A good old fashioned working class Yorkshire lad goes in our local pub. I’ll call him anti-Paul. Paul isn’t his real name (although he will never read this), but the “anti” comes from him being negative towards just about anything. He is a regular typhoid Mary of that hardcore mindset, stalwart in his own opinions, but cannot see how they are self-limiting. I suppose that is true for most of us to some extent, but this one borderes on characature. He is actually a good guy, but I use the hopefully not too offensive name anti-Paul to innoculate myself from accepting anything he says at face value. He and his ilk (ie my own Dad) might well be considered as an unquaranteened reservoir species of Z memes. I’ve been picking some out.
One of my favorates is that of “useless knowledge”. As I self-identify as an engineer, and judging from some of the wishy-washy studies I have read, I sympathise to some extent. However, in difference to pure research that hasn’t attracted an application yet, I believe, as a Z meme, “useless knowledge” is meant to imply valueless knowledge. Academics and philosophers would provide arguments about the value of such knowledge (which engineers would find largely impractical.) While Paul’s opinions appear to be based on practicality, and I’m sure that is true in his eyes, there is likely to be something going on there, a whole self-sustaining memeplex, which as a Z meme is both limiting and dangerious. Identifying and eliminating maladaptive memes is a practical aspiration incedentally – but I’ll waffle about it here.
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