We as individuals don't live very long, but cultures can and do. Assimilation of concepts/behaviors can occur over the course of generations. Optimization of learnability is, IMHO, the effect of the explosion of data, which has the effect of compressing time.
A key evolutionary pressure on culture is that it can only include concepts and behaviors that can be assimilated by humans in a short period of time (since we don't live very long and we're pretty busy). As a result, culture is optimized for learnability.
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Never lived in Japan, have you? Although it's very true that the most prolific and leading culture is not coincidentally also the one that is most communicative, the local minima phenomenon exists in culture as well. All you need is some form of environmental obstacle ...
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This is funny because, while I've lived in Japan for a few years, I have no idea what this twete means
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So more complex concepts and behaviors can still be assimilated over a longer period of time. I’m not sure I 100% get the point of the tweet without an example.
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Indeed. Very complex concepts can be built on top of simpler ones. I would say this would have less to do with complexity and more to do with small increments of learning, which are disseminated quickly.
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I'm not sure that childhood isn't basically cultural indoctrination (and childhood lasts quite a while.) Learnability is useful, but the staying power to have the will to indoctrinate the next generation is what kills.
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It seems that cultural norms can be learned pretty quickly (teenagers have etiquette, know popular music, etc.) But culture does move slowly. Possibly mostly due to an individual’s neural nets being relatively “set”, so culture can only move when those NNs need to be “unlearned”
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Is there a difference between learnability and memeability?
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@StanDehaene has a nice hypothesis about it: neuronal recycling.Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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