3 ms·

> I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example. Shaka, when the walls fell

by paulmd 4y ago

> I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example. Shaka, when the walls fell ;) honestly there's an interesting argument to be made there that memes and cliches provide a higher symbol density to our communications via shared context/subtext. A meme has additional layers of context and nuance that are implicitly carried along with the actual words themselves, it has higher "meaning-density". Whether or not you like them, this is how human communications are evolving, and have been for a long time, particularly as we reshape language around our new technologies. "lol" as an interjective is a tonality carrier, just like vocal tone. Emojis are short textual-form memes. Etc etc. Image memes as high-density multilayered communication are just another form. I mean half the time when I write out a longform comment, the response I get is "I ain't reading all that shit" even here on HN. ;). People just want higher symbol density, it's the same reason they don't read the article or watch the video. The human brain is a meaning-density machine and we inherently seek ways to increase the amount and preciseness of meaning-interchange. Higher meaning-density per symbol is a great way to do that given our physical limitations at processing more symbols. In ironic contrast to the rise of youtube-driven content production - I think people inherently crave symbol density and meaning. But since we've monetized attention, there's a perverse incentive to decrease symbol density/meaning-density to allow greater time for monetization... but I think that also rubs against what our brains want to do. In the aggregate, the way memes bounce around communities nowadays is also not dissimilar to a neural network working with higher-order objects instead of zeros and ones or floats. Memes that don't get passed between groups are the ones that are less relevant - so we have activation energy in some form, short-term storage, and cross-group linkage between neurons. And the memes are symbolic encodings of some groups of features (concepts). They are an emergent cluster of features that activates various groups reliably. Higher meaning-density is also the reason some people prefer face-to-face communication or phone calls. Things like facial expressions and tone of voice also increase meaning-density as well. People say things like "it's less ambiguous/more immediate" but I think that's because of those sub-channels increasing the meaningfulness. And while meme culture/emojis isn't all good, maybe it's best viewed as replacing some of those sub-channels we lost in the shift from verbal to written communication rather than a regression to repetitive communication.

