Memetics

A meme is a mental belief or behavior learned from others. Another definition is a "unit of cultural information." Memetic means of or dealing with memes, just as genetic means of or dealing with genes. Memetics is the study and practical application of the abstraction of memes.

The use of social agent types, meme types, and memetic infection lies at the heart of Thwink.org's approach to modeling the social side of the sustainability problem. We believe there is no better way to understand why the human system behaves the way it does when it comes to political decision making and change resistance to solving the sustainability problem. How the science of memetics has been applied at Thwink.org may be seen in the following work:

Simulation Models

The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace paper describes how two types of social agents (corrupt and virtuous politicians) use two main types of memes (false and true memes) to infect potential supporters. Whoever infects the most supporters tends to win the most elections and stay in office the longest. The highlights of the paper are the proposition that the race to the bottom has an inherent structural advantage over the race to the top, and the identification of the low and high leverage points of the system.

The Memetic Evolution of Solutions to Difficult Problems uses memes, the evolutionary algorithm, and the scientific method to show how complex solutions evolve over time and how that process can be improved. This work argues that the process must be improved if problem sovers (the environmental movement) are to create a sufficiently correct analysis and solution in time to avoid environmental catastrophe.

Frequently Asked Questions

In 1976, in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins dropped a bombshell. In a few quick paragraphs he sketched out what memes are, why they existed, and why they were so crucial to the study of all species whose niche dominance requires a stong culture. The potential of social engineering has not been the same since, because now we can apply all the principles of evolution to learned, memetic behavior, rather than just innate, genetically based behavior. In other words, cultural engineering is now as realistic as any other branch of engineering.

What is the "social side" of the problem? While the answer never mentions memes, the social side of the problem is really the memetic side. Whenever you see the phrase "social side" at Thwink.org, it is really the "memetic side."

Glossary of Key Concepts

See agent, change resistance, the competitive exclusion principle, dueling loops, meme, more of the truth, the New Dominant Life Form, and the social side of the problem.

Experimentation

Proof of hypothesis work is just beginning. Experiment 1 is an attempt to determine if the main high leverage point (general ability to detect political deception) identified in the Dueling Loops model behaves as the model shows it does. This experiment basically measures how effective injecting a new meme into the human system at the right high leverage point might be. The meme is the Truth Test.

Manuscript Chapters

There are two books in progress at Thwink.org:

The shorter book, Analytical Activism, is written for the layman. Its purpose is to transform the environmental movement from the use of an intuitive, ad hoc, event oriented approach (the process of Classic Activism) to a problem solving process that is mature enough to solve the sustainability problem (the process of Analytical Activism).

Analytical Activism argues that if environmentalists switched to a more mature process, they would come to much more productive analysis and solution conclusions. An example of what that might be is The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace, which is a chapter in that book (This is identical to the first paper mentioned above). Another example in the same book is the Memetic Evolution of Solutions to Difficult Problems model (This is identical to the second paper mentioned above). Finally, the last chapter in the book proposes that tomorrow's activist organizations will be something that can be called Solution Factories. Instead of goods and services, solution factories produce the many memes needed to solve large, pressing social problems, such as the global environmental sustainability problem.

The longer book, A Model in Crisis, has the goal of providing a fairly complete collection of the tools needed to solve the global environmental sustainability problem, along with a mature example of how these tools can be applied. It is a more challenging read than Analytical Activism, and is designed as a sequel to that book. It uses memes throughout the book as a central problem solving abstraction. Chapters depending strongly on memetics include The Young Science of Memetics, Omniplexes (large omnipresent memetic life forms), The New Dominant Life Form, Subproblem 1: Why Such Strong Adoption Resistance?, Why the Problem Has Defied Solution for Over Thirty Years, and How to Overcome Resistance to Solution Adoption. The way to read these chapters is to download the complete manuscript.