Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index
Introduction
Macromemetics gives us insights how groups of humans really work and how they might work better. One question I looked at was what we should think about government activities, like secrecy.
Secret Orgies and Echo Chambers
I wrote an essay where I looked at how high transparency can make the government less effective. We can think in terms of how efficient memetic transactions are. This can also be related to how humor works. Much like a joke which dies when overexplained, the efficiency of an organization in getting its job done can be eroded by the need to explain things arbitrarily to outsiders.
The Structure of Memetic Systems
You can check out THIS ESSAY for an example of what memetic state transition diagrams and transition matrix sets look like. The point is that adding more memes and states, like "an outsider asked a question" or "react to an outsider asking a question" or "make a new government 27B-6 form to deal with questions about this thing" or "hire more people to process the new 27B-6 form" and so on.
Each of these causes the organization to have a new state, e.g., "answering the phone" or "replying to a stack of 27B-6 forms" and so on, and memes that of course transition to and from those states. What that means is that the organization spends less time on its core mission memes and states such as "brainstorming on how to make nuclear power safer" or "getting search warrants for people we think are defrauding people on the Web" or "auditing ourselves and reporting to Congress" and so on.
The effect is probably way worse than it sounds. And also, the typical efforts to quell problems to do with an organization floundering from distractions from its core mission tend to be pretty draconian as well.
Memetic Design to the Rescue!
People tend to throw up their hands and accept that things have to be expensive, slow, inefficient, and unsatisfying, and that many worthy goals simply have to be abandoned since we'll never get our poop in a group.
Yes, the objectives of efficiency and transparency are probably mutually exclusive, at least locally. If we have an organization with a specific mission, outside can mire said organization in responding to requests for information. Hopefully this is kind of obvious.
However, an efficient organization in which a high degree of the states it gets into and the memetic transactions (messages) that move it around those states can be maintained, I think, if the communication interface is controlled. Why not create another organization whose mission is to communicate with the outside world, and then filter that function into the organization with a specific non-communication mission?
In this scenario, the communication interface organization can have a rich and complex set of states and memes to do with communicating to taxpayers and other outsiders. They can make up their own forms, man (1) their own telephone lines, reply to their own emails and websites. They can then turn around and communicate and filter the information and requests to other organizations, who have other missions not directly rated to communication.
I suppose this is fairly obvious. But there is a strong macromemetic engineering justification for something like this design. Further, looking at macromemetics may give detailed design ideas and principles to make solutions to problems like this more clear.
Summary
Memes not related to the "mission" of an organization dilute its effectiveness. The addition of "external communication memes" just means more states and memes, which take resources, that are not related to the mission.
One possible approach is to reengineer things so as to shift the communication memes away from the mission memes, so that communication memes coming in from the outside do not "interrupt" the work going on elsewhere in the system.
Memetic design principles can inform how to do this sort of thing in detail.
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(1) This is a generic term. Women can "man" things.
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