The Speculist

My hope for is for increased intellectual humility and deep analysis on the definition, nature and means to enable good and goodness.

My new idea for personal exploration is the attainment of quantification and measurement of flows of global consciousness, manifested and displayed across time and space in the form of weather patterns.

cheers,
dave

Dave, you'd have to come up with some sort of abstract way to represent the data since geographic representations wouldn't work (communication and travel disperse meme groups and meme trade routes). If I were to do such a thing, I'd probably try a graph with the vertices weighted by population or perhaps some sort of heuristics derived from clustering analysis. And that's just for representing data.

Actually modeling the flow and interaction of memes (probably an intermediate goal of any wannabe Foundation)? That would be difficult when you might not even be able to figure out how much a meme manifests in society much less how it interacts with other memes. After all, there are probably somewhere on the order of hundreds of thousands of memes that are decently propagated (I'm guessing on the order of the number of words in the English language in decent use). And of course, there's probably at least a couple of orders of magnitude more ideas in books and other places that just aren't viable or are unknown.

It's like a really tough protein interaction problem. And you can always slightly modify a meme (so there will be numerous variants clustered together). Even worse, you can create new very elaborate memes.

I made some attempts in the past to model the prices of the Foresight Exchange with Jim Bowery (which as a prediction betting market is a specialized meme market), but that approach turned out to be extremely sensitive to rare, unusual, trivial changes (we messed up somehow so that something which changed once over the period of interest had many orders of magnitude more significance than it should have had).

Karl,

You raise good points about the difficulties associated with specific memes, but what about a map showing prevalence of meme types and methods of transmittal? There are these meta-memes that set the context for how memes are transmitted. A global map showing even something as simple as how much of the memespace is transferred vertically (from family, government, or other authority) vs. how much is transferred horizontally (word of mouth, blogs, etc.), by region, would be of use, I think.