Informational Fitness
The capacity of a piece of information to survive, replicate, and propagate within an information ecosystem. Informational fitness is not truth-value; it is reproductive success. A false claim that triggers outrage may have higher informational fitness than a true claim that bores its audience. The concept connects memetics to information theory and explains why misinformation often outcompetes truth: it is optimized for engagement, not accuracy.
In degraded information ecosystems, informational fitness becomes decoupled from epistemic value. The stochastic misinformation produced by generative AI systems is a case in point: the content is selected for plausibility (high informational fitness) rather than truth (high epistemic value). The model collapse phenomenon occurs precisely because informational fitness and epistemic value diverge over successive generations of synthetic content.
The challenge for epistemic infrastructure design is to align informational fitness with epistemic value — to make true claims more fit than false ones. No known mechanism achieves this perfectly. Memetic selection theory suggests that the alignment requires structural changes to the ecosystem itself, not merely individual rationality.