Are you hosting a memetic parasite?
apxhard.com
apxhard.com
Currently, I suspect parasitic memes have lots of room to flourish because we keep people alive who are hosts. There is very little selection pressure.
But that is because we are in a time of unbelievable prosperity, a Stable Era. I believe that as other countries catch up, we will enter a Chaotic Era. The real pressures will pop up then and either a massive gap will yawn between those with many meme parasites or the ones with meme parasites will follow their directive to eat those without.
Not to sound like an accelerationist but since I'd prefer that parasitic memes die out, I hope that the chaos comes fast, so that even if I am heavily infected the coming purge wipes me so that Clean Humanity may survive. If we wait too long, too many of us may be infected, and we may win but doom us all to a local optimum.
And as Toby Ord argues in The Precipice, that would be a terrible end.
I have a feeling like the developers of Control (the video game) were heavily influenced by SCPs.
Edit: ok, just checked out the Wikipedia page. You will be happy to learn that it is directly inspired by SCP.
And I get the appeal of most of these things. When I was an adolescent I had this or other 24h info network on most of the time on a tv in my room. I spent nights arguing with people on Usenet.
But after a few months or maybe a year or two, I would get bored with them. Yet people can keep going for decades. Why is their memetic immune system not firing up?
Every day when I go to work (pre-covid anyway) I used to chat with the middle-aged lady living next door and we'd talk about the weather or the news or whatever, and there's nothing new about it but it's enjoyable. I've heard someone argue it's like a low-key reality check, sort of like people pinging each other checking if everything's still in tune.
Not too long ago we used to congregate in large communities and extended families for much of the day, and for the last few decades we've locked ourselves in cubicles and single family homes. My grandmother had 8 siblings and three generations living in one home, there was always something to talk about or get in a fight with. It's no wonder most people are yearning for a sort of casual background chat.
The other side never tires, and it always offers something new. This novelty is different to a conversation with a real (or virtual) human that will tire or run out of new content which leads to natural boredom.
The effort is also smaller. Bite size interactions are easy to digest and "just one more" whereas starting a new movie or TV show has a larger mental hurdle.
It also has elements of gambling. What's in the news feed mystery box this time? Refresh and see. It does not have to be good every time. Intermittent reinforcement takes care of that. In this respect it has a lot in common with many video games.
This is an interesting framing. What form of social organization would make it so that altruistic behavior was not a result of the whims of people in extant power structures? It seems tautologous that if someone has the power to allocate funds, they are the current beneficiary of the extant power structure.
Well, what do the alternatives look like? It's not like powerful politicians aren't self-aggrandizing; I'm sure many of them would like to effect structural change, but the structural change they want is probably pretty suspect. Nor is it the case that "political majorities", writ large, have an untarnished reputation for gentleness and decency.
As a society we can be changed by individual people. I would prefer to retain that, yes.
CGP Grey's, This video will make you angry really gives a lot of insight into the nearly biological nature of memes and the selection process that goes into the ones that we end up seeing.
The central idea reminds me of the quote by Jung:
"People don't have ideas; ideas have people."
It's pithy, and maybe not entirely true, but it's something we see every day, and can all resonate with.
Saad also appeared on the Jordan Peterson podcast recently, explaining his framing and terminology around ideas infecting minds: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/gadsaad/
I think it's a social mechanism to weed out traitors. It's a necessary part of the process, not just a parasite meme.
I recommend the Web Archives Firefox extension by the way. Useful not just for archive.is but also for e.g. Google cache (googlebot is often allowed pass paywalls).
https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r1/index.ht...
https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r2/index.ht...
There's evidence that highly educated people are _more_ likely to believe in the Qanon conspiracy.
Belief isn't just shorthand for "checking out the evidence and making claims about the world on the basis of the probability of that evidence." There can be a will to believe whatever supports your social or material interests that trumps reason. We are now living in post-epistemological times.
Interestingly, at the end of the article he brings up pro wrestling and remarks on not believing it anymore. But this kind of credulity is almost the opposite of what pro wrestling is all about - you have to buy in to take part (kayfabe). Everyone does, everyone knows it.
If you have a college education, you're proportionally much more likely to have a "very unfavorable" view of QAnon. (26% with no college degrees, versus ~42% with college or higher).
How did the journalists get it wrong?
1) They fixated on a poorly worded polling question: "How accurate or inaccurate are the claims made by QAnon?" (I myself believe that QAnon's claims are "somewhat accurate", in a similar way that I notice that broken clocks are correct twice per day.)
2) They failed to notice that non-college-educated people overwhelmingly account for people who are "unaware" of QAnon. It could be inferred that education correlates with worldly awareness, and hence the ability to have opinions on obscure topics.
In conclusion, don't trust popular press. Journalists lack the analytical skill and incentives to accurately report on science, much less on raw data. https://xkcd.com/882/
It's not clear any clarity is added to the world by replacing the term for culture or thoughts with whatever the term meme is trying to accomplish.
Plenty of terms originally coined by academics lack broad academic or even intellectual credibility. I'd agree with the OP that the use of "Meme" is one. I'd also agree that this is because the term provides no clarity - ideas aren't like genes. Genes reproduce by a set mechanism, ideas can be stretched and modified any way you want. Genes are interpreted and realized by a fairly set mechanism. Ideas can be realized any old way. The "Meme" concept is one person's bad analogy imo.
"broad academic or even intellectual credibility"
I see what you did there.