anigbrowl 4y ago
Temba; his arms wide. I agree with all of this, and I'm fond of memes myself. They are definitely an important sense-making tool. But there's a distinction that I can't quite articulate, between memes as shared shorthand, and cliches that are actually reflexes or performative gestures, but are meant to be processed by the recipient as original communication. As an extreme example, I used to know someone who was quite brilliant and would regularly make profound statements on a wide variety of topics, which he could explain in depth if needed. Some years after getting to be friends with this person, I wound up living with him for a few months and had access to his extensive library. I was surprised to discover how many of his profundities were actually quotations from books, but were uttered without any attribution or reference to the book. It would be like a HN commenter systematically lifting vc quotes but never mentioning their originators by name.
- monknomo 4y ago
  maybe the difference between a meme and a thought terminating cliche?
- remarkEon 4y ago
  Mirab, with sails unfurled. The other thing that this meme-language does is signal some sort of unity of understanding. The memes with deeper meaning tend to have much further longevity and come back time and again, in many different contexts. The father the meme travels, the more likely it is to absorb additional contextual significance.
- paulmd 4y ago
  "I made this" dot meme. See? Shaka, when the walls fell. Yeah I mean if he's presenting them as ideas he came up with that's intellectual fraud which it seems like most people are uncomfortable with. To some extent we are all living in a soup of ideas and we're just synthesizing from a lot of the same sources and riffing on a lot of the same inputs. But if it's systematic and specific and presented as ideas he came up with then yeah. I think a lesser form of "intellectual fraud" many of us are guilty of is speaking too authoritatively about things we're not deep experts on, that's why it's always uncomfortable to get called out on things we're wrong about like that. Even things like citing concepts from books we haven't read/etc are kinda "intellectual fraud". The concept of intellectual fraud is a really interesting one though because it's very ill-defined in general. Academics believe self-plagarism is intellectual fraud, you are presenting ideas constructed for another intellectual exercise as being ones for this exercise, you should independently construct each work or cite your prior works. I kinda feel like that one's a bit bullshit, that you can plagarize your own ideas. Ideas evolve continuously and I think it's a little weird to atomize their development like that. The idea of "you stole my meme, you should re-attribute when you re-post" is an interesting one that cooked for a bit there too. Like half the time who even knows where a meme came from let alone randomly crediting users every time it's reposted. I think in general it seems things like removing watermarks is going a little far but some people also go nuclear with the u/biggusdickus @xXxBD420xXx ON TWITTER stuff too, and it's also kinda crass with the way memes derive and are remixed to think you own an idea forever. Derivative works in copyrights are really another one where the law is kinda weird, I think we have this sense that Disney doesn't own your star wars slashfic because it's a derivate work, but it do be like that, even your additional creative input is subordinate to that original conceptual ownership. And that really feels weird and out of step. That's one of the reasons AI gen is awkward too, it's like an exam question of the most impossible chain of intellectual ownership. Who owns the ideas, the person whose stuff was used to train the net and was riffed upon? The company who built the net itself and tuned/trained it etc? The person coming up with the ideas for the prompts and curating/editing the results? Actual artists are influenced by each other all the time, who owns the idea of vintage anime artstyle or whatever, (forgetting assignment of copyright) does some artist from the 80s have social-intellectual ownership of gundam or whatever? how about Touhou? How is a neural net different, and who really owns the ideas? Like, you go to college to learn to mash up ideas gooder and come up with some new twists of your own, and neural nets can do the "ok now draw daft punk in the style of 1980s gundam" art homework assignments now. (really it's sort of like raising a kid, yeah the parents did a lot of it but the kid is also kind of their own intellectual entity, and the exact behavior will depend on trained responses to a particular life scenario ("prompt").) Intellectual ownership is a super interesting concept, like don't we all own these ideas we're discussing right now? is it some star trek TNG writer, because they wrote the proto-meme that sparked our discussion 30 years later? Which neuron initiated the wave, and does it even matter? (stolen meme: which pebble causes the avalanche?) Like physically it isn't even one thing, it's brain waves, neurons firing themselves in self-organizing clusters. Can you say who owns a meme? (which version?) Like yeah if it's a bunch of direct stolen quotes that he's presenting as his own that's easy, but, the concept of intellectual ownership (and the accompanying intellectual fraud) is really interesting and fuzzy in human society. derivative works are a sticking point in mapping onto our ideas of "ownership", and we intellectually derive all the time as a matter of course of life, sometimes inappropriately (like the "talking authoritatively about things you don't know all that well" thing). Our brains are information summary generators right down to things like daily routines, and that's inherently "derivation" of information in the ownership sense. Who really made any of that, which neuron is the "brush your teeth or they'll fall out" neuron and is that owned by my parents or by the dentist or by university biology, or some dead guy from the 1900s who invented the toothbrush? Which neuron was the one where I got good at python, and how much of that weight is from being good at C#/java? We are just giant idea machines that riff off what's worked, constantly, deriving and mashing up ideas is all we do. Ideas are weird and "I own that" really doesn't work for derivation, we have this inherent idea that if we add enough of ourself to it then we have at least some ownership of something that's not subordinate to someone else's ownership. Our ownership of the idea is intuitively relative to how much we add vs re-use... and that is our society-organism's gradient descent. ;) And maybe that gradient-descent is why the idea of your friend claiming those ideas as his own is offputting, or getting caught lacking on something you don't know well that you spoke too rashly about - it's an error in the backprop, if you will, and socially we know that and that's why it's taboo. It's fine to estimate the backprop a bit wrong (some fuzz even can improve results!) just try not to fire grossly wrong too much or in an adversarial fashion. (and in this model... self-plagarism isn't really a thing. I cited me, that's who I'm always citing, there is no error in the social backprop there, that's why it doesn't really "feel" wrong.) Memes as elements of cultural communication are interesting in that light because there's an explicit physicality to it that isn't present in just a raw idea. We definitely have a cultural idiom for "that's my image you can't steal it", despite it actually being a token/stimulus/idea itself in our culture ("the sign becomes its own pure simulacra" dot meme). Because that intentionality is also present in any act of creation. Art doesn't have to be good art, it just has to be trying to communicate a message, and the element implicit to that act of creation is really intentionality. Just a random interesting tangent I've been thinking about lately. Completely independent idea with no input from current events or anything else happening or being discussed by anyone else - original idea do not steal. You're all on notice, better cite your shit, cause my ownership of those ideas is clearly the most significant! /s (anyway the real meme weapon was Metal Gear all along. The Orange, pretty good, kept you waiting huh, even the idea of surpassing metal gear? All according to the will of the patriots... in 1992 nobody was prepared for a memetic weapon of that kind. It caught humanity unprepared. It's hilarious that one of the greatest theses about memes is itself an absolute memetic powerhouse, Kojima is really a William Gibson-level visionary about where things were going to go and also a master of the medium before it even existed. Modern meme but also not an unfair summary of Kojima's work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTqxL_6Ysg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTqxL_6Ysg )

by paulmd 4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago

Temba; his arms wide. I agree with all of this, and I'm fond of memes myself. They are definitely an important sense-making tool. But there's a distinction that I can't quite articulate, between memes as shared shorthand, and cliches that are actually reflexes or performative gestures, but are meant to be processed by the recipient as original communication. As an extreme example, I used to know someone who was quite brilliant and would regularly make profound statements on a wide variety of topics, which he could explain in depth if needed. Some years after getting to be friends with this person, I wound up living with him for a few months and had access to his extensive library. I was surprised to discover how many of his profundities were actually quotations from books, but were uttered without any attribution or reference to the book. It would be like a HN commenter systematically lifting vc quotes but never mentioning their originators by name.

