We can’t observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along.
LOL: “had” to live with them. I like (= I find humorous) the implied, possibly unintended, sexism.
If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light—well, you can’t blame that on theology, now, can you?
Why not? I mean, I don’t say that we should or shouldn’t put women in a bad light, nor that we should or shouldn’t blame theology for that. But why we can’t blame theology? It’s not like memes evolve to attain truthiness, or that humans are automatic maximizers / strategizers. Pretty any memeplex I know of has some form of “push away / ostracize my enemies”. Understood, any meme that contains “kill all women” would have a pretty short lifespan. But one containing “enslave all women and use them as breeding cattle” could survive indefinitely, whether women are cattle or not.
Isn’t the whole Neoreactionary movement born under the fallacy that equates survivability with adherence to truth? I find this to be a somewhat inclusive description.
Despite this, I still find the linked article to be appalingly bad at presenting the issue with some form of objectivity. They are not even trying. But I don’t know the site and I’m possibly mistaken assuming that it has as mission disseminating informations of some quality.
Deleterious things get locked into fixation in genomes and biological systems all the time. I see no reason that deleterious traits cannot get fixed into cultures.
Oh, they surely can. But that gives those cultures a disadvantage and maintaining this disadvantage “indefinitely” seems to be a stretch, especially given how cultures are malleable and tend to change anyway.
It’s not that it offers no advantage, is that it offers no immediate disadvantage.
A discriminating culture that happens to have more material advantage at the start could just wipe other more egalitarian cultures without much concerns.
It’s only very recently that physical strength has lost its importance as a driving force in cultures clashes.
It is possible that in a future where intellect matters much more, but life is still cheap, a more egalitarian society will employ women more efficiently and thus prevail against discriminating ones. But it seems that the more material wealth we have, the more relaxed we are about the whole killing other people stuff.
Lack of real-life societies which enslaved all their women should be a big hint.
Think about it for a bit. Half the population is slaves. Somebody has to watch them, guard them, suppress their attempts at rebellion, etc. Your hypothetical society will have to spend a LOT of resources on just keeping things under control while having significantly lower economic productivity. And in the case of war they can’t field a large army because a lot of men are prison wardens and can’t leave women slaves unattended.
The idea is just very obviously bad and unworkable.
I think this idea of slavery does not match with what historically has been the reality of enslavement. It’s not that you need one slavemaster for every slave, or that slaves are kept perpetually in prison.
To have slaves you ‘just’ need less education, the prevalent idea that they need a master, hard labor and some form of punishment for transgressing. I think this set better describes what has been the reality of (say) women in ancient China or Middle-East, black people under the colonial empires, etc.
But let’s just taboo “slave”, the main issue is another: a meme that asserts “women are inferior beings and they should be treated as such” does not pose an immediate threat to the surivival of a tribe, and for this reason can be latched into a culture for a very long period of time, in the millennia range. To say that memetic evolution selects for truth is just silly.
I’m not sure if you disagree with my last paragraph and precisely on what.
I’m not clear where you place the controversy. Do you think that the striking difference is between the degree of bad treatment (enslaving vs treating as inferior) or the survivability of the meme (survive indefinitely vs not an immediate threat)? In the second case, that’s not my motte, because I clearly state that I think “not an immediate threat” yelds “indefinite survivability”. In the first case, I can just notice that you think there’s a sharp divide where I see just a continuum between the cost of the two memes. But that’s not a problem, I’ll be happy to stay in the bailey and taboo “slavery”, as the article you link suggested, to see if there’s a real disagreement here.
LOL: “had” to live with them. I like (= I find humorous) the implied, possibly unintended, sexism.
What definition of “sexism” are you using here? The word “had” there serves an important point, contrast this with the fact that people don’t have to live with other ethnic groups.
It’s not like memes evolve to attain truthiness,
Yes, they do. If this wasn’t the case we’d still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
But one containing “enslave all women and use them as breeding cattle” could survive indefinitely, whether women are cattle or not.
Um, tribes have to compete with other tribes. Memes can’t survive for long simply because they aren’t immediately destructive.
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.
LOL: “had” to live with them. I like (= I find humorous) the implied, possibly unintended, sexism.
