Yup, the evolution and spreading of memes is not always aligned with the good, true, and beautiful. But the same is true for genetics, the field which memetics is originally based on.
Human evolution shaped our gene pool in a way that makes us prone to some biases, some forms of prejudice, and violence. But that is just one of the many aspects of these theories. That these are facts about genetics doesn’t mean that genetics and evolution themselves are evil or tainted and something you shouldn’t associate yourself with unless you are a hateful bigot. If we were to follow your rule to the end, we would have to invent all the vocabulary of genetical research from scratch because racists sometimes like to talk about genetics as well. Memetics is not a trivial field of knowledge, and I think just as with genetics, obfuscating the valuable work that has already been done there by reinventing the wheel from scratch with a fresh branding is way too costly.
As we’re at Wikipedia-ing, mind the introductory definition in the meme-article:
A meme (/miːm/MEEM)[1][2][3] is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.
That description is entirely independent of how valuable/damaging memes are, and pretty much exactly what I mean. “The memetic capital of the EA community”, then, is the amount of good and useful memes we have readily available in the community, alongside with the absence of bad and harmful memes.
Thanks, I agree that we should generally not let a useful concept be tainted by negative associations. But!
That description is entirely independent of how valuable/damaging memes are
That’s kinda what I mean, memes are independent of how valuable/damaging the information are, and that’s one main way that in my mind it stands out among other concepts such as ideas. E.g. it seems odd to say “I’m not convinced by this meme”.
Maybe “ideational capital” could fit better? This terms seems to be used in political science, e.g.
Ideational capital refers to a stock of core principles or ideas that form the basis for two key party functions.
Do you have a link to a smooth definition of “ideational capital”? I googled your citation and found a book, but apparently my skill in deciphering political science essays has massively declined since university.
A meta-level remark: I notice I’m a bit emotionally attached to “memetic capital”, because I’ve thought about these things under the term “memetics” a bunch during the last year. In addition, a person whose understanding of cultural evolution I admire uses to speak about it in terms of memetics, so there’s some matters of tribal belonging at play for me. Just flagging this, because it makes me prone to rationalization and overestimating the strength of my reasons to defend the term “memetic capital”. _____________
Now to why I genuinely think “memetic capital” is more fitting:
1. It is useful not only for talking about propositional knowledge. When I read “ideational capital”, or generally “ideas”, I initially think exclusively of propositional knowledge, i.e. things that can be stated as facts in natural language, like “Tel Aviv is a city in Israel.” But there are other forms of knowledge than propositional knowledge. John Vervaeke, for example, describes the “4 Ps of knowledge”:
- Propositional knowing (see above) - Procedural knowing (knowledge how to do things, e.g. ride a bicycle, or fill a tax form) - Perspectival knowing (knowledge of where and how you are situated in the world as an embodied being, e.g. where up and down is, that this is a computer and that a glass door I can’t just pass through without opening it.) - Participatory knowing (knowledge of how to move in the world. E.g., whether you feel stuck and confused staring at a bouldering problem, or just get into flow while your hands and feet find the right places at the wall almost on their own.)
In my understanding, memetics is useful to describe all four forms of knowing, while at the first glance, “ideational capital” only refers to the propositional kind. And in my opinion, the more interesting aspects of memetic capital are procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing. It’s better than nothing to have propositional knowledge that Double Crux exists and what the key steps listed in the CFAR handbook are. But the more interesting, and more important, thing is having an intuitive grasp of the spirit of the method, and intuitively, without thinking, applying it in a conversation like this one.
2. Memetics lends itself to a systemic, rather than engineering-approach to understanding and influencing social systems. The observation that memes’ evolutionary fitness is orthogonal to their usefulness points out a problem, but it also helps us get a better grasp of which strategies for spreading valuable memes might and might not work. For example, if we ask “Which core concepts should more people in EA know?”, we end up writing a curriculum, like the post above. However, we can also ask “Which trajectory does EA’s cultural evolution have, and how can we influence that trajectory so that it flows into a more desirable manner and direction?” Then, we might discover more and completely different attack routes. For example, we end up with a call to action and an offer to connect group organizers to facilitators like the one at the end of my post.
I wrote the following on Facebook in a precursor to this EAF post:
In groups with a healthy debate culture, the process of group beliefs around a polarizing topic shifting looks a lot less like people convincing each other with arguments and a lot more like osmosis. Because the main thing that has to be addressed is not peoples’ consciously held beliefs, but the underlying values, aspects of personal identity and belonging, and peoples’ emotions about them.
What (I think) happens is that at first, the other side sounds like outrageous out-group nonsense. Then you hear more and more people you *like* repeating the out-group’s opinions. With each time, you empathize a tiny bit more with that opinion, and over time, it feels less and less like evil out-group nonsense and more and more like “that’s coherent, though not the way I’d go about things.” And gradually, people converge towards a new stable equilibrium of how to do stuff that accounts for all of the formerly polarized interests.
