So. I've been thinking about the "marketplace of ideas" idea because I've come across disconnected talk about the contagiousness of "bad ideas" and how "good ideas" can't beat "bad ideas" in a fair Darwinian contest.

The thing here is that if we're going to go with a Dawkinsian meme framework, then the analogy to evolutionary processes points towards the "fittest" ideas beating out "less fit" ideas, and nothing more.

There isn't anything about "good" or "bad" in there.

It's somewhat of a tautology, because fitness is defined by the relative reproductive ability within a given reproductive environment, which is another way to phrase the relative level "winning" or "beating" in this game.

The point being, that ideas that can spread themselves better and displace other ideas will end up winning in the "marketplace of ideas," not the ones that are "good" or "better."

This may sound obvious. But it allows us to ask why people believe "good" ideas have high fitness.

For people that defend the idea of the marketplace of ideas, the "goodness" of an idea can probably be correlated with how well an idea explains, corresponds to, predicts, or captures reality or natural processes in some way.

When understanding your environment and how it works is directly related to your fitness, then ideas that allow one to better understand the environment well confer greater fitness.

You probably don't have many direct ancestors who thought jumping off of a cliff was a good idea.

So a lot of ideas that get selected for are ones that correspond to reality. Makes sense. But then why are there so many "bad" ideas too, and why are they so popular? I don't know the answer. I have a few hypotheses within this framework though.

One hypothesis is that "bad" ideas, which do not correspond with reality, can confer greater fitness despite this lack of correspondence. How?

One example is religion, where ideas and behaviors can increase fitness based on secondary effects of social cohesion and other things.

But why do the good parts social cohesion, rituals that reduce food borne illness, and other secondary effects of religion need to come attached with the religion part? Certainly, the idea or ideas would be "better" if they were more objective? Not so fast.

Here's where we need linkage disequilibrium. Sometimes certain ideas are only found attached to other ideas, and those ideas are reliably reproduced together.

Regardless of the fitness effects of one modular idea, the entire meme linkage group can have high combined fitness.

But this all still relies upon the assumption that "goodness" is broadly correlated with fitness, and empirical evidence has more than stained our ability to strictly adhere to it.

How well ideas correspond with reality is not a good indicator of fitness.

The dirty secret is that this isn't so much of a secret.

So then, what's the point? Why even engage in discourse? Are people fools for not seeing this, or for engaging in the "marketplace" regardless?

The REAL secret is found in the definition of "fitness."

"Fitness" is dependent upon the environmental. Is a circular peg or a square peg more fit? The question doesn't make sense without the context of what shape the hole is.

Ask the scientists. The entirety of the scientific method, peer review, and everything else that goes into producing knowledge is for the (intended, sometimes) purpose of engineering the selection gradient such that "fitness" is as close to" goodness" as we can possibly get it.

The problem here is that in less engineered "marketplaces" this system is being overrun with memeplexes with extremely high reproductive fitness, high linkage disequilibrium, and Bateson–Dobzhansky–Muller incompatibilities with "good" ideas.

These memeplexes are also act to change the selective landscape such that their own fitness is accelerated and magnified while other ideas are reduced in fitness. It's honestly quite remarkable in terms of appreciating evolutionary dynamics, for what it's worth.

So how did this happen? Ideas that come in the form of "anti-(blank)-ism" have taken direct control of their own fitness landscape in the same way that successful dominant "might makes right" ideologies can enforce systems where disagreement is equivalent to walking into a blade.

The linkage disequilibrium, either anaolgized to a theoretical linkage group, a physical chromosome, or a functional "supergene," (take your pick,) is the memeplex itself, the functional ideology and its framework, in toto. In this case, Critical Theory and wokeness.

This is why, despite repeated efforts to challenge specific pieces of Critical Theory with "good" ideas, the whole still remains. So long as the fitness of the memeplex, as an emergent system, is unchallenged on a landscape where "fitness" has been engineered against "goodness."

Similar to how you can't dismantle a religion by pointing to inconsistencies with science.

And this point brings me to the problem of Bateson–Dobzhansky–Muller incompatibilities, where (in analogy) the fitness of individual ideas is dependant upon the haplotype background.

