Since you brought up Dawkins, I think teaching about Memetics would be very useful in raising the “sanity waterline”. Learning about Memetics really forces you to analyze your beliefs for selfish replicator ideas.
In addition, it challenges the view that consensus is an impregnable defense for believing bizarre things. You are put in the position of actually having to try to cite evidence for why you believe things. Of course even that doesn’t work very often, since most people have very strong ideological immune systems that protect their beliefs. But asking those questions, and trying to justify your beliefs is a necessary first step.
What exactly do you mean by being “rigorous about them”?
Some seemingly ‘rigorous’ ways of studying memes that spring to mind:
Archaeologists studying the dissemination of arrowhead technology
Linguists studying the geographic distribution of phonemes among dialects of a language
Biblical studies
Etymology
It’s not clear that memes are copied with a high enough degree of fidelity to really be subject to evolution by natural selection, but they certainly share the other structural characteristics of genes, namely variation and differential fitness.
It means that if I talk about memes, I leave myself open to an easy challenge to which I currently have no reply. I’d really like a good reply, since I think it’s a genuinely useful aid to thinking about what it means for an idea to be popular, so if you have one I’m keen to hear it!
Suppose I present a concrete non-rigorous analogy: “A chain letter is like an organism with a habitat of human minds.”. What is the easy challenge that I have left myself open to? I already freely conceded that it was non-rigorous.
You leave yourself open to the reply that the non-rigorousness of the analogy makes it useless or even pernicious. Owning up to a fault doesn’t make it go away.
Since you brought up Dawkins, I think teaching about Memetics would be very useful in raising the “sanity waterline”. Learning about Memetics really forces you to analyze your beliefs for selfish replicator ideas.
In addition, it challenges the view that consensus is an impregnable defense for believing bizarre things. You are put in the position of actually having to try to cite evidence for why you believe things. Of course even that doesn’t work very often, since most people have very strong ideological immune systems that protect their beliefs. But asking those questions, and trying to justify your beliefs is a necessary first step.
Memes are at best a thought-provoking analogy—we have no way of being rigorous about them. I’d love to be wrong about this, but I’d be surprised.
What exactly do you mean by being “rigorous about them”?
Some seemingly ‘rigorous’ ways of studying memes that spring to mind:
Archaeologists studying the dissemination of arrowhead technology
Linguists studying the geographic distribution of phonemes among dialects of a language
Biblical studies
Etymology
It’s not clear that memes are copied with a high enough degree of fidelity to really be subject to evolution by natural selection, but they certainly share the other structural characteristics of genes, namely variation and differential fitness.
Would you say that “We have no way of being rigorous about it” means that we shouldn’t teach the meme analogy?
It means that if I talk about memes, I leave myself open to an easy challenge to which I currently have no reply. I’d really like a good reply, since I think it’s a genuinely useful aid to thinking about what it means for an idea to be popular, so if you have one I’m keen to hear it!
Suppose I present a concrete non-rigorous analogy: “A chain letter is like an organism with a habitat of human minds.”. What is the easy challenge that I have left myself open to? I already freely conceded that it was non-rigorous.
Johnicholas:
You leave yourself open to the reply that the non-rigorousness of the analogy makes it useless or even pernicious. Owning up to a fault doesn’t make it go away.
Congratulations, you have just reduced the proper use of humility to a single proverb. I shall endeavor to go around repeating this.