The ideas that survive are the ones that reproduce themselves by being copied from one mind or other storage facility to another.

Where it all goes wrong is that it is very expensive to test an idea and determine whether it is good, whereas an idea that is very attractive to repeat and copy without testing is much fitter and the more it resists testing the better it is.

This is why the whole framework for protecting IP is broken as well - we incentivize coming up with ideas, but ideas are worthless - it's evaluating and testing ideas that is valuable.

I have seen the theory that the most optimally emotional ideas are the ones that go viral: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Emotion is adaptive, but only if the emotion is revulsion at the idea of skepticism.

The issue isn't who is the most persuasive. The problem is confirm bias and echo chambers. People aren't persuaded any more. Now they make emotional trigger snap assumptions and then only consume that which fits the narrative of the assumption.

I think almost everyone agrees that echo chambers at massive scale are really bad for society... and yet it's still as, if not more, prevalent as ever.

We're letting the world burn for the sake of online advertising revenue and broken business models.

"A lie can make its way around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes on."

It’s more like “When everyone has a printing press, the ideas people listen to are the ones that have been pushed relentlessly by a millions-strong AI generated bot army.”

Product success via pure advertising volume, is not an effective strategy. Maybe that oversimplification needs work.

That's a tautology!

A good tautology can be helpful in revealing errors in reasoning. Like here, the sentence "ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to" sounds reasonable; the equivalent statement "best reasoning is the most persuasive" is clearly wrong.

“Stating tautologies is sometimes necessary in the presence of those who believe self-contradictions” - paraphrased from weird sun twitter

True.

And a good tautology like this one can at least help people realize the difficulties in distinguishing merit from success.

Which puts it up a step from overconfident generalizations.

Which is funny, because that's also a decent lay-explanation of how PageRank works.