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Dirk comments on A Taxonomy of Bias: Mindware Problems - Less Wrong
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I don't think the Mensa data is that useful necessarily. The sort of people who join Mensa are often people who think they are smart and think that intelligence matters a lot more than critical thinking or listening to criticism from people even if they aren't as bright. It shouldn't be that surprising if they are going to pick up unjustified fringe beliefs.
I'm not sure I completely see the difference between memes and mindware. Are they they the same thing but with different emphasis? If not, what is the difference? (I know that there are four of five different notions of memes floating around so this may not be a well-defined question).
For the purposes of this discussion, pretty much the same thing. I added a note to the post clarifying this.
To be super-specific: memes are a kind of mindware. Though they're practically synonymous, a piece of mindware that you cannot or do not replicate is not a meme. A secret belief that you actually keep secret, say, would be mindware but not a meme.
That said, the whole point of memetics is that ideas survive to the extent that they replicate well; so we should expect non-memetic mindware to be rare.
Doesn't that seem like a weakness in the definition of memes? After all, a gene that does not replicate (eg arising through mutation and causing the organism to be non-viable) is still a gene.
It is more a question of the emphasis of analysis. If you speak of a meme, you are thinking of its replicative power; if you speak of mindware, you are thinking about its effect on the possessor's thoughts; but either way it is the same concept. To draw the analogy with genes, it is as though the word 'protein-builder' had been coined for the purpose of speaking of a gene's effect on the body, and we retained the word 'gene' for use when discussing allele frequencies.