As it is based on evolutionary theory, I think memetics is particularly well-suited for describing and understanding processes of cultural evolution like the one outlined above that I think is currently happening in EA. And the better we understand these processes, the better can we intervene on them to prevent bad things. These bad things could be an EA-internal culture war, or even the community eventually breaking apart because it can’t handle its own diversity.
When I say “memetic capital”, I don’t have a specific set of timeless ideas in mind that all the EAs should know/should have known about all along. Instead, I think of an ever-changing egregore of ideas, processes, traditions, social customs, social and psychotechnologies, figures of speech and whathaveyou. And the reference to evolutionary theory the term “memetic” implies feels very elegant to me for pointing at this egregore.
The crux of EA’s (or any social bubble’s) memetic capital is that it is hard to inventorize, hard to steer, and that in some sense, we are its servants rather than its masters. I think memetics can describe that. And in the process of describing, it can help us gain more agency over which memes we want to keep and which ones we want to get rid of.
_____________
Do let me know whether this makes sense or sounds like total gibberish to you. I’m thinking/explaining all these things for the first time. And the way I think about social systems is influenced way more by continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, systems theory, and Buddhism than by the more STEM/engineering-style approaches that are common in EA. Thus, I have no clue whether I’m at all understandable for people who read other books than me.
Thanks for the elaboration, no, that all felt very comprehensible to me! Hopefully not ghibbering too much as well:
Knowledge capital?
I agree that “idea” is more strongly connected with propositional knowledge, which is suboptimal, and that “knowledge” seems preferable as it covers the other types you bring up. I just googled “knowledge capital” and that might fit nicely and seems like it’s actually an existing term from economics that overlaps a lot with what you have in mind (though of course missing the side-benefit of alluding to potentially neglected forms of analysis that you mention).
The term knowledge capital refers to the intangible value of an organization made up of its knowledge, relationships, learned techniques, procedures, and innovations. In other words, knowledge capital is the full body of knowledge an organization possesses.
Memetic’s lack of ephasis on argument still worries me
One potential point of disagreement that is also related to my discomfort with memetics is this sentence:
However, we can also ask “Which trajectory does EA’s cultural evolution have, and how can we influence that trajectory so that it flows into a more desirable manner and direction?”
I generally feel icky about strategies that try to affect the cultural development of a community when this is not done transparently and deliberately. And memes kind of feel unilateral and uncooperative this way. For example say you’d like the EA community to engage more with authentic relating training to prevent unproductive and unnecessary conflicts. One way to do this would be to make a case for it on the EA forum, giving arguments and let people see and get excited about your vision. Another approach would be to think about ways to put authentic relating into easily digestable chunks that include positive vibes about authentic relating and an association of authentic relating with effectiveness or whatever. :D
You bring up that memetics helps with understanding failure modes in cultural evolution, and that seems benign and useful to me. But I’d wish that the interventions based on that understanding are also done transparently and cooperatively, and while you probably agree with that, I still worry that a memetic approach tends to emphasize the cooperative improvement and truth-seeking less than e.g. “cultivating EA’ s shared knowledge (capital)”.
And though I sometimes sound a whole lot Slytherin, I absolutely don’t want to normalize using the Dark Arts in EA community building. I’ll change the term in the initial post and link to this comment thread.
Yup, the evolution and spreading of memes is not always aligned with the good, true, and beautiful. But the same is true for genetics, the field which memetics is originally based on.
Human evolution shaped our gene pool in a way that makes us prone to some biases, some forms of prejudice, and violence. But that is just one of the many aspects of these theories. That these are facts about genetics doesn’t mean that genetics and evolution themselves are evil or tainted and something you shouldn’t associate yourself with unless you are a hateful bigot. If we were to follow your rule to the end, we would have to invent all the vocabulary of genetical research from scratch because racists sometimes like to talk about genetics as well. Memetics is not a trivial field of knowledge, and I think just as with genetics, obfuscating the valuable work that has already been done there by reinventing the wheel from scratch with a fresh branding is way too costly.
As we’re at Wikipedia-ing, mind the introductory definition in the meme-article:
That description is entirely independent of how valuable/damaging memes are, and pretty much exactly what I mean. “The memetic capital of the EA community”, then, is the amount of good and useful memes we have readily available in the community, alongside with the absence of bad and harmful memes.
Thanks, I agree that we should generally not let a useful concept be tainted by negative associations. But!
That’s kinda what I mean, memes are independent of how valuable/damaging the information are, and that’s one main way that in my mind it stands out among other concepts such as ideas. E.g. it seems odd to say “I’m not convinced by this meme”.
Maybe “ideational capital” could fit better? This terms seems to be used in political science, e.g.
Do you have a link to a smooth definition of “ideational capital”? I googled your citation and found a book, but apparently my skill in deciphering political science essays has massively declined since university.
A meta-level remark: I notice I’m a bit emotionally attached to “memetic capital”, because I’ve thought about these things under the term “memetics” a bunch during the last year. In addition, a person whose understanding of cultural evolution I admire uses to speak about it in terms of memetics, so there’s some matters of tribal belonging at play for me. Just flagging this, because it makes me prone to rationalization and overestimating the strength of my reasons to defend the term “memetic capital”.
