Antimemetics | Hacker News Reader

Antimemetics

jernesto.com

6 pointsjoshpicky6 comments

I heard the book has a cheesy ending while the original SCP version leaves it open.

My opinion is that SCP-3125 is something like game theory, or death anxiety, or knowing the most effective way to make money (which is applied game theory), that if everyone thinks about it too much, destroys the world.

These are your type 4 antimemes. Death anxiety leads to the rational conclusion that nothing is worth doing so you might as well just die immediately, and this takes the idea with it. (Healthy humans have developed irrational ways to suppress this.) (Particularly unhealthy humans might also realize that society and the human race don't matter, or that other humans existing are suffering for no benefit.) Perfect knowledge of game theory leads to a cut-throat world where not much survives, again taking most of the idea with it, as well as every idea that's not part of the optimal winning strategy.

The book is better conceptually than history wise.

Interesting your type 4 final stage nihilism, not sure if it will consider a type 4 given that it only self destructive.

Time matters in some of the categories there. What if a meme (I don't know, money, the tragedy of the commons, some future cult of the dead or whatever) works as a great filter and wipes mankind and any civilization that develops it at some stage? it is an antimeme even if, for some thousand years, it became locally popular? Something that erases itself or whatever spreads it over a not short period of time qualifies as antimeme or not?

Agree that’s kind of the hard part of trying to categorize them.

Spatial and temporal locality can be a thing. And depending on how you take them into account they can be more or less clear categories

There are genes that spread rapidly in a population because they are highly inheritable and yet, once they spread, cause a population extinction. These are genes- they replicate easily- not anti-genes. An anti-gene is something that doesn't replicate at all: it kills off its organism in infancy, or makes it sterile. Each of them needs to develop entirely independently, because it can't be transmitted.

Note that in There is no Antimemetics Division, the anti-memes are persistent, independent entities, not information: they have an existence that is material, it's the information about them that cannot be communicated (it's an antimeme). So maybe a good starting point would be to ask ourselves what facts and patterns exists in the world that resist being noticed and communicated.

I think that was the starting point of author. Similar to “meme” the term is too broad on purpose, so you come up with different possible ideas depending where you started from

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