Could you please elaborate on what you mean by “highly memetic” and “internal memetic selection pressures”? I’m probably not the right audience for this piece, but that particular word (memetic) is making it difficult for me to get to grips with the post as a whole. I’m confused if you mean there is a high degree of uncritical mimicry, or if you’re making some analogy to ‘genetic’ (and what that analogy is...)
It is indeed an anology to ‘genetic’. Ideas “reproduce” via people sharing them. Some ideas are shared more often, by more people, than others. So, much like biologists think about the relative rate at which genes reproduce as “genetic fitness”, we can think of the relative rate at which ideas reproduce as “memetic fitness”. (The term comes from Dawkins back in the 70′s; this is where the word “meme” originally came from, as in “internet memes”.)
I think you’re using “memetic” to mean “of high memetic fitness”, and I wish you wouldn’t. No one uses “genetic” in that way.
An idea that gets itself copied a lot (either because of “actually good” qualities like internal consistency, doing well at explaining observations, etc., or because of “bad” (or at least irrelevant) ones like memorability, grabbing the emotions, etc.) has high memetic fitness. Similarly, a genetically transmissible trait that tends to lead to its bearers having more surviving offspring with the same trait has high genetic fitness. On the other hand, calling a trait genetic means that it propagates through the genes rather than being taught, formed by the environment, etc., and one could similarly call an idea or practice memetic if it comes about by people learning it from one another rather than (e.g.) being instinctive or a thing that everyone in a particular environment invents out of necessity.
When you say, e.g., “lots of work in that field will be highly memetic despite trash statistics, blatant p-hacking, etc.” I am pretty certain you mean “of high memetic fitness” rather than “people aware of it are aware of it because they learned of it from others rather than because it came to them instinctively or they reinvented it spontaneously because it was obvious from what was around them”.
(It would be possible, though I’d dislike it, to use “memetic” to mean something like “of high memetic fitness for ‘bad’ reasons”—i.e., liable to be popular for the sort of reason that we might not appreciate without the notion of memes. But I don’t think that can be your meaning in the words I quoted, which seem to presuppose that the “default” way for a piece of work to be “memetic” is for it to be of high quality.)
I have split feelings on this one. On the one hand, you are clearly correct that it’s useful to distinguish those two things and that my usage here disagrees with the analogous usage in genetics. On the other hand, I have the vague impression that my usage here is already somewhat standard, so changing to match genetics would potentially be confusing in its own right.
It would be useful to hear from others whether they think my usage in this post is already standard (beyond just me), or they had to infer it from the context of the post. If it’s mostly the latter, then I’m pretty sold on changing my usage to match genetics.
Your use of “memetic” here did struck me as somewhat idiosyncratic; I had to infer it. I would have used “memetically viral” and derivatives in its place. (E. g., in place of “lots of work in that field will be highly memetic despite trash statistics”, I would’ve said “lots of ideas in that field will be highly viral despite originating from research with trash statistics” or something.)
To me memetic normally reads something like “has a high propensity to become a meme” or “is meme-like” I had no trouble interpreting the post from this basis.
I push back against trying to hew closely to usages from the field of genetics. Fundamentally I feel like that is not what talking about memes is for; it was an analogy from the start, not meant for the same level of rigor. Further, memes and how meme-like things are is much more widely talked about than genetics, so insofar as we privilege usage considerations I claim switching to one matching genetics would require more inferential work from readers overall because the population of readers conversant with genetics is smaller.
I also feel like the value of speaking in terms of memes in the post is that the replication crises is largely the fault of non-rigorous treatment; that is to say in many fields the statistical analysis parts really were/are more of a meme inside the field rather than a rigorous practice. People just read other people’s published papers analysis sections, and write something shaped like that, replicability be damned.
Yep, it seems like pretty standard usage to me (and IMO seems conceptually fine, despite the fact that “genetic” means something different, since for some reason using “memetic” in the same way feels very weird or confused to me, like I would almost never say “this has memetic origin”)
since for some reason using “memetic” in the same way feels very weird or confused to me, like I would almost never say “this has memetic origin”
… though now that it’s been pointed out, I do feel like I want a short handle for “this idea is mostly passed from person-to-person, as opposed to e.g. being rederived or learned firsthand”.
I also kinda now wish “highly genetic” meant that a gene has high fitness, that usage feels like it would be more natural.
I think in principle it makes sense in the same sense “highly genetic” makes sense. If a trait is highly genetic, then there’s a strong chance for it to be passed on given a reproductive event. If a meme is highly memetic, then there’s a strong chance for it to be passed on via a information transmission.
In genetic evolution it makes sense to distinguish this from fitness, because in genetic evolution the dominant feedback signal is whether you found a mate, not the probability a given trait is passed to the next generation.
In memetic evolution, the dominant feedback signal is the probability a meme gets passed on given a conversation, because there is a strong correlation between the probability someone passes on the information you told them, and getting more people to listen to you. So a highly memetic meme is also incredibly likely to be highly memetically fit.
