Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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When I read the title I had the thought that someone had concocted some kind of adversarial neural network attack on humans that could be delivered by video, like in Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

Reminds me of this oddity: https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/jumping-frenchmen-of-...

Are there such things as mimetic diseases? We have definitely seen that alarmingly insane quasi-cults like Qanon or flat Earth can spread entirely via social media, so that isn’t too far away. The jump would be to something not requiring conscious thought or belief at all, something that fully bypasses the neocortex.

If that is actually possible I can see a future where everyone runs smart content filters (maybe AI powered) and curated whitelists before viewing things. Maybe there could be mental techniques for handling “cognitive hazards” that could be learned too. I feel like some mystical traditions have inklings of that like “visualize a white light around you” or “as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Maybe that stuff fires up some anti-malware in your brain.

At least there is already a symbol: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/264113001

Mimetic disease? If by that you include Bad Ideas, then yes, absolutely there are techniques for defending yourself against them. See things like Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World#Balone...

Or more generally, awareness of informal logical fallacies prepares you for spotting them in the wild (and they are everywhere).

I'd also include texts such as Rudyard Kipling's If in the toolbox of defensive thinking, for its advocacy of balance and humility:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%E2%80%94

And pg's essay on small identity:

http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

And thought-terminating clichés:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

None of these are guides to having good ideas as such, but can help avoid falling into the traps of bad ideas.

I was about to jump in with the term "cognitohazard", from SCP lore. Imagine a future where you'd hear something like "Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day." (@qntm is a terrific story writer and also brought us hatetris)

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

We are so, so close to that. Political parties and nation states now effectively have memetic warfare arms in the form of very advanced and soon AI augmented PR and propaganda agencies. Where there is attack there must also be defense.

Arms races tend to push innovation, which is why I now wonder about actual adversarial attacks on the brain that can bypass choice and thought entirely and even cause illness. That would be the logical endpoint, sort of like how the hydrogen bomb was the outcome of the bombing arms race. If it’s possible I predict it will be discovered in the next 25 years. We may see a video that sends people to the hospital that appears, say, right before an election and is targeted at the opposing side.

> Are there such things as mimetic diseases?

A n article on a doco with good background info: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/29/carol-morley-th...

"Ninety per cent of participants in reported epidemics are female. [] Studies that try to explain mass psychogenic illnesses have uncovered a familiar pattern. They are transmitted by sight and sound, so you have to witness the events happening to be affected. They often begin very suddenly and spread rapidly. Adolescents and pre-adolescents are particularly susceptible to them. They are also more likely to escalate if the people involved know each other. Seeing a friend who you admire becoming sick is the best predictor of getting symptoms. She faints and then immediately you start to feel shaky and sick too and it starts to spread. As Simon suggested: "Anxiety itself goes up and you get more symptoms. You get breathless, you start to shake, feel nauseous and sick. But instead of saying, ‘I’m getting anxious’, you think you’re possibly getting poisoned.”

Humans lost the war against memes, if there could have been a war, millennia ago. We are now ruled by memes like "language" and "currency" and "justice".

And we like it.¹ Is it “losing a war” if we weren't fighting?

¹: To the extent we don't like it, we're still fighting. And if you're not, consider: why not? (There's a meme for you: one should fight against harmful ideas.)

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