_____________
Now to why I genuinely think “memetic capital” is more fitting:
1. It is useful not only for talking about propositional knowledge.
When I read “ideational capital”, or generally “ideas”, I initially think exclusively of propositional knowledge, i.e. things that can be stated as facts in natural language, like “Tel Aviv is a city in Israel.” But there are other forms of knowledge than propositional knowledge. John Vervaeke, for example, describes the “4 Ps of knowledge”:
- Propositional knowing (see above)
- Procedural knowing (knowledge how to do things, e.g. ride a bicycle, or fill a tax form)
- Perspectival knowing (knowledge of where and how you are situated in the world as an embodied being, e.g. where up and down is, that this is a computer and that a glass door I can’t just pass through without opening it.)
- Participatory knowing (knowledge of how to move in the world. E.g., whether you feel stuck and confused staring at a bouldering problem, or just get into flow while your hands and feet find the right places at the wall almost on their own.)
In my understanding, memetics is useful to describe all four forms of knowing, while at the first glance, “ideational capital” only refers to the propositional kind. And in my opinion, the more interesting aspects of memetic capital are procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing. It’s better than nothing to have propositional knowledge that Double Crux exists and what the key steps listed in the CFAR handbook are. But the more interesting, and more important, thing is having an intuitive grasp of the spirit of the method, and intuitively, without thinking, applying it in a conversation like this one.
2. Memetics lends itself to a systemic, rather than engineering-approach to understanding and influencing social systems.
The observation that memes’ evolutionary fitness is orthogonal to their usefulness points out a problem, but it also helps us get a better grasp of which strategies for spreading valuable memes might and might not work. For example, if we ask “Which core concepts should more people in EA know?”, we end up writing a curriculum, like the post above. However, we can also ask “Which trajectory does EA’s cultural evolution have, and how can we influence that trajectory so that it flows into a more desirable manner and direction?” Then, we might discover more and completely different attack routes. For example, we end up with a call to action and an offer to connect group organizers to facilitators like the one at the end of my post.
I wrote the following on Facebook in a precursor to this EAF post:
As it is based on evolutionary theory, I think memetics is particularly well-suited for describing and understanding processes of cultural evolution like the one outlined above that I think is currently happening in EA. And the better we understand these processes, the better can we intervene on them to prevent bad things. These bad things could be an EA-internal culture war, or even the community eventually breaking apart because it can’t handle its own diversity.
When I say “memetic capital”, I don’t have a specific set of timeless ideas in mind that all the EAs should know/should have known about all along. Instead, I think of an ever-changing egregore of ideas, processes, traditions, social customs, social and psychotechnologies, figures of speech and whathaveyou. And the reference to evolutionary theory the term “memetic” implies feels very elegant to me for pointing at this egregore.
The crux of EA’s (or any social bubble’s) memetic capital is that it is hard to inventorize, hard to steer, and that in some sense, we are its servants rather than its masters. I think memetics can describe that. And in the process of describing, it can help us gain more agency over which memes we want to keep and which ones we want to get rid of.
_____________
Do let me know whether this makes sense or sounds like total gibberish to you. I’m thinking/explaining all these things for the first time. And the way I think about social systems is influenced way more by continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, systems theory, and Buddhism than by the more STEM/engineering-style approaches that are common in EA. Thus, I have no clue whether I’m at all understandable for people who read other books than me.
Thanks for the elaboration, no, that all felt very comprehensible to me! Hopefully not ghibbering too much as well:
Knowledge capital?
I agree that “idea” is more strongly connected with propositional knowledge, which is suboptimal, and that “knowledge” seems preferable as it covers the other types you bring up. I just googled “knowledge capital” and that might fit nicely and seems like it’s actually an existing term from economics that overlaps a lot with what you have in mind (though of course missing the side-benefit of alluding to potentially neglected forms of analysis that you mention).
From Investopedia:
Memetic’s lack of ephasis on argument still worries me
One potential point of disagreement that is also related to my discomfort with memetics is this sentence:
I generally feel icky about strategies that try to affect the cultural development of a community when this is not done transparently and deliberately. And memes kind of feel unilateral and uncooperative this way. For example say you’d like the EA community to engage more with authentic relating training to prevent unproductive and unnecessary conflicts. One way to do this would be to make a case for it on the EA forum, giving arguments and let people see and get excited about your vision. Another approach would be to think about ways to put authentic relating into easily digestable chunks that include positive vibes about authentic relating and an association of authentic relating with effectiveness or whatever. :D
You bring up that memetics helps with understanding failure modes in cultural evolution, and that seems benign and useful to me. But I’d wish that the interventions based on that understanding are also done transparently and cooperatively, and while you probably agree with that, I still worry that a memetic approach tends to emphasize the cooperative improvement and truth-seeking less than e.g. “cultivating EA’ s shared knowledge (capital)”.
Agreed, “knowledge capital” fits well.
And though I sometimes sound a whole lot Slytherin, I absolutely don’t want to normalize using the Dark Arts in EA community building. I’ll change the term in the initial post and link to this comment thread.