would be “truly part of you”.
EDIT: I realize this analogy is at risk of noticing “surface analogies” between genetics and memetics, which I’ve just been warned against in the article. I don’t think this is the case, but I’ll leave the caveat that my understanding of this idea may be as low as level 2.
This should be easy to test: where can we find a research article that makes (and tests) a quantitative prediction based on rigorous memetics ? ;)
(I plead guilty to using the analogy myself.)