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Marketing is also the evil twin. They're both collections of lies told by people looking to manipulate or coerce.

This isn't new, it's just a formalization of cult mechanics contrasted against the memes familiar to modern culture sieved through social science and psychology.

Refining this part of science, with the tools, compute, and and data freely available online, feels like one of Bostrom's black marbles.

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I think it's more like how humans have handled and weaponized too-complex-to-fully-understand information since the beginning of time. Old-shool religion kind of lost its power and usefulness, classical political ideologies are too diluted to work as intended, and now we're (re)inventing the next-gen "religions" on top of capitalism and science...

Every time humans try to "make some sense on what they can't fully make sense" a subgroup of them uses it as a tool to concentrate power... all old is new again...

Then again, the previous version of this, political ideologies, almost (or is still trying to get us) killed via full nuclear war, so this shiny new thing can very well be a "black marble"...

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