I found it curious that there wasn’t a single mention of memetics in this essay. It made me think that maybe you’ve started to evolve some similar ideas without knowing there was a prior field (now basically defunct as it’s own field, as the sole journal shut down) developed to study this question.
The basic answer that memetics gives is that “the ideas most likely to support their own survival and replication float to the top.” Simplicity here is one factor that matters, as is truth, as is matching the values of the average person, to the extent that these factors support survival and replication.
For instance, “Having children will bring you joy” is a common example in memetics. The idea may not be any more simple, truthful, or value giving than other similar beliefs about what having children will bring you, but it will tend to propagate because the people who believe it have more children to pass the idea on to.
This. Also, political factors-ideas that boost the status of your tribe are likely to be very competitive independently of truth and nearly so of complexity (though if they’re too complex one would expect to see simplified versions propagating as well).
I don’t know a lot about evolution, but I suspect any benefits of building on memetics work directly would fall under the umbrella of “what about when we’re tipping the scale in favor of some ingroup?”. I defined density_3 as a placeholder for this along with all maximization related issues, and then said “we’ll ignore this for now and focus on more basic foundations”. I don’t know if I’ll return to it, but if I do, it’ll take me a really really long time.
The thing I was trying to point at is that memetics IS the basic foundations. All three of the items you mentioned are a side effect of survival and replication characteristics, not something that underlie them.
It may be that the work you’re trying to do here has already been done.
Sorry. The point was NAT, density_{1,2,3} was devised scaffolding for the MVB (minimum viable blogpost). I imagine that NAT has already been discovered, discussed, problematized etc. somewhere but I couldn’t find it. I have a background assumption that attention economists are competent and well-intentioned people, so I trust that they have the situation under control.
I found it curious that there wasn’t a single mention of memetics in this essay. It made me think that maybe you’ve started to evolve some similar ideas without knowing there was a prior field (now basically defunct as it’s own field, as the sole journal shut down) developed to study this question.
The basic answer that memetics gives is that “the ideas most likely to support their own survival and replication float to the top.” Simplicity here is one factor that matters, as is truth, as is matching the values of the average person, to the extent that these factors support survival and replication.
For instance, “Having children will bring you joy” is a common example in memetics. The idea may not be any more simple, truthful, or value giving than other similar beliefs about what having children will bring you, but it will tend to propagate because the people who believe it have more children to pass the idea on to.
This. Also, political factors-ideas that boost the status of your tribe are likely to be very competitive independently of truth and nearly so of complexity (though if they’re too complex one would expect to see simplified versions propagating as well).
I don’t know a lot about evolution, but I suspect any benefits of building on memetics work directly would fall under the umbrella of “what about when we’re tipping the scale in favor of some ingroup?”. I defined density_3 as a placeholder for this along with all maximization related issues, and then said “we’ll ignore this for now and focus on more basic foundations”. I don’t know if I’ll return to it, but if I do, it’ll take me a really really long time.
The thing I was trying to point at is that memetics IS the basic foundations. All three of the items you mentioned are a side effect of survival and replication characteristics, not something that underlie them.
It may be that the work you’re trying to do here has already been done.
Sorry. The point was NAT,
density_{1,2,3}
was devised scaffolding for the MVB (minimum viable blogpost). I imagine that NAT has already been discovered, discussed, problematized etc. somewhere but I couldn’t find it. I have a background assumption that attention economists are competent and well-intentioned people, so I trust that they have the situation under control.