Ideas are replicators under the same selection pressure — an idea spreads because it is good at spreading, not because it is true.
Tossed off in the final chapter and now the most useful available model for how information behaves in a recommendation-driven environment. Fitness and truth are independent variables.
Links
Typed edges. Anything below the line was authored on the other note and derived here.
supports →We compress the past into stories that feel explanatory and predict nothing — coherence is not evidence.Explains the persistence Taleb only describes. Stories are selected for transmissibility, and coherence is what makes them transmissible — so the fallacy is not a bug in cognition but the predictable output of a selection process.
← requiresSelection acts on genes, not individuals or species — the organism is the vehicle the gene builds to copy itself.
The abstraction has to come first. Once selection is understood as acting on replicators rather than bodies, nothing restricts it to molecules — which is what makes the last chapter possible.