The word “had” there serves an important point, contrast this with the fact that people don’t have to live with other ethnic groups.
Yes, but it could also imply that women are difficult to endure, and men would be better off without them. But of course this meaning was unintended, thus the humor.
Yes, they do. If this wasn’t the case we’d still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
But where does the selective pressure comes from? Why this pressure has not made the atomistic idea, or the spherical Earth, formulated almost three thousands of year ago, immediately popular? Why there are people that still believe in magic? Why we still believe in both relativity and quantum mechanics, despite these ideas being incompatible and more than a century old?
Um, tribes have to compete with other tribes. Memes can’t survive for long simply because they aren’t immediately destructive.
Yes, avoiding to be immediately destructive is not sufficient to guarantee a meme survivability, but cultures can lock all kind of memes if there’s no immediate selective pressure against them. For example, a society that has to battle on phyisical grounds, with physical strength, gains no immediate disadvantage over a more egalitarian society if it enslaves women. A false meme can even gain a society some advantage, such as the case of an ethnic group that enslaves another ethnic group and makes them work for hard labor. Past history was about guns, germs and steel, not about truth. Those are what has been selected. The rest of the memes are purely random junk.
We can’t observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along.
Rather then mocking his phrasing maybe you should try actually paying attention to his point.
I was doing both. And nobody has yet pointed to a valid reason why, just by the mere presence, truth should ooze out of things directly into our minds.
The process of intentionally acquiring truth is costly and fragile: you need to experiment, be willing to discard ideas, formulate wildly new theories. If the truth is not immediately strategic, i.e. it offers no immediate and perceptible disadvantage, it has no particular selective pressure against in a clash between cultures or different memetic spaces. The truth can even hinders the success of a tribe, acting through our biased brains.
A ship disappearing behind the horizon, fire, women are all observable phoenomena, and yet we had (have) flat earth, flogiston and discrimination.
Yes, but it could also imply that women are difficult to endure, and men would be better off without them. But of course this meaning was unintended, thus the humor.
But where does the selective pressure comes from? Why this pressure has not made the atomistic idea, or the spherical Earth, formulated almost three thousands of year ago, immediately popular? Why there are people that still believe in magic? Why we still believe in both relativity and quantum mechanics, despite these ideas being incompatible and more than a century old?
Yes, avoiding to be immediately destructive is not sufficient to guarantee a meme survivability, but cultures can lock all kind of memes if there’s no immediate selective pressure against them.
For example, a society that has to battle on phyisical grounds, with physical strength, gains no immediate disadvantage over a more egalitarian society if it enslaves women.
A false meme can even gain a society some advantage, such as the case of an ethnic group that enslaves another ethnic group and makes them work for hard labor.
Past history was about guns, germs and steel, not about truth. Those are what has been selected. The rest of the memes are purely random junk.
As advancedatheist said in the OC:
Rather then mocking his phrasing maybe you should try actually paying attention to his point.
In particular truths about metallurgy and the chemistry of gunpowder.
I was doing both. And nobody has yet pointed to a valid reason why, just by the mere presence, truth should ooze out of things directly into our minds.
The process of intentionally acquiring truth is costly and fragile: you need to experiment, be willing to discard ideas, formulate wildly new theories.
If the truth is not immediately strategic, i.e. it offers no immediate and perceptible disadvantage, it has no particular selective pressure against in a clash between cultures or different memetic spaces. The truth can even hinders the success of a tribe, acting through our biased brains.
A ship disappearing behind the horizon, fire, women are all observable phoenomena, and yet we had (have) flat earth, flogiston and discrimination.
Memetic evolution does just that.
Yes, but not in an orderly, cumulative, feedback driven fashion.
If memetics is like genetics, you should observe very often useless memes become fixed in a population.