As memes house in agents with an energy budget, I think that shorter simpler memes have more chance to take hold and reproduce ("Make something people want").
Words in a sentence are like models in an ensemble. Simple words are more general and have a high bias and low variance ("Make stuff users want"). Highly complex words and sentences have a lower bias, but a higher variance. You need to average a lot of them to get a clear picture. That's why the sentences in scientific papers are usually so long, they need to gradually cancel out the noise.
> There is certainly some cultural variance that can be orthogonal to efficiency.
Yes, agreed! Though same with memes, certain words or symbols without any redundancy may have cultural value. You may gain energy by speaking a certain language to a certain degree of sophistication. You may have to invest energy to gain access to the information contained in symbols (or have agents "unzip" these for themselves).
As memes house in agents with an energy budget, I think that shorter simpler memes have more chance to take hold and reproduce ("Make something people want").
Words in a sentence are like models in an ensemble. Simple words are more general and have a high bias and low variance ("Make stuff users want"). Highly complex words and sentences have a lower bias, but a higher variance. You need to average a lot of them to get a clear picture. That's why the sentences in scientific papers are usually so long, they need to gradually cancel out the noise.
> There is certainly some cultural variance that can be orthogonal to efficiency.
Yes, agreed! Though same with memes, certain words or symbols without any redundancy may have cultural value. You may gain energy by speaking a certain language to a certain degree of sophistication. You may have to invest energy to gain access to the information contained in symbols (or have agents "unzip" these for themselves).