There Are No Stupid Questions

The infamous Proust (and Vanity Fair) Questionnaire. [via Literacity]

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

All suffering comes from desire and separation. Misery is almost always self-inflicted.

Where would you like to live?

I've learned it doesn't matter where. I'd rather travel.

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

A. What other kind is there?
B. Knowing that nothing needs to be done.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Enthusiasm. People should be stupidly passionate about things. Everything else is annoying.

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?

Lovable misfits who band together in the end...

Who are your favorite characters in history?

The one's who got away with it.

Who are your favorite heroines in real life?

Mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?

The Brunnhildes and Bodhisattvas

Your favorite painter?

Edward Hopper

Your favorite musician?

Guitar players: Jimmy Page, Johnny Marr, John Squire, Graham Coxon

The quality you most admire in a man?

Decisiveness.

The quality you most admire in a woman?

Impertinence.

Your favorite virtue?

Gravity, because it always wins.

Your favorite occupation?

I prefer to think I'll be greeted as a liberator.

Who would you have liked to be?

Not Proust.

The Memes are Cascading

This article in the New Republic also says less than it seems to at first blush.

Of course everyone knows about bandwagons. But the recent studies have offered some real surprises. Why does one singer become a superstar, whereas an apparently indistinguishable singer is now waiting tables? Why do some books or movies become blockbusters while equally good ones flop? Observers tend to treat successes and failures as the logical outcomes of well (or poorly) laid plans, or attribute them to large, intrinsic differences among people and products. But cascades, which are unpredictable and not very logical are created by small variations and even coincidences, and these often make all the difference. A few early supporters, or a single favorable review or report, can start a "yes" cascade--just as a few early negatives, or a bad first week, can produce a devastating "no" cascade.

The key point for the author is how rational people make irrational decisions by getting caught up in these waves, but for me the idea of cascades sounds a lot like other similarly weird "the world is not what seems" explanations for how the world really works.

This time instead of memes, we have cascades (perhaps waves are replacing particles in this new Einsteinian universe). But this time it's not the meme that's selfish, it's people who are easily swayed by others and have a tendency for group-think. So the answer really does lie in human nature. We believe what other's believe because the pathways are smoother. It gives us a sense of belonging and social approval. But why? And how is it that so many other people are able to short-circuit or ignore those cascades in favor of ideas that barely make a ripple?

Genes for Individuals, Memes for Groups?

An interesting response to Dawkins's book that actually moves the discussion beyond the religion good/bad argument. Here's what's interesting to me in David Sloan Wilson's discussion:

Consider genetic evolution by itself. When a new mutation arises, the total population consists of one group with a single mutant and many groups with no mutants. There is not much variation among groups in this scenario for group selection to act upon. Now imagine a species that has the ability to socially transmit information. A new cultural mutation can rapidly spread to everyone in the same group, resulting in one group that is very different from the other groups in the total population. This is one way that culture can radically shift the balance between levels of selection in favor of group selection. Add to this the ability to monitor the behavior of others, communicate social transgressions through gossip, and easily punish or exclude transgressors at low cost to the punishers, and it becomes clear that human evolution represents a whole new ball game as far as group selection is concerned.

With culture, mutations can be shared and advantageous new things can benefit everyone and not just the owner. It's like the internet. One computer is useful, a computer attached to other computers on the net is exponentially more powerful. From this perspective, religion is just another word for culture: a way of ordering, structuring, and transmitting the core information that is shared amongst a group of human beings. Basically, memes. Or the blogosphere.

What's missing from Wilson's discussion is that Dawkins considered memes to be just as selfish as genes. Some transmit more easily than others regardless of their usefulness or wisdom. He also ignores the fact a lot of the information that is socially transmitted is just plain bogus, superstitious or wrong. It's also not clear what distinguishes religious beliefs from more useful information like how to hunt, when its good to plant crops, etc. Nor does it explain how societies organize themselves into castes and cliques that determine shares of the wealth or is allowed to marry whom.

In the end religion is reduced to just those things that exist beyond human beings like nature and the after-life, or as a moralistic police force designed to keep the peasants in-line. It's Nietzschean resentment where the weak use memes to rule the strong, and choose the void for their purpose rather than being void of purpose.

Now that I've thought it through a little, the article really begs more questions than it answers. And, as has been said before, we don't need biology to explain how social transmission works. We already have Austen and Tolstoy.

Memes du Jour of the Day

• iPhone fatigue - I'm kind of sick of it already.
• Elizabeth Edwards taking Ann to Fist City - Everybody loves the smack-down justice.
• Cheney Hate - Impeach! Impeach!
• Die Hard IV - 80s-style retro action movie is maybe not so bad? Yippi-ki-yay!
  
• Tony Blair - We liked him for a while, but in the end, meh.

Update
After listening to others describe the Elizabeth Edwards call, I thought she'd really ripped Ann a new one. But if you watch it, she didn't lay a glove on her. It just makes Elizabeth seem uptight and her husband looks like a wimp by comparison.

Just remember kids, substance is for losers. Personal attacks and name-calling always win.

In Your Blog, Killing Your Lolcats

I had been struggling to decide what I thought about the whole LOL Cats meme-omenon. Cute? Stupid? Witty? The antithesis of wit? It was consistent enough that I thought there just had to be something more to it. And as a developer, I did get a kick out of the LOLCats programming language.

Fortunately the Table of Malcontents has come to set me straight:

LOLCats isn't funny: just because Boing Boing just heard of a forum meme that was run into the ground by Something Awful three years ago does not make it a cultural phenomenon. But the Laugh Out Loud Cats, by Ape Lad? Genius.

Can't argue with the guy who brings me Cthulu Cthursday every week. Glad that's over.