Related papers: On Selfish Memes
Technological parasitism is a new theory to explain the evolution of technology in society. In this context, this study proposes a model to analyze the interaction between a host technology (system) and a parasitic technology (subsystem) to…
Ideas by Statistical Mechanics (ISM) is a generic program to model evolution and propagation of ideas/patterns throughout populations subjected to endogenous and exogenous interactions. The program is based on the author's work in…
One major function of social networks (e.g., massive online social networks) is the dissemination of information such as scientific knowledge, news, and rumors. Information can be propagated by the users of the network via natural…
We present a survey of more than 90 recent papers that aim to study cultural representation and inclusion in large language models (LLMs). We observe that none of the studies explicitly define "culture, which is a complex, multifaceted…
What is a population? This review considers how a population may be defined in terms of understanding the structure of the underlying genetics of the individuals involved. The main approach is to consider statistically identifiable groups…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
Success-driven social learning, in which individuals preferentially adopt the ideas and methods that appear most successful, is a foundational principle of collective behavior across systems ranging from ant colonies to scientific…
Memes are a popular element of modern web communication, used not only as static artifacts but also as interactive replies within conversations. While computational research has focused on analyzing the intrinsic properties of memes, the…
This paper explains in layperson's terms how an agent-based model was used to investigate the hypothesis that culture evolves more effectively when novelty-generating creative processes are tempered by imitation processes that preserve…
We study a model describing the spread of a globalized culture in a population of individuals localized at the nodes of a social network. The influence of this globalized culture, assumed to be foreign to the local culture, is measured by a…
In several domains such as linguistics, molecular biology or social sciences, holistic effects are hardly well-defined by modeling with single units, but more and more studies tend to understand macro structures with the help of meaningful…
A stochastic model for the evolution of a growing population is proposed, in order to explain empirical power-law distributions in the frequency of family names as a function of the family size. Preliminary results show that the predicted…
Automated interpretability aims to translate large language model (LLM) features into human understandable descriptions. However, natural language feature descriptions can be vague, inconsistent, and require manual relabeling. In response,…
This paper proposes a systems approach to social sciences based on mathematical framework derived from a generalization of the mathematical kinetic theory and on theoretical tools of game theory. Social systems are modeled as a living…
In evolutionary game theory, an important measure of a mutant trait (strategy) is its ability to invade and take over an otherwise-monomorphic population. Typically, one quantifies the success of a mutant strategy via the probability that a…
Evolutionary game dynamics describes not only frequency dependent genetical evolution, but also cultural evolution in humans. In this context, successful strategies spread by imitation. It has been shown that the details of strategy update…
We introduce a general modeling framework to predict the outcomes, at the population level, of individual psychology and behavior. The framework prescribes that researchers build a cost function that embodies knowledge of what trait values…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
How does network structure affect diffusion? Recent studies suggest that the answer depends on the type of contagion. Complex contagions, unlike infectious diseases (simple contagions), are affected by social reinforcement and homophily.…
Internet memes are a central element of online culture, blending images and text. While substantial research has focused on either the visual or textual components of memes, little attention has been given to their interplay. This gap…