Hmmmm. Depends how ingrained the memes are in the material. Oh, you'd certainly have awareness of the memes - but accepting them is a different story, and a certain skepticism in a student (or in a professor) can probably blunt that effect quite a bit.
Even if the memes are that thoroughly integrated, though, the only effect is to make the establishment of a parallel infrastructure that much more appropriate a solution.
I think missionaries are usually sent to particular places by organizations, and when one leaves another goes.
It's not going to be perfect. Sometimes there will be more missionaries than established places to send them, and new missions can be opened - but sometimes a missionary will, through mischance or malice, die before he's expected to do so and there will be no replacement ready to send.
I don't actually know about specific incidences, but there should be enough data on what happens when a mission is abandoned to be able to tell how successful it can be.
... (read more)You're welcome to be (having had the facts pointed out to you) as surprised or unsurprised as
Huh.
Okay. In this particular real-life example, though, it is clear that the politicisation is in the infrastructure around the science, not in the science itself. That is to say, learning climate science is not memetically dangerous - it is simply difficult to get a paper published that does not agree with certain politics. And that is bad, but it is not the worst possibility - it means that someone merely studying climate science is safe in so doing.
So, in this particular case, the solution of studying climate science oneself, becoming an expert, and then forming a suitable opinion is a viable strategy (albeit one that takes some significant time).
(An alternative solution -... (read more)
But "amateurs should defer to experts", in reference to Christianity, doesn't mean "amateurs should accept the experts' word about Christianity," it means "amateurs should accept the claims presented by Christianity". There's nothing comparable for Shakespeare. In this sense, neither experts nor schools teach Shakespeare at all.
Um.
Going back to the comment that started this all - over here - shows that the quote originally comes from this page, which is an essay written from the atheist perspective on how to go about arguing the historicity of Jesus. The 'experts' in question appear (to me) to be not theologists but historians, seeking whether or not a given person, referenced in certain historical documents, actually... (read more)
Schools still teach Latin?
...mine didn't. (It did teach Shakespeare, though).
If all experts are infected with meme plagues, and are able to prevent alternative views from being presented, then you have a problem. This implies that one of the following is true:
You could attempt to study the subject to expert level yourself, taking appropriate anti-meme-plague precautions; but you have to be very careful that you're not shutting your ears to something that's really true (you don't want to become a climate-change-denying weather expert, after all) so you'll need to seriously consider all necessary data (maybe re-run some vital experiments). This would take significant time and effort.
I don't know what other strategy could reasonably be followed...
I don't think you need a careful effort to track their exact effectiveness. It would be fairly obvious in a couple of generations that peaceful missionaries would fall in one of two categories - either they have some success (as evidenced by some number of converts that they win over) or they have no success (as evidenced by every missionary outreach pretty much collapsing as soon as the missionary either leaves or dies).
A careful effort to track effectiveness could tell the difference between slight success and strong success, but I think that even with a merely cursory checkup people could tell the difference between some success and no success at all.
... (read more)If you
A brief Google points me at this fellow. He was a medieval Fransiscan missionary to China, and established what appears to have been a reasonably successful church there that stayed around for about forty years after his death (until the Ming Dynasty arose in 1369 and expelled them from the country).
I'm pretty sure that the main modern transmission vector for Newtonian physics is schoolteacher-to-child (which is very similar to parent-to-child, except that the parent hires an intermediary). Mind you, I don't have any stats or data handy to back that up, it's just a general impression.
So far, we only have one known example of the development of intelligent life; and that example is us. Humanity. That means that we have only one machanism that is known to be able to produce intelligent life; and that is evolution. But by far the majority of life that is produced by evolution is not
intelligent. (In fact, by far the majority of life produced by evolution appears to be bacteria, as far as I can tell. There's also a lot of beetles).
Why did evolution produce such a steep climb in human intelligence, while not so much in the case of other creatures? That, I suspect, is at least partially because as... (read 480 more words →)
Hmmm. I don't know enough history to be able to name specific situations, but what about the other way round - countries that learned Latin without being conquered? (Perhaps for ease of trading?)
I believe the Roman Empire once tried to suppress... (read more)