I don't see a problem with memetics being non-mainstream in the way it's described here. Sure. If you want a job doing something called _memetics_. If you want to gain clout and respectability among your peers for illuminating some dark corner of the worlds problems with your writing, memetics is not going to impress anyone.
I say, More ideas the better!
I would be very grateful to ANYONE who could produce a reference to a published paper or text describing both memetics and semiotics in culture.
Another critique comes from semiotic theorists such as Terrence Deacon[41] and Kalevi Kull.[42] This view regards the concept of "meme" as a primitivized concept of "sign".
?? I don't know what that refers to.
Regarding the references from Wikipedia--I apologize for my enthusiasm in a post about memetics, if I gave you the impression I was just shooting off in the forum. I should have worded it better. I'm sure the reference to Wikipedia was an honest gesture at being informative.
"Kalevi Kull (born 12 August 1952, Tartu) is a biosemiotics professor at the University of Tartu, Estonia." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalevi_Kull)
Yes. Tartu is the holdout for semiotics in academia. My guess is Professor Kull has to have an opinion about memetics teaching at Tartu.
> "Terrence William Deacon ... is an American neuroanthropologist ... is currently Professor of Anthropology and member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon)
Anthropologist would certainly have an opinion about memetics. Blackmore (2000) essentially spends her whole book making the case for memetics in this field.
I was excited by the prospect someone in the _semiotic_ community would take memetics seriously (other than the subfield of bio-semiotics).
Noth (1995) is not a recent publication, but it is a serious survey of semiotic theories. He devotes only 5 paragraphs of 575 pages to memes. (https://www.google.com/books/edition/Handbook_of_Semiotics/r...) (you only get to see the beginning in this link, but I have the book and there is only one more paragraphs on the next page).
Quoting the rest of the paragraph from Wikipedia, "Another critique comes from semiotic theorists such as Terrence Deacon[41] and Kalevi Kull.[42] This view regards the concept of "meme" as a primitivized concept of "sign". The meme is thus described in memetics as a sign lacking a triadic nature. Semioticians can regard a meme as a "degenerate" sign, which includes only its ability of being copied. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.[clarification needed]"
It's a radical notion, even for semiotics, there could be anything more primitive than the sign itself. And a sign lacking a triadic nature is incomplete critique, since semiotic community is divided between bipartite and tripartite sign theory. Nevertheless, intellectually I'm very curious about the possible connections. Semiotics is so terribly 'static', and suffers to make sense of change. While memetics is incessantly dynamic, but where's the beef?
Alas, the search continues...
Both semiotic and memetic engineering are both a joke on par of "don't think of elephants", much less science.
Phlogiston was descriptive too. Arguably useful. Completely wrong as it turned out by serious study.
The key problem with meme as a concept is that unlike biology with virion the concept cannot even predict how successfully the thing will spread out to where. Similarly with signs and how will they impact communication.
The real test of an idea is what predictions it makes not how well it describes things.
So you agree they are descriptive, and for you the test is the effectiveness of their predictions.
In a scientific context these are both valid criticisms. Semiotics had it's brush with scientific rigor and suffered a similar blow as formalized mathematics suffered in the early 20th century.
Of course mathematics survives not because its logically consistent, but because it's useful. Semiotics is also useful in many disciplines such as art, literature, design, communications, philosophy, where it provides a consistent language and framework to describe culture and language construction of meaning. Semiotics is sufficiently useful to generate new perspectives in short order (Greimas' Semiotic Square) is a neat trick.
Memetics also has a number of neat tricks which are usefully descriptive of phenomena.
Jokes aside, any work which is mostly descriptive suffers the same criticisms, and different descriptions of those disciplines also do justice, or work to discredit equally well.
Not for nothing. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, but I do have more than a passing _blog_ fancy of these topics. I'm always looking for others who are equally interested, and maybe, like me still look for more better uses. (^_^) And I'm thinking there may be a few here on HN, because this post did get some upvotes.
If you took the article and replaced meme with idea would anything be lost?
It's only a property of some ideas. People have self-contained ideas all the time, including ideas they're inclined to absolutely keep to themselves.
Not telling anyone your ideas is like a mountaintop hermit not spreading a new viral strain.
Is your comment different than saying "some ideas are catchier than others"?
No, and that's the whole point.
Since "some ideas are catchier than others", ideas are superset of memes.
Memes being, precisely, the ideas with higher virality.
Ideas with low or zero virality are not memes.
Presumably, a scientific study of ideas would observe ideas commonly transmitted in the wild.
The field of meme-ology however does. So there's that.
This seems to work fine.
Whether insight comes from calling an idea an organism is another issue, I suspect it's a poor metaphor.
First, "What the academy uses" is a pretty low bar for clarity, thinking, relevance, and all that...
That said, meme was popularized by Richard Dawkins, an academic.
Mimetic theory (conceptually related) was formed by Rene Girard, a Harvard scholar (and has tons of citations).
Plus, "meme" gives 717,342 results back on JSTOR, 2 million+ on Google Scholar, and 219,789 on ScienceDirect.
So, there's that.
>It's not clear any clarity is added to the world by replacing the term for culture or thoughts with whatever the term meme is trying to accomplis
It is perfectly clear what is added, if one bothers to read a description of the term "meme". Neither culture nor thoughts mean the same thing. So much so, that your complain isn't even wrong.
Culture and thoughts may not mean the same thing, but people are not using the word "meme" consistently- hence sometimes it means cultures and sometimes thoughts and sometimes it's a term for cat pictures on twitter.