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ciphergoth comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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Memes are at best a thought-provoking analogy - we have no way of being rigorous about them. I'd love to be wrong about this, but I'd be surprised.
Would you say that "We have no way of being rigorous about it" means that we shouldn't teach the meme analogy?
It means that if I talk about memes, I leave myself open to an easy challenge to which I currently have no reply. I'd really like a good reply, since I think it's a genuinely useful aid to thinking about what it means for an idea to be popular, so if you have one I'm keen to hear it!
Suppose I present a concrete non-rigorous analogy: "A chain letter is like an organism with a habitat of human minds.". What is the easy challenge that I have left myself open to? I already freely conceded that it was non-rigorous.
Johnicholas:
You leave yourself open to the reply that the non-rigorousness of the analogy makes it useless or even pernicious. Owning up to a fault doesn't make it go away.
Congratulations, you have just reduced the proper use of humility to a single proverb. I shall endeavor to go around repeating this.
What exactly do you mean by being "rigorous about them"?
Some seemingly 'rigorous' ways of studying memes that spring to mind:
It's not clear that memes are copied with a high enough degree of fidelity to really be subject to evolution by natural selection, but they certainly share the other structural characteristics of genes, namely variation and differential fitness.