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MrMind comments on November 2014 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (154)
LOL: "had" to live with them. I like (= I find humorous) the implied, possibly unintended, sexism.
Why not? I mean, I don't say that we should or shouldn't put women in a bad light, nor that we should or shouldn't blame theology for that. But why we can't blame theology?
It's not like memes evolve to attain truthiness, or that humans are automatic maximizers / strategizers. Pretty any memeplex I know of has some form of "push away / ostracize my enemies". Understood, any meme that contains "kill all women" would have a pretty short lifespan. But one containing "enslave all women and use them as breeding cattle" could survive indefinitely, whether women are cattle or not. Isn't the whole Neoreactionary movement born under the fallacy that equates survivability with adherence to truth? I find this to be a somewhat inclusive description.
Despite this, I still find the linked article to be appalingly bad at presenting the issue with some form of objectivity. They are not even trying. But I don't know the site and I'm possibly mistaken assuming that it has as mission disseminating informations of some quality.
What definition of "sexism" are you using here? The word "had" there serves an important point, contrast this with the fact that people don't have to live with other ethnic groups.
Yes, they do. If this wasn't the case we'd still be on the savannah getting chased by lions.
Um, tribes have to compete with other tribes. Memes can't survive for long simply because they aren't immediately destructive.
Yes, but it could also imply that women are difficult to endure, and men would be better off without them. But of course this meaning was unintended, thus the humor.
But where does the selective pressure comes from? Why this pressure has not made the atomistic idea, or the spherical Earth, formulated almost three thousands of year ago, immediately popular? Why there are people that still believe in magic? Why we still believe in both relativity and quantum mechanics, despite these ideas being incompatible and more than a century old?
Yes, avoiding to be immediately destructive is not sufficient to guarantee a meme survivability, but cultures can lock all kind of memes if there's no immediate selective pressure against them.
For example, a society that has to battle on phyisical grounds, with physical strength, gains no immediate disadvantage over a more egalitarian society if it enslaves women.
A false meme can even gain a society some advantage, such as the case of an ethnic group that enslaves another ethnic group and makes them work for hard labor.
Past history was about guns, germs and steel, not about truth. Those are what has been selected. The rest of the memes are purely random junk.
As advancedatheist said in the OC:
Rather then mocking his phrasing maybe you should try actually paying attention to his point.
In particular truths about metallurgy and the chemistry of gunpowder.
I wonder if you realize that a direct implication of this statement is that treating women as not cattle offers no advantage to a society..?
Deleterious things get locked into fixation in genomes and biological systems all the time. I see no reason that deleterious traits cannot get fixed into cultures.
Oh, they surely can. But that gives those cultures a disadvantage and maintaining this disadvantage "indefinitely" seems to be a stretch, especially given how cultures are malleable and tend to change anyway.
Indefinitely meant more "comparably to a culture lifespan" than "until the heat death of the universe".
It's not that it offers no advantage, is that it offers no immediate disadvantage.
A discriminating culture that happens to have more material advantage at the start could just wipe other more egalitarian cultures without much concerns. It's only very recently that physical strength has lost its importance as a driving force in cultures clashes.
It is possible that in a future where intellect matters much more, but life is still cheap, a more egalitarian society will employ women more efficiently and thus prevail against discriminating ones. But it seems that the more material wealth we have, the more relaxed we are about the whole killing other people stuff.
Really, you think so?