The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice
by Steve Rayhawk and Anna Salamon. (Joint authorship; there's currently no way to notate that in the Reddit code base.)
Related to: Use the Native Architecture
When cholera moves through countries with poor drinking water sanitation, it apparently becomes more virulent. When it moves through countries that have clean drinking water (more exactly, countries that reliably keep fecal matter out of the drinking water), it becomes less virulent. The theory is that cholera faces a tradeoff between rapidly copying within its human host (so that it has more copies to spread) and keeping its host well enough to wander around infecting others. If person-to-person transmission is cholera’s only means of spreading, it will evolve to keep its host well enough to spread it. If it can instead spread through the drinking water (and thus spread even from hosts who are too ill to go out), it will evolve toward increased lethality. (Critics here.)
I’m stealing this line of thinking from my friend Jennifer Rodriguez-Mueller, but: I’m curious whether anyone’s gotten analogous results for the progress and mutation of ideas, among communities with different communication media and/or different habits for deciding which ideas to adopt and pass on. Are there differences between religions that are passed down vertically (parent to child) vs. horizontally (peer to peer), since the former do better when their bearers raise more children? Do mass media such as radio, TV, newspapers, or printing presses decrease the functionality of the average person’s ideas, by allowing ideas to spread in a manner that is less dependent on their average host’s prestige and influence? (The intuition here is that prestige and influence might be positively correlated with the functionality of the host’s ideas, at least in some domains, while the contingencies determining whether an idea spreads through mass media instruments might have less to do with functionality.)
Extending this analogy -- most of us were taught as children to wash our hands. We were given the rationale, not only of keeping ourselves from getting sick, but also of making sure we don’t infect others. There’s an ethic of sanitariness that draws from the ethic of being good community members.
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