meme drives
Meme drives: gene drives applied to self-replicating ideas
11 tweets · July 2019 · 37 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
...what? there's a thing called a gene drive that makes a gene spread really fast through a population from a small start, basically by making it always (or usually) be inherited rather than only a 50/50 shot.
In using the term "meme" here, I'm referring to "an idea that causes someone who holds it to spread it to others". Quoting @DavidDeutschOxf: > "A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. [...Memes are] ideas that are replicators."
So extending the "gene drive" concept to memes, we get a notion of a particular variation of a meme that tends to spread itself extra-virulently. That has a particular tendency to outcompete other memes at the reproduction stage, not just via later selection.
I'm recognizing that this kind of sounds like this disturbing phenomenon that @nntaleb talks about in this article (/chapter from Skin in the Game) describing how the majority can end up with a medium.com/incerto/the-mo…
I originally imagined that there also might be creative ways to use the idea of a "meme drive" as well, but as I thought about it more I found myself thinking "this seems to describe a kind of meme that would tend to spread among people even if it was bad for them."
Which... makes sense, given that one of the main proposed uses of a gene drive might be to literally kill off an entire species of mosquito (the ones that carry malaria, dengue, & zika) by eg making all offspring male. This only works if gene spreads though maladaptive.
Then I realize out David Deustch (quoted above) has written extensively about this exact structure in The Beginning of Infinity. For most of human history (& prehistory!) the kinds of memes we've had have been optimized for replicating, not truth or subjective well-being.
The "meme drive" metaphor then allows us to think about how these "static memeplexes" are so sticky (eg why ex-Christians still act as if they're afraid of hell and parents do all sorts of shit to their kids they swore they wouldn't)
...and furthermore allows us to ask questions like "given that these static memes have a meme drive, do we need an even more powerful meme drive to replace them?" and "what would that even mean?"