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Are you hosting a memetic parasite?
- foobarbecue 6y agoThere is no antimemetics division.
- coderzach 6y agoI've been feeling very paranoid about posting ANYTHING online, honestly. Or chat, email, video call, etc. Is that what we're talking about?
- MrRadar 6y agoIt's a reference to this: http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub There Is No Antimemetics Division and its sequel Five Five Five Five Five are some of the best sci-fi stories I've ever read.
- coderzach 6y agohaha, that's not a visual programming language!
- omginternets 6y agoI'm really enjoying this. Thanks for posting it!
- joshschreuder 6y agoThere’s some really great SCPs on there, I go through the top rated ones every few months. Some very creative and well thought out pieces. I have a feeling like the developers of Control (the video game) were heavily influenced by SCPs.
- omginternets 6y agoHuh I’m not familiar with that game. Gonna check this out. Edit: ok, just checked out the Wikipedia page. You will be happy to learn that it is directly inspired by SCP.
- joshschreuder 6y agoIt’s a great game, really hit that X-Files / Fringe vibe that has been largely missing from a lot of media in the last decade or so.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jsmith99 6y agoNot working for me, try https://archive.is/20210319065509/https://apxhard.com/2021/03/17/are-you-hosting-a-mimetic-parasite/ https://archive.is/20210319065509/https://apxhard.com/2021/0... I recommend the Web Archives Firefox extension by the way. Useful not just for archive.is but also for e.g. Google cache (googlebot is often allowed pass paywalls).
- renewiltord 6y agoThank you for the link and extension recommendation.
- omginternets 6y agoI guess we'll never know :(
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- staticman2 6y agoI don't believe (hardly) anyone in academia uses the term meme. Perhaps there's a good reason for that? It's not clear any clarity is added to the world by replacing the term for culture or thoughts with whatever the term meme is trying to accomplish.
- turblety 6y agoYou know, meme was originally coined [1] by Richard Dawkins, an academic scientist, in his book The Selfish Gene. 1. https://books.google.com/books?id=WkHO9HI7koEC&pg=PA192 https://books.google.com/books?id=WkHO9HI7koEC&pg=PA192
- joe_the_user 6y agoThe Selfish Gene is a popular text by an academic articulating a very specific view of evolution, one that's caught on among a certain subculture but which isn't mainstream as far as I can tell. Plenty of terms originally coined by academics lack broad academic or even intellectual credibility. I'd agree with the OP that the use of "Meme" is one. I'd also agree that this is because the term provides no clarity - ideas aren't like genes. Genes reproduce by a set mechanism, ideas can be stretched and modified any way you want. Genes are interpreted and realized by a fairly set mechanism. Ideas can be realized any old way. The "Meme" concept is one person's bad analogy imo.
- xtiansimon 6y ago"The Selfish Gene is a popular text ... among a certain subculture but which isn't mainstream as far as I can tell." "broad academic or even intellectual credibility" I see what you did there. I don't see a problem with memetics being non-mainstream in the way it's described here. Sure. If you want a job doing something called _memetics_. If you want to gain clout and respectability among your peers for illuminating some dark corner of the worlds problems with your writing, memetics is not going to impress anyone. I say, More ideas the better!
- staticman2 6y ago
- joe_the_user 6y agoGoogle Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Yo3J8VEjX2kJ:https://apxhard.com/2021/03/17/are-you-hosting-a-mimetic-parasite/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Yo3J8V...
- smarx007 6y agoConnection refused is likely that the site was "nullrouted" (not really, but don't have a better term) by a hosting provider after HN hug and not crumbled under load itself (usually you experience very long response times, which would then often be a 5xx error). Wall of shame: https://www.whoishostingthis.com/#search=apxhard.com https://www.whoishostingthis.com/#search=apxhard.com (Dreamhost).
- blfr 6y agoWhat surprises me about habits like watching news or scrolling Facebook is that people don't get bored by it. Because this is our failsafe mechanism for not falling into repetitive loops. And I get the appeal of most of these things. When I was an adolescent I had this or other 24h info network on most of the time on a tv in my room. I spent nights arguing with people on Usenet. But after a few months or maybe a year or two, I would get bored with them. Yet people can keep going for decades. Why is their memetic immune system not firing up?
- hirundo 6y agoThose who are alive have genes that have survived billions of generations due to our ancestors' habitual vigilance for predators, prey and mates. We are hardwired to scan the world for those, whatever the channel. Our predecessors who got bored too quickly by massively repetitive scenery were less likely to become our ancestors.
