[extropy-chat] Goring a local ox--Meta example

[Keith Henson]

A while back I said if nobody objected, I would gore one of the local 
oxen.  Before I do, let me make it clear that I am a lower case 
libertarian.  I never appreciated the difference between lower and upper 
case Libertarians until the news releases came out about the work Drew 
Westen did with partisans, in this case Democrats and Republicans, trying 
to deal with input that indicated their particular candidate was less than 
a saint.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11009379/ There are two or three hundred places 
this story can be found with Google.  If you don't understand Westen's work 
in detail, go read it first.

(Parenthetically, I think the same mechanism is responsible for the 
non-rational thinking that goes on in the decisions about starting and 
fighting wars--making the point that politics is war by other means.)

However . . . . Westen's work explained an old mystery.

Virtually every reader of this list understands memetics.  Off hand you 
might think memetics would be a fairly neutral topic and for most people it is.

Going on 20 years ago, I wrote two articles on memetics.  The first, 
"Memetics and the Modular Mind" was published in _Analog_ and reprinted 
(with considerable editing) in _Co-Evolution Quarterly_ as "MEMETICS The 
Science of Information Viruses."

Both versions can be found on the net.

http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.mindcontrol/msg/103e03bce6100cac?hl=en&
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?noframes;read=67342

The second, "Memes, MetaMemes and Politics" was written for the Libertarian 
magazine  _Reason_.

http://www.alamut.com/subj/evolution/misc/hensonMemes.html

It covered much the same material with what I thought was a L(l)ibertarian 
slant.  I talked to the editor Robert Poole before I wrote the 
article.  (My wife and I had written "Star Laws" about the Moon Treaty for 
_Reason_ a few years before.)

"MetaMemes" came right back rejected.  So I called Robert.  He said to send 
it back again directly to him.  So I did, and it came right back again.  I 
either talked to Robert or someone who said Robert was no longer making 
editorial decisions.  Ok, big deal, the Skeptics rejected an article on 
memetics I wrote for them too.  It isn't like writing pays minimum wage for me.

This was pre-web, 1986-1987.  Not wanting to waste an article I posted it 
in a few places on Usenet and mailing lists where it circulated widely (for 
pre/early web days).

Andre Marrou (the Libertarian vice presidential candidate in 1988 and 
presidential candidate in 1992) read it somewhere and liked it enough to 
call me up and ask that I send it to _Liberty_.  He would ask them to 
publish it.  (_Liberty_ is *the* hard core Libertarian magazine for those 
not up on such things).  I am not sure, but I think he called me during the 
1988 campaign because I remember he was the VP candidate.  (I got this 
wrong on the memetics list in 2002, confusing him with Browne.)

So with a slight degree of trepidation (but hey what do you do when a 
*candidate* calls you up?) I sent them a paper copy.  Two weeks later I 
called _Liberty_ up to see if they had received the article and got his 
incredibly hostile blast from the editor.  I have a vague memory that he 
blasted the candidate as well--who then cooled off to the entire subject.

In neither case was there any reason given for the hostility to the article.

Years later this hostility toward the article was cited as why _Reason_ 
gave a bad review to Aaron Lynch's book _Thought Contegion_

In 2002 these events were discussed on the memetics list to the general 
puzzlement.

http://cfpm.org/~majordom/memetics/2000/9948.html

 >I believe it was someone at Reason who told me that they still
 >remembered your rejected article 10 years later!
 >
 >--Aaron Lynch

Now I'm not citing this episode to promote memetics--it isn't needed 
here.  (And much of that old article has been superseded with more recent 
evolutionary psychology based understanding.)

The Libertarians, at least the ones who reacted so strongly to the memetics 
article, are being used as examples of non-rational partisans running on 
the emotional parts of their brains--as Drew Westen showed in his fMRI work 
with Democrats and Republicans.

I am using this example to caution everyone that--without an fMRI scan of 
your brain while you are thinking about your pet memes--it is very easy to 
go into non-rational mode over your set of memes and never have any idea 
you did it.

Present company *not* excluded.  :-)

Keith Henson
(Who probably is a partisan about EP--thinking it allows him to understand 
human weirdness even if he can't figure out how to do a damn thing about it.)