The Memescape

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins popularized the notion of a 'meme,' which compliments the biological 'gene.' When he took a question about the subject at a talk in Columbia, SC recently, he seemed almost rueful, saying something like "Oh, no. Not the meme question." But there's no turning back now, as the google trends chart shows:

A search on Amazon.com revealed about eighteen books about memes, and there are currently 49 million hits on google, including the wiki page, a Daily Meme site, and Know Your Meme that claims to document Internet phenomena (one might say ephemera). A whole "science of memes" called memetics has sprung up, claiming 487,000 web hits currently.

So what's a meme? The wikipedia definition is just fine:

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"^[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena

Remember pet rocks, anyone? Meme. Tickle-me Elmo. Another meme. Obviously, "meme" itself is a meme, and a very successful one. If we think of any medium that will permit complex organizations within it, it seems to find fixed points (self-replicators) on its own. We might call this the cosmic version of Murphy's Law: if a system has fixed-point expressions, they emerge naturally from noise. Feed some noise into a microphone and point it at the speaker. You don't get amplified noise, you get a particular resonant frequency that is tuned to the physical characteristics of the system. This is a powerful idea because you can work it backwards too: look at what emerges naturally from a medium and then figure out what the characteristics of the medium must be.

Ever get a chain letter? That's a particularly interesting one because it's easy to dissect. This idea is described by Dawkins, but I'll paraphrase. A good way to get an idea replicator going is to combine these elements:

1. An imperative to replicate the idea. This is the basic "reproduction drive." E.g. Send this to ten of your friends.
2. A carrot. If you perform #1, something good is likely to happen to you. E.g. Cite stories of people who had amazing fortune after forwarding the email to ten of their friends.
3. A stick. If you fail to perform #1, something bad will happen to you. E.g. This one dude forgot to send the email and a brick fell on him.

Of course, the more fake documentation (a REAL LAWYER friend said "blah blah blah"), and other emotional mumbo-jumbo you can ladle onto the thing, the better chance it has. In order to survive, it needs to multiply its chances geometrically (at least, I think I can prove that if you give me an hour), and hence the replication imperative is structured to multiply senders. Dawkins notes that the elements above are found in most religions.

This is a mind-broadening idea, because we all carry around the burden of memes that are so deeply buried in our nous that we don't realize they are there. Some are undoubtedly hardwired by evolution so we avoid starvation, for example. Not everything you believe can be logical. This is because even logic is based on assumptions (called axioms). Karl Popper ran into this problem when he philosophized about science never proving anything a theory, but rather only disproving theories that didn't work. By his own logic, he couldn't prove that. You have to start somewhere. It's a nice exercise to dig around in your beliefs and see what's there. Could be a great self-assessment assignment for a course that contains noncognitives too. Which leads to next topic.

Memes and the Academy. What does this have to do with teaching, learning, and assessing? Obviously teaching has to do with the transmission of ideas. I think we miss a trick by not trying more actively to transmit habits of mind as well. After all, part of being open-minded is the meta-cognitive ability to examine ones own beliefs. We could do that more deliberately in our curricula.

There apparently are some scholarly activities on this topic, for example "Memes and the Teaching of English, which "Examines why some sayings and catchphrases stick in people's minds, while others are unrecognized and unused. Offers an answer to this question from an evolutionary standpoint."

It's much more natural to me to think of assessment on the meme level, rather than on the cognitive ability level. Individual concepts and skills can be taught. I'm not sure how to teach raw cognitive ability. The assessments of the former are more or less straightforward. Of the latter, steeped in statistical voodoo and ed-psych theory that may or may not have a basis in physical reality.

In practical terms, you can use memetics every day. Here's an example. You're sitting in a committee meeting, where the members are problem-solving. You have some ideas of your own about how the issue at hand might be resolved. What do you do?