Why not? I mean, I don’t say that we should or shouldn’t put women in a bad light, nor that we should or shouldn’t blame theology for that. But why we can’t blame theology?
It’s not like memes evolve to attain truthiness, or that humans are automatic maximizers / strategizers. Pretty any memeplex I know of has some form of “push away / ostracize my enemies”. Understood, any meme that contains “kill all women” would have a pretty short lifespan. But one containing “enslave all women and use them as breeding cattle” could survive indefinitely, whether women are cattle or not. Isn’t the whole Neoreactionary movement born under the fallacy that equates survivability with adherence to truth? I find this to be a somewhat inclusive description.
Despite this, I still find the linked article to be appalingly bad at presenting the issue with some form of objectivity. They are not even trying. But I don’t know the site and I’m possibly mistaken assuming that it has as mission disseminating informations of some quality.
I wonder if you realize that a direct implication of this statement is that treating women as not cattle offers no advantage to a society..?
Deleterious things get locked into fixation in genomes and biological systems all the time. I see no reason that deleterious traits cannot get fixed into cultures.
Oh, they surely can. But that gives those cultures a disadvantage and maintaining this disadvantage “indefinitely” seems to be a stretch, especially given how cultures are malleable and tend to change anyway.
Indefinitely meant more “comparably to a culture lifespan” than “until the heat death of the universe”.
It’s not that it offers no advantage, is that it offers no immediate disadvantage.
A discriminating culture that happens to have more material advantage at the start could just wipe other more egalitarian cultures without much concerns. It’s only very recently that physical strength has lost its importance as a driving force in cultures clashes.
It is possible that in a future where intellect matters much more, but life is still cheap, a more egalitarian society will employ women more efficiently and thus prevail against discriminating ones. But it seems that the more material wealth we have, the more relaxed we are about the whole killing other people stuff.
Really, you think so?
Really, I think so.
You don’t? Care enough to point to a counterexample?
Lack of real-life societies which enslaved all their women should be a big hint.
Think about it for a bit. Half the population is slaves. Somebody has to watch them, guard them, suppress their attempts at rebellion, etc. Your hypothetical society will have to spend a LOT of resources on just keeping things under control while having significantly lower economic productivity. And in the case of war they can’t field a large army because a lot of men are prison wardens and can’t leave women slaves unattended.
The idea is just very obviously bad and unworkable.
I think this idea of slavery does not match with what historically has been the reality of enslavement. It’s not that you need one slavemaster for every slave, or that slaves are kept perpetually in prison.
To have slaves you ‘just’ need less education, the prevalent idea that they need a master, hard labor and some form of punishment for transgressing. I think this set better describes what has been the reality of (say) women in ancient China or Middle-East, black people under the colonial empires, etc.
But let’s just taboo “slave”, the main issue is another: a meme that asserts “women are inferior beings and they should be treated as such” does not pose an immediate threat to the surivival of a tribe, and for this reason can be latched into a culture for a very long period of time, in the millennia range. To say that memetic evolution selects for truth is just silly.
I’m not sure if you disagree with my last paragraph and precisely on what.
Heh. Such a nice example of motte and bailey.
Behold, here is your bailey:
and here is your motte:
You do notice the difference, right? :-)
I’m not clear where you place the controversy.
Do you think that the striking difference is between the degree of bad treatment (enslaving vs treating as inferior) or the survivability of the meme (survive indefinitely vs not an immediate threat)?
In the second case, that’s not my motte, because I clearly state that I think “not an immediate threat” yelds “indefinite survivability”.
In the first case, I can just notice that you think there’s a sharp divide where I see just a continuum between the cost of the two memes. But that’s not a problem, I’ll be happy to stay in the bailey and taboo “slavery”, as the article you link suggested, to see if there’s a real disagreement here.
Both places.
That doesn’t look like a reasonable position, at least if you use words in their normal meaning.
Ah, so there are two memes here? So which one are we talking about and which one corresponds to what you want to claim?
What definition of “sexism” are you using here? 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, they do. If this wasn’t the case we’d still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
Um, tribes have to compete with other tribes. Memes can’t survive for long simply because they aren’t immediately destructive.
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.