4 ms·

He didn't actually take the metaphor this far, but as I was reading his essay, what I wanted it to be about is this. If the corollary to virus is meme, than wh

by pdx 16y ago

He didn't actually take the metaphor this far, but as I was reading his essay, what I wanted it to be about is this. If the corollary to virus is meme, than what is the corollary to t-cell? We can't engineer real t-cells, but wouldn't it be fun to engineer their idea-space equivalents? Snopes.com, for example, is sort of a t-cell that can attack and kill a lot of memes, if the infected person is vaccinated with snopes after exposure.

andreyf 16y ago
I think the interaction between ideas is a little more intricate than that. For example, holding some ideas in high regard makes you more susceptible to other ideas and immune to others. The most infectious kind of idea is one transmitted through gossip.
- Travis 16y ago
  This works just as well for the human immune system as well. Having certain diseases makes you more susceptible to others. Case in point, the HIV virus causes AIDS, but generally death is described as "complications due to AIDS", e.g., non-Hodkins Lymphoma causes about 28% of death due to AIDS related complications (http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/recent/2008/082608_a.html http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/recent/2008/082608_a.html). Also, if you consider gossip as an unavoidable negative trait (i.e., society will never eliminate it, but we all kind of wish we could), then there are direct analogues in biology. Diarrhea, for example, is analogous to gossip in that sense. And it is a major vector for biological infection. I suspect you could stretch the analogy even further, but my point is that biological systems have some pretty complex interactions as well.
khafra 16y ago
There's a theory that religion, as well as being a parasitic meme, is also an inoculation against newer and more damaging memes: http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...
- theoj 16y ago
  I wanted to say the same thing as soon as I saw the article. You can look at religions as memes or viruses that propagate from person to person.

by pdx 16y ago

andreyf 16y ago

I think the interaction between ideas is a little more intricate than that. For example, holding some ideas in high regard makes you more susceptible to other ideas and immune to others. The most infectious kind of idea is one transmitted through gossip.

Travis 16y ago
This works just as well for the human immune system as well. Having certain diseases makes you more susceptible to others. Case in point, the HIV virus causes AIDS, but generally death is described as "complications due to AIDS", e.g., non-Hodkins Lymphoma causes about 28% of death due to AIDS related complications (http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/recent/2008/082608_a.html http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/recent/2008/082608_a.html). Also, if you consider gossip as an unavoidable negative trait (i.e., society will never eliminate it, but we all kind of wish we could), then there are direct analogues in biology. Diarrhea, for example, is analogous to gossip in that sense. And it is a major vector for biological infection. I suspect you could stretch the analogy even further, but my point is that biological systems have some pretty complex interactions as well.

khafra 16y ago

There's a theory that religion, as well as being a parasitic meme, is also an inoculation against newer and more damaging memes: http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...

theoj 16y ago
I wanted to say the same thing as soon as I saw the article. You can look at religions as memes or viruses that propagate from person to person.