- archduck 6y agoTell that to all the descendants of Genghis Khan....
- samus 6y agoIf we go back in history far enough: yes, of course we will realize that X% of humanity is a descendant of person Y. But that is just a rather obvious consequence of the fact that genetic signals can travel through a genepool pretty quickly. Nevermind that we are talking about ancestry, not any particular genetic signals. It's just that Genghis Khan, King John and Charlemagne are rather prominent ancestors, and that their geneanalogy is documented well. I'm pretty sure we would find similar results with most people who still had decendants by, let's say, 1750. Since then, humanity went through a phase of tremendous population growth, which by definition expands the set of descendants of any of our ancestors. Most humans that have ever existed are alive today. Their ancestry must come from somewhere.
- Barrin92 6y agoCasual social interaction argumentative or otherwise is natural. I mean it's not like we're by nature solitary animals who sit in our rooms and ponder the mysteries of the universe for ten hours. That's just a nerdy hobby of a minority of people who write blogs like that. Every day when I go to work (pre-covid anyway) I used to chat with the middle-aged lady living next door and we'd talk about the weather or the news or whatever, and there's nothing new about it but it's enjoyable. I've heard someone argue it's like a low-key reality check, sort of like people pinging each other checking if everything's still in tune. Not too long ago we used to congregate in large communities and extended families for much of the day, and for the last few decades we've locked ourselves in cubicles and single family homes. My grandmother had 8 siblings and three generations living in one home, there was always something to talk about or get in a fight with. It's no wonder most people are yearning for a sort of casual background chat.
- renewiltord 6y agoInteresting model. I have found the meme model a useful thing in the past but have not distinguished things except by their transmissibility and energy consumption. The meme parasite model is an interesting way to distinguish "harmful" memes from good ones. Currently, I suspect parasitic memes have lots of room to flourish because we keep people alive who are hosts. There is very little selection pressure. But that is because we are in a time of unbelievable prosperity, a Stable Era. I believe that as other countries catch up, we will enter a Chaotic Era. The real pressures will pop up then and either a massive gap will yawn between those with many meme parasites or the ones with meme parasites will follow their directive to eat those without. Not to sound like an accelerationist but since I'd prefer that parasitic memes die out, I hope that the chaos comes fast, so that even if I am heavily infected the coming purge wipes me so that Clean Humanity may survive. If we wait too long, too many of us may be infected, and we may win but doom us all to a local optimum. And as Toby Ord argues in The Precipice, that would be a terrible end.
- mattkevan 6y agoGood satire!
- totetsu 6y agoIt's easy to get caught up in information flows, and assess how the state of the world aligns with your values. It's much harder to propagate your values into the world. Just worrying sometimes feels like you're doing something, when you're not. It's a shame that most of us are so disempowered that tuning out is probably the best option for our individual wellbeing. I realised Social media was a memetic parasite right from the start when I could feel the urge to take a photo of something, rather than just enjoy it rising in my consciousness.
- nradov 6y agoPeople felt the urge to take pictures rather than just enjoying things long before social media. Many of us enjoy the photography process itself, and we like to share our art with friends.
- totetsu 6y agoI just made a dark room in my bathroom last week to try black and white photo paper developing. The slow hard treacherous process is giving me a new appreciation for photography of the past. I guess I do remember people talking a disposable camera to a party and then personally giving the prints to their friends weeks later. What I found in the mid 2000s was this new thought of 'what photo to take' and 'what caption to write' , Like I was my own publicist. always in an imaginary conversation with people who weren't actually around, which is more a hallmark of loneliness than of touted 'being connected to the things and people I love' ...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- m463 6y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20210320221007/https://apxhard.com/2021/03/17/are-you-hosting-a-mimetic-parasite/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210320221007/https://apxhard.c...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- archduck 6y ago> More intelligent people can play host to far more sophisticated parasitic memes. Educated adults are less likely to believe that lizard people rule the world There's evidence that highly educated people are _more_ likely to believe in the Qanon conspiracy. Belief isn't just shorthand for "checking out the evidence and making claims about the world on the basis of the probability of that evidence." There can be a will to believe whatever supports your social or material interests that trumps reason. We are now living in post-epistemological times. Interestingly, at the end of the article he brings up pro wrestling and remarks on not believing it anymore. But this kind of credulity is almost the opposite of what pro wrestling is all about - you have to buy in to take part (kayfabe). Everyone does, everyone knows it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- exo-pla-net 6y agoWhat's your source that more educated people are more prone to buying into Qanon?
