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Comment by nhinck2 | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't an antimeme be something that was non-communicable?

It'd be the idea of something being perfectly memorable but when you attempt to describe it or begin in anyway to record or communicate about it your mind just goes blank, only for the memory to re-emerge some time later like a shower nightmare. Forever in your head but unable to pass onto anyone else.

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The closest thing I've seen to an antimeme in real life is the explanation of a monad. Many people seem to lose the ability to explain what it is as soon as they understand it. Maybe tensors are a close second.

FloatHeadPhysics has a pretty good explanation as to what tensors are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2FP-T6S1x0

The best I can do for monads is "it's like Option and Result in rust"

But if you're able to tell me that a thing called a monad exists, then it's nothing like a pure antimeme, which to my mind would be self-removing from all perception in all normal contexts.

The word for this is "esoteric". An "esoteric ritual" is one that's easily kept secret because it's hard to learn even if you try to explain it.

Like, you can't learn to drive a car or play a violin by reading a book about it.

Some real life anti-memes include embarrassing stories and complex passwords.

An antimeme is something you forget. You can communicate about it fine.

There are SCPs that affect communication:

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/taboo

Yes but if it were to be a pure antimeme, wouldn't being able to communicate about it be irrelevant, since it would remove itself from both your memory and that of whoever described it to you, as if nobody had ever described anything? I at least see it this way, and believe that if we were ever confronted with such a thing in the real world, all references to it would be imperceptible in any normal non-momentary context.

That is correct. I'm pointing it out because the "non-communicability" aspect is a whole genre called "infohazards", which is any SCP triggered by or involving communication. It's a very popular tag.

You might contrast with SCP-2521 that attacks those that use written or spoken language to refer to it, so the documentation page is one giant infographic without text.[1]

[1] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2521

The basic idea of an antimeme is an idea that doesn't want to be spread or perpetuated. A secret is an example of an antimeme that actually exists, so I would say communication of the idea would also in principle be resisted. But creepy, wild sci-fi needs to go with 'what if that, but even more so?'. (though, I would also say a pure antimeme would be completely self-extinguishing. Actually the way these sci-fi antimemes work is closer to how e.g. real-life secret societies operate(d). There's a secret, and it is perpetuated within the group, but it's carefully guarded from widespread knowledge. The sci-fi idea is that the knowledge itself basically does this, somehow, to any entity not in the in-group, where the in-group is frequently non-human, maybe non-organic/non-sentient)

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