metagorgon asked: 'the mind-virus hypothesis has been thoroughly disconfirmed' which hypothesis, what has disconfirmed it, citation citation citation needed.
I can’t be arsed to provide citations, but it’s really easy to denounce things nobody actually believes… (for example, Dawkins seems to have a more nuanced view on the topic than he is often accused of having; like with many things the idea of memes can be separated into a “strong” claim (such as all cognition being simply idea-viruses) which is obviously either false, dramatically oversimplified, or utterly trivial; and a “weak” claim (such as the general kind of cultural transmission happening) which is obviously true and a somewhat useful concept; so that the strong one can be used to motte-and-bailey those who dislike the idea by agreeing with them and the weak one can be used to motte-and-bailey those who like the idea by agreeing with them
(compare this with the efficient market hypothesis: the strong version that 100% perfect information is already there is impossible because nobody could benefit from inputting information and thus the information wouldn’t be 100% perfect, while the weak version that any trick that consistently outsmarted the markets must have some reason why it isn’t constantly applied by everyone is obviously inevitable, and thus I can agree with people who start from “efficient markets are bullshit” and people who start from “markets are efficient” and corrupt them both to my obviously correct view
(obviously correct because if there was a way to consistently outsmart myself on the memetic marketplace I’d be using it already
(yo dawg I heard u like meta so I put meta in your meta…))))
…but some people believe others do (this is how I achieve brilliant success with my feminism; when someone “egalitarian” says how they hate $weakman I can just say “yeah, we hate that thing too, and hating that thing is called feminism” and then they are like “lol wtf” and then I’m like “it tru tho, and many of the people you thought had that opinion actually have $nuanced_opinion which just resembles $weakman if you look at it from an uninformed position and while some people actually believe $weakman the truth is more complex” and then they are like “okay lol I was mistaken about this looks like feminism is not a monolith of ridiculousness even if some feminists are”) and I vaguely remembered that my leftist friends had scorned a silly interpretation of memetics and scorning a silly interpretation would implant idea-viruses in the cool kids’ minds that make them more friendly to me.
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p>Oops, please don’t tell the cool kids that I said this. Oh wait, the cool kids can see it anyway because this is public. Well fuck, now they know that I think that few people actually shared the conception of memetics they thought people shared widely and now they are inoculated against my idea-virus. Damnit!
1 month ago · tagged #the radical idea that people would yell less if someone translated things from one culture to another · 3 notes · .permalink
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