Could you please elaborate on what you mean by “highly memetic” and “internal memetic selection pressures”? I’m probably not the right audience for this piece, but that particular word (memetic) is making it difficult for me to get to grips with the post as a whole. I’m confused if you mean there is a high degree of uncritical mimicry, or if you’re making some analogy to ‘genetic’ (and what that analogy is...)
It is indeed an anology to ‘genetic’. Ideas “reproduce” via people sharing them. Some ideas are shared more often, by more people, than others. So, much like biologists think about the relative rate at which genes reproduce as “genetic fitness”, we can think of the relative rate at which ideas reproduce as “memetic fitness”. (The term comes from Dawkins back in the 70′s; this is where the word “meme” originally came from, as in “internet memes”.)
I think you’re using “memetic” to mean “of high memetic fitness”, and I wish you wouldn’t. No one uses “genetic” in that way.
An idea that gets itself copied a lot (either because of “actually good” qualities like internal consistency, doing well at explaining observations, etc., or because of “bad” (or at least irrelevant) ones like memorability, grabbing the emotions, etc.) has high memetic fitness. Similarly, a genetically transmissible trait that tends to lead to its bearers having more surviving offspring with the same trait has high genetic fitness. On the other hand, calling a trait genetic means that it propagates through the genes rather than being taught, formed by the environment, etc., and one could similarly call an idea or practice memetic if it comes about by people learning it from one another rather than (e.g.) being instinctive or a thing that everyone in a particular environment invents out of necessity.
When you say, e.g., “lots of work in that field will be highly memetic despite trash statistics, blatant p-hacking, etc.” I am pretty certain you mean “of high memetic fitness” rather than “people aware of it are aware of it because they learned of it from others rather than because it came to them instinctively or they reinvented it spontaneously because it was obvious from what was around them”.
(It would be possible, though I’d dislike it, to use “memetic” to mean something like “of high memetic fitness for ‘bad’ reasons”—i.e., liable to be popular for the sort of reason that we might not appreciate without the notion of memes. But I don’t think that can be your meaning in the words I quoted, which seem to presuppose that the “default” way for a piece of work to be “memetic” is for it to be of high quality.)
I have split feelings on this one. On the one hand, you are clearly correct that it’s useful to distinguish those two things and that my usage here disagrees with the analogous usage in genetics. On the other hand, I have the vague impression that my usage here is already somewhat standard, so changing to match genetics would potentially be confusing in its own right.
It would be useful to hear from others whether they think my usage in this post is already standard (beyond just me), or they had to infer it from the context of the post. If it’s mostly the latter, then I’m pretty sold on changing my usage to match genetics.
Your use of “memetic” here did struck me as somewhat idiosyncratic; I had to infer it. I would have used “memetically viral” and derivatives in its place. (E. g., in place of “lots of work in that field will be highly memetic despite trash statistics”, I would’ve said “lots of ideas in that field will be highly viral despite originating from research with trash statistics” or something.)
To me memetic normally reads something like “has a high propensity to become a meme” or “is meme-like” I had no trouble interpreting the post from this basis.
I push back against trying to hew closely to usages from the field of genetics. Fundamentally I feel like that is not what talking about memes is for; it was an analogy from the start, not meant for the same level of rigor. Further, memes and how meme-like things are is much more widely talked about than genetics, so insofar as we privilege usage considerations I claim switching to one matching genetics would require more inferential work from readers overall because the population of readers conversant with genetics is smaller.
I also feel like the value of speaking in terms of memes in the post is that the replication crises is largely the fault of non-rigorous treatment; that is to say in many fields the statistical analysis parts really were/are more of a meme inside the field rather than a rigorous practice. People just read other people’s published papers analysis sections, and write something shaped like that, replicability be damned.
Yep, it seems like pretty standard usage to me (and IMO seems conceptually fine, despite the fact that “genetic” means something different, since for some reason using “memetic” in the same way feels very weird or confused to me, like I would almost never say “this has memetic origin”)
… though now that it’s been pointed out, I do feel like I want a short handle for “this idea is mostly passed from person-to-person, as opposed to e.g. being rederived or learned firsthand”.
I also kinda now wish “highly genetic” meant that a gene has high fitness, that usage feels like it would be more natural.
I think in principle it makes sense in the same sense “highly genetic” makes sense. If a trait is highly genetic, then there’s a strong chance for it to be passed on given a reproductive event. If a meme is highly memetic, then there’s a strong chance for it to be passed on via a information transmission.
In genetic evolution it makes sense to distinguish this from fitness, because in genetic evolution the dominant feedback signal is whether you found a mate, not the probability a given trait is passed to the next generation.
In memetic evolution, the dominant feedback signal is the probability a meme gets passed on given a conversation, because there is a strong correlation between the probability someone passes on the information you told them, and getting more people to listen to you. So a highly memetic meme is also incredibly likely to be highly memetically fit.
I definitely had no trouble understanding the post, and the usage seems very standard among blogs I read and people I talk to.