Re: legend of Greyfriar's Bobby EP Meta

From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat 28 Jan 2006 - 19:22:02 GMT

  • Next message: Jerry Bryson: "Re: Little Dutch Boy"

    >From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com>
    >Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >Subject: Re: legend of Greyfriar's Bobby EP Meta
    >Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 10:52:48 -0500
    >
    >At 07:29 PM 1/27/2006 -0500, Keith wrote:
    >
    >>First, you need to analyze human behaviors
    >
    >snip
    >
    >I am curious about something. My postings rarely get follow ups, and not
    >just here.
    >
    >Among the reasons . . . .
    >
    >The postings are clear and so obvious nobody has a comment.
    >
    >The postings are so unclear or esoteric that nobody can make sense of them.
    >
    >I am not just fishing for compliments, I am really in the dark.
    >
    I usually read your posts. I'm interested in your perspective, though I'm not sold on EP and sometimes tend to disagree a lot :-)

    I indirectly followed up to Benzon and you in a reply to Kate a couple pots bach in the archive. I notice sometimes people indirectly reply to something I said. We're emerging from another long doldrum, so I'm not entirely sure what drives the response cycles on this list.

    The #1 reason for lack of responce could be that most of us are really busy and skim through the posts, but don't have time to insert comment along the way.

    Another reason would be diversity of backgrounds. Not only are we all from different intellectual backgrounds (undergrad biology and psychology here), that it's hard to comprehend comments that are in our knowledge store. It's probably not the way you word our posts as much as how much experience people have with the intellectual background you come from. Memetics has so many potential angles that we're all grasping at certain areas we're comfortable with.

    Another issue might be language barrier stuff. There are people from all over the world reading posts and linguistic background might influence the way people word their posts or how well they attend to a post they are reading. Being from two different fields of knowledge alone is a linguitic barrier, because part of learning a field is learning the language of that field (terminology, etc).

    People might be nervous about replying for various reasons, like that you're pretty well known in memetics circles and people might be intimidated by Richard for the same reason, because he's published a book on the topic. If Dennett or Dawkins posted here, some people might scurry back into a corner, just because of the author's prominence.

    I thought it was cool to have Brodie over the years posting here given who he is. When Kate showed up I thought it was great that she had published a book and wanted feedback. You definitely bring a different perspective into the mix, with your emphasis on EP issues. Others might think more in terms of human psychological plasticity than you do, since memetics is naturally cultural in nature and might attract people wanting something different than the evolved innate pattern or modular mind approach of classic ethology and sociobiology through EP.

    =============================================================== 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 : Sat 28 Jan 2006 - 19:43:48 GMT