>i guess it is easy to see that politicians themselves would be prime
>beneficiaries of that action. a leader that got 1% and won the election
>won't have the same status as the one who got 40%, 80% or in same cases
>103%. (not making this up.)
>
>so the people that spread this meme would be the leading party, or the one
>that is best known. same as with soup. once you have 80% of the soup
>market, you don't push people to eat your brand of soup, you paddle them to
>eat any soup.
I don't see this as the case at all. You're generalizing the situation down
to a statistical level without first examining your statistics. I just had
this converation with someone else a couple days ago, so I'll just quote
myself here for a bit:
"This follows a similar line of thought to a discussion I was having with
someone the other day about learning strategies in higher education. Its
quite obvious that students employ a wide number differing learning
strategies in college, all with differing degrees of success. Some
strategies are more successful in one set of circumstances, others in
another. But if you look at the pool of strategies over time, you see
different methods come into style and become more popular and widespread
at different times. It would seem, on the surface, that methods of study
come in and out of fashion among students and, as a result, that this
might prove to be a good place to look for some raw data for a memetics
study. Except of one thing--its been shown that people don't change
learning strategies throughout their lives. They keep the same ones they
learned as children, with only minor alterations, for the entire length
of their schooling.
"So how can you explain these two seemingly conflicting pieces of data?
Students don't change the way they learn, but the way they, as a group,
learn changes over time. Well, there's really only one explanation. If
the methods students use aren't changing, then the _pool_ of students
itself must be changing--and that seems to be the case. Entrance exams
end up selecting for different qualities in different eras and that
translates into a shifting, changing complexion in the pool of students
and the study habits they bring with them into college.
"But what does that have to do with politics?"
"I would offer that a similar process is at work in the electorate. That
it may not be so much the case that different political movements come in
and out of style among the electorate, so much as that the very
_complexion_ of the electorate changes. Not that there were more
liberals in the nation last week than there were four years ago, but
rather that the proportions of liberals within the pool of active voters
changed. And if this is the case, the group that becomes aware of this
fact and is able to engage more of its members to become politically
active gains the upper hand. We could well see an arms race of political
activism in our future as every political party competes to have _more_
committed, active, involved individuals than the others."
See?
>btw, nice meme.
Thank you.
-Prof. Tim