- archduck 6y agoThe original source is over a hundred pages of polling data, so I won’t link to that. https://m.slashdot.org/story/381628 https://m.slashdot.org/story/381628
- exo-pla-net 6y agoThey aren't scientists. And their conclusion is not just false; it's the opposite. If you have a college education, you're proportionally much more likely to have a "very unfavorable" view of QAnon. (26% with no college degrees, versus ~42% with college or higher). How did the journalists get it wrong? 1) They fixated on a poorly worded polling question: "How accurate or inaccurate are the claims made by QAnon?" (I myself believe that QAnon's claims are "somewhat accurate", in a similar way that I notice that broken clocks are correct twice per day.) 2) They failed to notice that non-college-educated people overwhelmingly account for people who are "unaware" of QAnon. It could be inferred that education correlates with worldly awareness, and hence the ability to have opinions on obscure topics. In conclusion, don't trust popular press. Journalists lack the analytical skill and incentives to accurately report on science, much less on raw data. https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- jamesgreenleaf 6y agoThat was a wonderful article, and an important concept from someone who found wisdom through suffering. The central idea reminds me of the quote by Jung: "People don't have ideas; ideas have people." It's pithy, and maybe not entirely true, but it's something we see every day, and can all resonate with.
- throwawaysea 6y agoGad Saad, professor of evolutionary psychology, recently wrote a book called “The Parasitic Mind”, that develops a similar set of ideas: https://bookshop.org/books/the-parasitic-mind-how-infectious-ideas-are-killing-common-sense/9781621579595 https://bookshop.org/books/the-parasitic-mind-how-infectious... Saad also appeared on the Jordan Peterson podcast recently, explaining his framing and terminology around ideas infecting minds: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/gadsaad/ https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/gadsaad/
- andreskytt 6y agoObserve, that today memes do not require the host to be alive. One could boast of a diet on YouTube, die of it a few days in and the videos would happily live on.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoThe videos age as well though. They aren't necessarily always in their prime, so its impact does tend to get reduced over time. so not "happily living on".
- PeterisP 6y agoThey may as well grow in popularity over time as they get shared and liked and pushed to others by recommender algorithms.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoI did think about that, in the scenario described by TP, I am putting faith that the claims made by a popular lifestyle video will be scrutinized and thus debunked.
- qubex 6y agoOh yes, the high level of discourse in the YouTube Comments section. ;)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- phreeza 6y agoIn your example at least the recipient is alive, but in fact I wonder if one could argue that with machine learning models training on web data, a meme can now perform an entire reproductive cycle without a human in the loop.
- 6y ago
- mikewarot 6y agoWhat about the other parasite, M0? https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r1/index.html https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r1/index.ht...
- tomgp 6y agoI agree with much of this article. I looked at the twitter output of an acquaintance a couple of days back and after literally 60 seconds I felt my mind becoming a stew of frustraion and anxiety -- i agreed with many of the points and retweets and slogans but to what end? On the other hand I'm dubious of effective altruism as a model for improving the world it seems to me it has very little chance of creating necessary structural change. Charitable giving is great but why as a society should we be subject to the whims of individual philanthropists -- often gross benneficiaries exisiting power structures.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago> Charitable giving is great but why as a society should we be subject to the whims of individual philanthropists -- often gross benneficiaries exisiting power structures. This is an interesting framing. What form of social organization would make it so that altruistic behavior was not a result of the whims of people in extant power structures? It seems tautologous that if someone has the power to allocate funds, they are the current beneficiary of the extant power structure.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago> why as a society should we be subject to the whims of individual philanthropists Well, what do the alternatives look like? It's not like powerful politicians aren't self-aggrandizing; I'm sure many of them would like to effect structural change, but the structural change they want is probably pretty suspect. Nor is it the case that "political majorities", writ large, have an untarnished reputation for gentleness and decency.
- kubanczyk 6y ago> as a society should we be subject to the whims of individual philanthropists As a society we can be changed by individual people. I would prefer to retain that, yes.
- pixl97 6y agoI dont really believe the altruism model will work myself, at least with our current society and the power memes have over people. CGP Grey's, This video will make you angry really gives a lot of insight into the nearly biological nature of memes and the selection process that goes into the ones that we end up seeing. https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc
- visarga 6y ago> One answer would be that “I care about the world and when I see things that are wrong I get upset, which is good and reasonable.” But that’s the parasite speaking. I think it's a social mechanism to weed out traitors. It's a necessary part of the process, not just a parasite meme.