wedrifid comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong

36 Post author: multifoliaterose 15 August 2010 07:16AM

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Comment author: wedrifid 25 August 2010 06:50:51AM *  2 points [-]

And Learning is equivalent to absorbing memes. The two are one and the same.

I don't agree. Meme absorption is just one element of learning.

To learn how to play darts well you absorb a couple of dozen memes and then spend hours upon hours rewiring your brain to implement a complex coordination process.

To learn how to behave appropriately in a given culture you learn a huge swath of existing memes, continue to learn a stream of new ones but also dedicate huge amounts of background processing reconfiguring the weightings of existing memes relative to each other and external inputs. You also learn all sorts of implicit information about how memes work for you specifically (due to, for example, physical characteristics), much of this information will never be represented in meme form.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 25 August 2010 07:05:57AM 0 points [-]

Fine, if you take memes to be just symbolic level transferable knowledge (which, thinking it over, I agree with), then at a more detailed level learning involves several sub-processes, one of which is the rapid transfer of memes into short term memory.