Comment by bmc7505 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmc7505 | Hacker News Reader

  "You're a hacker, that means you have deep structures to worry about, too."

  "Deep structures?"

  "Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?"

  "Sure."

  "You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them - the axons split and pushed their way between the dividing glial cells - your bioware self-modifies - the software becomes a part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable - all hackers are vulnerable - to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."

  "What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"

  "Just don't stare into any bitmaps..."

― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash. (1992)

  "The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction."

― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. (1979)

Sure, and see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)

But, uh, any evidence that that's real? We should be careful with Gödel's results here; the Gödelian incompleteness of the human mind is that a human cannot consistently believe that everything they believe is true. It has nothing to do with sanity and perception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxastic_logic

I think if you take these parables literally, there probably isn't a single input that will reliably cause the mind to self-destruct, but they are a cautionary warning. The internet gives plenty of evidence to support the theory that memetic hazards (1) exist, (2) are more transmissible than widely believed and (3) repeated exposure will cause cognitive malfunction.

What evidence are you referring to? Trying to search for this is impossible, keeps throwing SCP results.

To share specific examples here would be irresponsible. But qualitatively speaking, one could argue that viral media are mild forms of memetic hazard propelling irrational, conspiratorial, or even extremist behavior in the real world. While the internet has many positive effects on our society, regardless of your political orientation, I think most would agree that instant, unfettered access to information can also lead to dysfunctional side-effects.

The mere idea of basilisks was enough to make the rationalist community self-destruct.

How rational of them!

I'm not sure if this is entirely true but it does seem like the lesswrong community happened to peak around this time.

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