Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id EAA12437 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 17 Jun 2000 04:30:48 +0100 From: "Richard Brodie" <richard@brodietech.com> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Cons and Facades Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000 20:28:49 -0700 Message-ID: <NBBBIIDKHCMGAIPMFFPJGEIDEPAA.richard@brodietech.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2919.6600 Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.0.20000616115929.01dbe340@popmail.mcs.net> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Careful, Aaron... people might start to accuse you of getting self-helpish!
;-)
Richard Brodie richard@brodietech.com www.memecentral.com/rbrodie.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
Of Aaron Lynch
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2000 10:58 AM
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: RE: Cons and Facades
At 03:48 PM 6/15/00 -0500, Aaron Lynch wrote:
>Relativism seems to have yet another interesting consequence, at least for
>some. Accepting the idea that "truth is relative" can make one more likely
>to reach the conclusion that "telling the truth" does not matter. This can
>then become a cognitive "justification" for telling lies, that is, making
>statements that are stamped as "untrue" or in the mind of the teller, or
>that the teller uses to deceive or mislead the recipient.
>
>If relativism is more prevalent in some fields than others, it could lead
>to lower levels of honesty. That, in turn, could tend to subvert the
>scientific method more for some fields than for others, and ultimately
>give some fields worse reputations than others. <snip>
>"Bad attitudes" are indeed a pervasive element in the modern USA and many
>other countries, especially in adolescents. (I think things often change
>around the time one has children to raise, and can see that a "bad
>attitude" imitated by an unsophisticated young child will lead to
>disaster.) But many products are now marketed by appeals to "bad
>attitude," such as "the luxury car with attitude," etc. Even an article
>about Dawkins was marketed with an appeal to "bad attitudes" sometime in
>the mid 1990s: Dawkins's picture appeared on the cover of Wired Magazine
>with a caption that called him "evolution's bad boy" or some such.
On thinking about this further, it occurs to me that there may be still
other ways that "bad attitudes" might affect memetics and related fields
more than physics, for instance. Memetics provides a means of regarding
neighborly love, kindness, honesty, etc. as being the result of infectious
memes that are parasitic to their hosts. This can lead, perhaps
unconsciously, to a view that neighborly love, kindness, honesty etc. are
foolish, and that the wiser attitude is the "bad attitude." For those who
already sport a "bad attitude," memetics might hold a disproportionate
allure due to its ability to provide a rationalization that neighborly
love, kindness, honesty, etc. are foolish.
Additionally, memetics provides new ways to reach the cynical conclusion
that unkindness, dishonesty, etc. will naturally prevail. This conclusion
can then lead one to infer that attempts to remain kind or honest (at more
than a thin facade level) will not matter, because entertaining this
thought can lead one to conclude that "bad attitudes" will outpropagate
"good attitudes" anyway. If someone reckons that adopting a "good attitude"
will just lead to forfeiting success and fame to someone else with a "bad
attitude," then they can easily decide to go with the "bad attitude" for
their own good.
Another route to "bad attitudes" is through the naturalistic fallacy. With
so much attention to selfish memes, one can simply conclude that one
"ought" to engineer or transmit selfish selfish memes. A double sense of
"selfishness" may enter in here, in which the meme is "selfhish"not only
with respect to itself, but also with respect to the interests of those
creating or transmitting it.
The potential harm of the resulting cons and facades does not require our
field to have as accomplished a scientist as Einstein in it. The thought
experiment was merely intended to illustrate the principles by which harm
can be done. We can imagine a scenario in which scientists of much more
ordinary levels of accomplishment than Einstein face not only the ordinary
scientific dissent among colleagues, but also the problems of having their
whole field's reputation and achievement hurt by a proliferation of cons
and facades. Whether "The Method, in a word, always winnows out the false."
as Wade put it may depend on how vigorously the scientific community acts
to limit the prevalence and influence of cons and facades.
--Aaron Lynch
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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
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