Many religions, at least in terms of contemporary incarnations, are compatible with ideas that would have been incompatible with prior incarnations.

For instance, the Pope endorses consilience between Catholicism and evolution and heliocentrism, despite historical qualms.

This suggests that, though the events may be relatively rare, that memeplexes with high linkage disequilibrium can still increase fitness by crossing over and incorporating other ideas by adaptive introgression.

Fundamentalist religions, on the other hand, have a hard time with this, and thus have developed a Bateson–Dobzhansky–Muller incompatibility with certain "good" ideas. Think how creationism as a memeplex can't reasonably incorporate evolution, geology, and cosmology into itself.

This, in the most roundabout way possible, is how we arrive at the significance of "2+2=5" discourse.

It demonstrates that Critical Theory has a Bateson–Dobzhansky–Muller incompatibility with the ideas of standard mathematical axioms and an operating belief in objectivity.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

It is good in that it allows us to draw a hard line that we can be (relatively) easily defended, along with anyone who refuses to cede the objective truthfulness of "2+2=4," as facile as it may appear on the surface.

It is bad in that Critical Theory is unbound by concerns of maintaining consistency, consilience, and truth. It is, however, directly concerned with deconstructing these ideas and directly reducing their fitness. Though this is, in so many words, why we must fight against it.

So where does this leave us, in terms of the "marketplace of ideas?"

Unfortunately, it is a self fulfilling prophecy, directly related to the degree to which it is believed that the adaptive fitness landscape can be engineered to select for "goodness" as truth and objectivity.

If people working together believe that it is possible, then the scientific method, peer review, and other features of the system (as flawed as all of them can be in their respective capacities) can engineer the adaptive landscape to select for "good" ideas.

If more people believe that "fitness" is entirely synonymous with "power," then the system will be engineered (by the people themselves or by the ideas that compel them, the distinction here is meaningless,) such that they approximate each other. And then might makes right.

I'm not going to reduce the conclusion of this thread to a wankfest over the amazing philosophical and epistemic accomplishments we inherited from (what are loosely referred to as) the enlightenment and the scientific revolution.

I am going to say that I think we need to defend them. I hope that you do too.

I believe that such ideas are the only way towards creating a world where might DOES NOT make right.

A "marketplace of ideas" with a properly engineered fitness landscape is how to select for them.

And engineering the selection gradient to correspond with accuracy, objectivity, and truth is NOT just an arbitrary exercise of power, as Critical Theory would claim.

This is at the heart of the entire disagreement Critical Theory has with the concept of a stable epistemology.

I don't want to find out what it's like to live in a world where objectivity has been fully "deconstructed."

And trust me, I'm sure that you don't either.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention a point about linkage disequilibrium. This is why I believe that we have a two party system and a broadly left versus right paradigm for contemporary politics.

There are supposedly a broad range of policy issues that people consider, but this complexity gets unduly compressed into a single axis. Here certain collections of ideas are positively associated with each other, often in counterintuitive, confusing, or even contradictory ways.

Democracy has a fitness landscape that, by definition, has been engineered to select for positive frequency dependant selection.

On this landscape, large coalitions and big tent memeplexes have more fitness than narrow ideas or independent persons.

Additionally, stable equilibria probably only exist when few, relatively large competing memeplexes are present. Small/new ones get absorbed, almost like getting bought out by a larger corporation, leaving few big ones to compete against each other.

And talking about stable equilibria, that reminds me of one final point that I missed about Critical Theory and the "good" engineered fitness landscape that it's trying (and succeeding) to re-engineer.

On the landscape engineered for correspondence with reality, new ideas continually emerge and are tested against the old ones, with overall fitness of the resulting memeplex increasing (generally) monotonically and asymptotically towards a theoretical maximum fitness limit.

(This resulting memeplex is "scientific knowledge" and it's not something that any one individual appreciates, knows, or believes in its entirety. It's more of an outsourced construct that is collectively trusted through a shared understanding of how it was forged and sharpened.)

On the landscape successfully engineered for correspondence with Critical Theory, the only stable equilibrium is a Critical Theory orthodoxy.

That's it.

You were expecting something else?

Join "The Party" and start reciting their slogans, because otherwise you'll get vanished.