
Does technology greatly diminish human creativity by slowing memetic evolution? - amichail
Before the advent of the printing press, memetic evolution was much more prominent as stories were retold/copied with changes from one person to another.<p>But now that technology makes it easy for many people to see the same information, one could argue that memetic evolution has slowed down dramatically.<p>BTW, one could also argue that modern healthcare greatly slows down natural evolution in humans.
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mechanical_fish
The problem with this argument is that modern technology has vastly increased
the _rate_ with which ideas spread, greatly decreased the amount of time it
takes to test a new idea for "stickiness", and made dramatic changes in the
"selection pressure" for ideas.

Back before printing it would take a minimum of weeks for an idea to work
itself across, say, Europe. (And that would have to be a _big_ idea, one worth
hiring the Pony Express to promulgate.) Now it takes a minimum of
milliseconds. Before the web you had to publish a paper or convene a major
international meeting to place an issue in front of most of the world's
experts on a subject; now you can do that in the morning and have everyone's
first response on your desk by the afternoon. I work in near-real time with
colleagues twelve times zones away.

Meanwhile, while we're engaged in potentially bogus extrapolation from
biology, I'd note that human "mimetic" copying has vastly _less_ fidelity than
genetic copying, even in the age of web-based copy-and-paste. Yet that hasn't
stopped the descendants of bacteria from turning into dolphins. Indeed, it
probably helps: If you're going to tinker with the genetics to see if
something better happens, it's best to tinker with one gene at a time, not
start flipping every switch at once.

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jerf
You beat me to it, only I feel somewhat compelled to add a big "What?! What?!"

In light of _multiple increases_ in the speed of memetic evolution as
mechanical_fish outlines, where on _Earth_ do you get the idea that idea
formation has _slowed down_? I can't even fathom such a thing.

Your (general sense of "you", i.e., this is true for me too) view of the past
is skewed by the fact that we see it all at once, and we are not living it.
However, try this: Take your favorite "fast moving" time, perhaps the
Enlightenment era. Plot the popular ideas on a timeline. Do the same thing
with the last century, on the same scale. Now, put those two timelines next to
each other, and you will achieve enlightenment.

By the way, no fair letting ignorance drive the timeline. No fair putting down
all sorts of 18th century advances in, say, philosophy, then claiming the
entire 20th century was a yawning, gaping void... because while your (again,
general "you") knowledge of 20th century philosophy may be a gaping void,
_actual_ 20th century philosophy was not. In fact, the reason why we all know
much more about the 18th century than the 20th century is that _so damn much_
happened in the 20th century that you can only absorb small parts of it. And
while the economy in the 21st has slowed down, idea formation sure hasn't.

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jonmc12
The written word was a technology advancement as well. It let stories be
retold/copied with more precision than song and dance. One could argue that
simply formalizing language in writing stifled human creativity as well.

However, its not just memetic evolution that dictates creativity, its also
mental abstraction. Even if you copied the same memes to the head of every
human, the ideas of the individuals would soon diverge as our mind mixes and
matched these 'terminal' memes to propose brand new memes.

I think that the greatest risk to human creativity is much the opposite of
widespread propagation. The greatest risk is that the new memes with the most
utility can not be understood by enough people to be propagated widely enough,
fast enough. The greatest risk is ending up with the mediocrity of new memes
that propagate only because they are simple enough to be quickly understood.

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Vandy_Travis
It's not at all clear that human evolution is slowing down. In a recent study,
it was found that it's actually speeding up. Evolution is a tricky area
because often its too easy to thought-experiment out a very wrong answer.

"Modern life's pressures may be hastening evolution"
<http://www.physorg.com/news158839250.html>

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enki
hey amichail, i'm happy for you and imma let you finish, but the internet has
some of the best memes of all time.

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pohl
Regarding modern medicine, it does seem to have the effect of allowing people
to survive today who might not have otherwise. But this means that it
increases the diversity of viable genes. Is that really "slowing down"
evolution? I'm not sure what a "rate of evolution" might be. Is it the rate of
mutation? Has that really changed with medicine? Is it the probability that a
mutation turns out to be viable? If so, hasn't that increased at the hands of
modern medicine?

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detcader
Religion is something that seems to be diminishing as technology and science
becomes more prominent. Just look at Digg.com. Do we really need these
"stories retold/copied from one person to another"? To me, it looks like
civilization is finally growing up.

As to the healthcare statement, I wonder if that's an argument that the
conservative right would try against Obama's reform... that would be quite
funny to see, really.

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kiba
There are more memes type than just conservatives that has opposed universial
healthcare.

We have libertarianism and individualist anarchism that will oppose any kind
of statist control on healthcare for example. Since they are natural opponents
of conservative and liberals anyway, you don't hear much of them.

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eru
> BTW, one could also argue that modern healthcare greatly slows down natural
> evolution in humans.

Yes. But we have `unnatural' selection, now. Those genes than make on better
placed to profit from modern healthcare have a better chance of staying in the
gene pool.

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billswift
The title is pretty bad; You are confusing memetic drift with creativity.

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4chan4ever
I don't know if technology diminishes human creativity, but it certainly
increases our love for big, intelligent-sounding words. :)