First, there are always ideas. Lots of ideas. I'd recommend sorting through your own in your head before advancing one. Make sure it has a chance of survival. Wouldn't want to get the poor meme's hopes up only to be dashed immediately. There is value to producing good ideas--it makes you seem smart--and so your standing in the community is enhanced when you display brilliance. So you may choose to pick your best idea and propose it. This is somewhat Machiavellian because the loading is "Professor Zza has good ideas" rather than the actual idea itself. We all have to play that game early in our careers. Of course, it extends to publishing research, which is more substantive than what happens in committees, but the idea is the same. This is the reason there are lots of meaningless papers produced--the real message is: Zza is really productive.

Once past the need to establish oneself, there is (sometimes) the altruist urge to actually reach good decisions in committees, simply for the good of the academy. This is an entirely different approach. It's like fishing. The problem is that everyone has only so much political capital to spend. Even if you have wonderful ideas, no one wants to admit that their own ideas are ugly misshapen things, so there is a kind of baby worship that happens when someone produces a newborn meme, no matter how defective and ill-begotten. At least, this can happen. If you're lucky there will be a ruthless meme-killer in the group who wields an idea-axe to put these unfortunate ideas out of their misery. That's a political minefield, so better have tenure first, and plan to be labeled a "character" for the rest of your career.

The fishing idea works like this: first, admit that other people have ideas as good as yours, and dedicate yourself to finding the best ones overall--not by wielding the axe, but by subtle twitches of the fishing lure. Help turn the discussion toward the ideas you see as best, and toss out a distraction if a real clunker comes along. A bright shiny object is as effective as an axe.

"I think we should eliminate faculty parking altogether."
"Hey--did you hear the merit bonuses are out?"

Check your ego. If you have a really great idea, wait to see if someone else comes up with it too. You can nudge your lure a bit toward the idea and hope someone grabs it. Then speak out in support of it strongly. This gives the little meme the best chance at life. For example, imagine that you like the idea of instituting an Assessment Day in the academic calendar to allow program assessments and surveys to be administered all at once. You might dangle your lure thus:

You: One of the problems is finding the time to get all these assessments done in an organized way. We don't want to duplicate students--ask them to take the same survey twice. They hate that.

Prof Eks: Maybe an assembly of students on Saturday?

You: They'd never show up. It would cost us a fortune in iPods to motivate them. I wish we could take class time to do it--you know, all at the same time period.

Prof Eks: That would never fly--we'd need to sacrifice a whole day from the calendar.

You: That's true. We'd need a whole day, probably. Hmmmm.

Prof Why: What if we added a day? Call it Assessment Day?

You: What a great idea! I've heard of this being done a Harvard and Yale. It would solve all our problems! Super!

You get the idea. You might want to hone your acting skills. A less honest way to engineer memes, which I don't recommend, is to attribute your own ideas to other people as a way of flattery. "You remember that idea you had about an Assessment Day? I really think that's a winner." If it really is their idea, that's fine, of course. But if you're inserting it into their memespace, tagged with their own ownership, you might get a funny look. It happens, though--now you're perhaps inoculated against such attacks. By means of this meme. Enjoy.

Update: Note that during the "fishing expedition" it often happens that someone advances an idea that's better than yours. At that point, it obvious what to do: support the better idea.

Dawkins and Decidability

On Tuesday night I was lucky enough to have friends who brought me along to Richard Dawkin's talk at University of South Carolina. I snapped the photo above from a few rows back. Dawkins is the author of The Selfish Gene and a bunch of other books, including his current on The Greatest Show on Earth. He's an evolutionary biologist, and writes and speaks very persuasively on the topic. Reading his first book was one of those WOW headspinners that change the way you think about the world. At least, I hope you've had that experience.

By coincidence, InsideHigherEd has a piece today called "Believing in God and Evolution" about a fundamentalists cleverly co-opting The Origin of Species and about bible colleges that make their students swear silly things like the belief that the earth is six thousand years old, and so on. It's a topic that never fails to rile up both sides, which you'll see if you read the comments. The internets are full of that stuff, and you can easily mobilize your amygdala by searching for blogs on either side of the great belief divide.

