effective competition

From: Reed Konsler (konslerr@mail.weston.org)
Date: Thu 05 Dec 2002 - 17:55:24 GMT

  • Next message: Grant Callaghan: "Re: effective competition"

    Grant Callaghan
    > > >
    > > > In numerous posts many of us have pointed out the fact that you can't
    > > > argue with memes of faith.

    I believe that I can create competitors to cultural replicators incorporating a faith meme. When I read the statement above, I focus on the word "argue" which, in my mind, has connotations of debate, formal logic, competitive strategy, and strict construction of rules. I interpret the above statement to mean that such strategies are not very effective in transmitting competing replicators into a mind that already hosts a replicator containing the faith meme.

    My interpretation doesn't imply that there aren't effective ways to have influence using language. It's more a question of adapting the memes of the competing replicator to the hosts present ideosphere.

    One difficulty in transmitting cultural replicators is that we tend to be in love with our own mental images. Like Narcissus, it is only satisfying to see a faithful reflection or reproduction of our replicator in the other. Anything less seems to compromise the "truth" of the idea. If I'm not careful, I often engage in the process with the implicit assumption that I can erase and overwrite memes on the surface of another brain like sectors on a hard drive.

    An effective competing replicator, however, needs to be specifically targeted. As the adage goes, success is 10% inspiration (breathing in the new replicator) and 90% perspiration (figuring out the thought process of the other person). It's very hard to keep that balance in mind.

    A corollary is that, given limited time and energy, one must distill down the replicator to the fewest memes possible. Every bit of excess baggage will require 9 times as much effort to transmit (or reduce the probability of transmission by some related factor).

    Best, Reed

    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu 05 Dec 2002 - 17:55:42 GMT