The success rate of developing and introducing better memes into society is indeed not 0. The key thing there is that the scientific revolutionaries weren’t just as an abstract thinking “we must uncouple from society first, and then we’ll know what to do”. Rather, they wanted to understand how objects fell, how animals evolved and lots of other specific problems and developed good memes to achieve those ends.
I’m by no means an expert on the topic, but I would have thought it was a result of both object-level thinking producing new memes that society recognized as true, but also some level of abstract thinking along the lines of “using God and the Bible as an explanation for every phenomenon doesn’t seem to be working very well, maybe we should create a scientific method or something.”
I think there may be a bit of us talking past each other, though. From your response, perhaps what I consider “uncoupling from society’s bad memes” you consider to be just generating new memes. It feels like generally a conversation where it’s hard to pin down what exactly people are trying to describe (starting from the OP, which I find very interesting, but am still having some trouble understanding specifically) which is making it a bit hard to communicate.
The success rate of developing and introducing better memes into society is indeed not 0. The key thing there is that the scientific revolutionaries weren’t just as an abstract thinking “we must uncouple from society first, and then we’ll know what to do”. Rather, they wanted to understand how objects fell, how animals evolved and lots of other specific problems and developed good memes to achieve those ends.
I’m by no means an expert on the topic, but I would have thought it was a result of both object-level thinking producing new memes that society recognized as true, but also some level of abstract thinking along the lines of “using God and the Bible as an explanation for every phenomenon doesn’t seem to be working very well, maybe we should create a scientific method or something.”
I think there may be a bit of us talking past each other, though. From your response, perhaps what I consider “uncoupling from society’s bad memes” you consider to be just generating new memes. It feels like generally a conversation where it’s hard to pin down what exactly people are trying to describe (starting from the OP, which I find very interesting, but am still having some trouble understanding specifically) which is making it a bit hard to communicate.