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#2283·Erik Orrje, 6 days agoWait, I've probably misunderstood but in #2228 it seemed like you thought pruning was needed for scarcity, which is needed for competition between ideas and their evolution.
And you equated pruning with the meta algorithm.
And now you say the meta algoritm/pruning is not needed for the evolution of ideas?
And now you say the meta algoritm/pruning is not needed for the evolution of ideas?
Right. Pruning helps it along but isn’t strictly required. You may be misunderstanding natural selection. It is merely “the non-random differential reproduction of genes.” (From The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.) More generally, it’s the non-random differential reproduction of replicators, including ideas.
In other words, selection in and of itself doesn’t even imply that any individual replicator dies (though in practice, they usually do). It just means there’s a difference in the rate of reproduction between different replicators. That difference arises without any pruning.