From: derek gatherer (dgatherer2002@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Wed 09 Apr 2003 - 11:50:34 GMT
> Keith Henson wrote:Meme spread by mathematical
>models that look exactly like epidemics. We have a
>potential pandemic (world wide epidemic) going right
>now. I thought you might be interested in the shape
>of the curve to
date.http://squeak.org/us/ted/sars->graph.html
Yes, it has a logarithmic y-axis, but is basically the
'contagionist paradigm'.
http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/2002/vol6/gatherer_d.html#HEADING5
It also shows that even in cases where we know:
a) the cause of the contagion (a real virus)
b) the means of generating immunity (ie. the actual
immune system),
it is still very difficult to predict the outcome in
any way. There may be millions of deaths or just a
few thousand - it simply isn't possible to tell.
It is even more difficult to predict social phenomena
using epidemiological methods. For culturally
selected traits (sensu Cavalli-Sforza), we don't know
exactly what is being transmitted. We don't know why
some people are more susceptible than others. We
don't know why some traits are culturally selected.
We can't even identify with any great certainty where
cultural selection is occurring. (See
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/5/4/5.html).
For instance:
>Of course there are many memes associated with this
>business, including those which spread panic among
?>the population. We have already seen massive
>disruptions of the travel industry.
If it really is possible to track memes in the same
way as one can track real viruses, it ought to be
possible to produce at least as good a curve for the
putative 'travel avoiding' meme as for the real virus.
However, nobody has even begun (or can even begin) to
do that, and in any case, if the predictive power was
only as good as that for the real virus (and that's
really as good as it could ever get - even with
complete knowledge of the mechanisms), it wouldn't be
something an airline CEO would want to bet his/her
shirt on.
Contagionism, as a repdictive mechanism for social
phenomena, is real a non-starter. The best that can
be done is to analyse things in retrospect< and say<
here was a contagion> any attempt to predict the
future using it is futile>
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