The connection, of course, is that Dr. Dawkins is quite outspoken about the general silliness that ensues when one believes things that aren't tied to knowledge and empiricism and all that boring stuff. In that vein was a question from the floor after Dawkins did some readings, asking about the evolutionary basis for belief in mystical stuff. If we assume that mystical stuff is generally wrong, then it ought to be detrimental to survival, right? It applies very generally. Think about all the things people believe. Undoubtedly, most of it is wrong, including most of what you and I believe about all the things we're sure of. This error is tolerable because approximations are usually good enough, but can get out of hand.

The difference, I think, is related to a computer science idea of "semi-decidability." As an example, some computer programs will run forever if allowed to, but there's no general way to know ahead of time if this will be the case. On the other hand, if the program does halt after a while, you can eventually discover that fact just by letting it run and run. So you can discover if it halts (if you're patient), but not if it doesn't.

The mystical beliefs that persist seem to largely be in the semi-decidable category. That is, I can't prove that there are no squid overlords in the sea watching our every move. They haven't been found yet (that I'm aware of), but they might be discovered tomorrow. It's only decidable in the event that it turns out to be true.

That type of question or belief covers a lot of territory. Anything outside the scope of our immediate empirical state of knowledge is semi-decidable. Philosophers have had raging debates over this sort of thing. Does the mailbox really exist when I'm not looking at it?

A semi-decidable belief is different from one that approximates some aspect of reality--a formal or informal empirical taste of the world. If we call a student "bright" this is an assessment we draw from experience and observation, and it communicates something to others we tell. This is the mundane sort of information transfer that gets us through the day. Consider:

Stanislav: Have you tried out the new fish place on 5th? It's great.
Tatiana: No--thanks for the tip. How did you hear about it?
Stanislav: The squid overlords told me in a dream.

Stanislav lurches from informal empiricism into semi-decidability in a dramatic way by, in effect, claiming that the squid question is now empirically settled. At this point, Tatiana would probably remember she left the stove on and discretely exit. But notice a curious fact--if everyone believes there are squid overlords, this could be a quite normal conversation:

Stanislav: Have you tried out the new fish place on 5th? It's great.
Tatiana: No--thanks for the tip. How did you hear about it?
Stanislav: The high priest of the squid overlords told me over lunch yesterday.

If the two are both squid-ites, then this might not be an unusual exchange at all. There's no boundary crossed where a semi-decidable questions has claimed to be settled. The question of squid overlords is comfortably untouched, since the presence of a priest doesn't affect the central question of the sea-dwellers' own foot-headed existence.

In the past, one can imagine that clever characters claimed proof of semi-decidable questions, and perhaps even tried to produce some artifacts or recollections to support the claim. It might go like this:

Stanislav the Shaman: Hear me! In a dream last night, dark creatures spoke to me and I could feel their suckered appendages on my body. Here--look! See that dark spot on my arm there? They told me that the fish would be plentiful this year and for three more years, but we must build them a temple: The Citadel of the Squid Overlords. Oh, and I'm to be the high priest. All hail the squids! Now bring me a coconut latte!

You'd think this sort of thing would be harder to pull of now that empiricism is well-established and we have a miraculous way to transmit information around the globe. Yet people still believe that the moon landings were faked, and any major event spawns its own group of conspiracy theorists. Religions still spring up like weeds. Did you know that Jedi is a real religion now--the thing from Star Wars. Not sure if they have to talk like Yoda or not.

So maybe it is genetically hardwired, this tendency to cultivate worldviews that are unverifiable. One advantage could be getting a "group bonus" for believing. It's a simple strategy: I will pretend to believe X if that gets me security, food, mates, etc. And for some it won't be a pretense. Maybe this malleability allowed people to survive turbulent times when cultures mixed because of war, famine, flood, or other impetus to displacement. I can't speakee your language too goodly, but I have the little chain with the squid, see? Can I has a cheezeburger?

It would be nice to introduce a topic like this in a critical thinking course, but the secular academy is strongly allergic to being "preachy." The irony is acid--that we'd work very hard to make students understand that the Earth moves around the Sun and not the other way around, but we don't make a conscious effort to help them understand the qualitative difference between that question and the burning question of the squid overlords.

And in case you think I'm making all this up, you can buy the tee-shirt here!