monknomo 4y ago
maybe the difference between a meme and a thought terminating cliche?
remarkEon 4y ago
Mirab, with sails unfurled. The other thing that this meme-language does is signal some sort of unity of understanding. The memes with deeper meaning tend to have much further longevity and come back time and again, in many different contexts. The father the meme travels, the more likely it is to absorb additional contextual significance.
paulmd 4y ago
"I made this" dot meme. See? Shaka, when the walls fell. Yeah I mean if he's presenting them as ideas he came up with that's intellectual fraud which it seems like most people are uncomfortable with. To some extent we are all living in a soup of ideas and we're just synthesizing from a lot of the same sources and riffing on a lot of the same inputs. But if it's systematic and specific and presented as ideas he came up with then yeah. I think a lesser form of "intellectual fraud" many of us are guilty of is speaking too authoritatively about things we're not deep experts on, that's why it's always uncomfortable to get called out on things we're wrong about like that. Even things like citing concepts from books we haven't read/etc are kinda "intellectual fraud". The concept of intellectual fraud is a really interesting one though because it's very ill-defined in general. Academics believe self-plagarism is intellectual fraud, you are presenting ideas constructed for another intellectual exercise as being ones for this exercise, you should independently construct each work or cite your prior works. I kinda feel like that one's a bit bullshit, that you can plagarize your own ideas. Ideas evolve continuously and I think it's a little weird to atomize their development like that. The idea of "you stole my meme, you should re-attribute when you re-post" is an interesting one that cooked for a bit there too. Like half the time who even knows where a meme came from let alone randomly crediting users every time it's reposted. I think in general it seems things like removing watermarks is going a little far but some people also go nuclear with the u/biggusdickus @xXxBD420xXx ON TWITTER stuff too, and it's also kinda crass with the way memes derive and are remixed to think you own an idea forever. Derivative works in copyrights are really another one where the law is kinda weird, I think we have this sense that Disney doesn't own your star wars slashfic because it's a derivate work, but it do be like that, even your additional creative input is subordinate to that original conceptual ownership. And that really feels weird and out of step. That's one of the reasons AI gen is awkward too, it's like an exam question of the most impossible chain of intellectual ownership. Who owns the ideas, the person whose stuff was used to train the net and was riffed upon? The company who built the net itself and tuned/trained it etc? The person coming up with the ideas for the prompts and curating/editing the results? Actual artists are influenced by each other all the time, who owns the idea of vintage anime artstyle or whatever, (forgetting assignment of copyright) does some artist from the 80s have social-intellectual ownership of gundam or whatever? how about Touhou? How is a neural net different, and who really owns the ideas? Like, you go to college to learn to mash up ideas gooder and come up with some new twists of your own, and neural nets can do the "ok now draw daft punk in the style of 1980s gundam" art homework assignments now. (really it's sort of like raising a kid, yeah the parents did a lot of it but the kid is also kind of their own intellectual entity, and the exact behavior will depend on trained responses to a particular life scenario ("prompt").) Intellectual ownership is a super interesting concept, like don't we all own these ideas we're discussing right now? is it some star trek TNG writer, because they wrote the proto-meme that sparked our discussion 30 years later? Which neuron initiated the wave, and does it even matter? (stolen meme: which pebble causes the avalanche?) Like physically it isn't even one thing, it's brain waves, neurons firing themselves in self-organizing clusters. Can you say who owns a meme? (which version?) Like yeah if it's a bunch of direct stolen quotes that he's presenting as his own that's easy, but, the concept of intellectual ownership (and the accompanying intellectual fraud) is really interesting and fuzzy in human society. derivative works are a sticking point in mapping onto our ideas of "ownership", and we intellectually derive all the time as a matter of course of life, sometimes inappropriately (like the "talking authoritatively about things you don't know all that well" thing). Our brains are information summary generators right down to things like daily routines, and that's inherently "derivation" of information in the ownership sense. Who really made any of that, which neuron is the "brush your teeth or they'll fall out" neuron and is that owned by my parents or by the dentist or by university biology, or some dead guy from the 1900s who invented the toothbrush? Which neuron was the one where I got good at python, and how much of that weight is from being good at C#/java? We are just giant idea machines that riff off what's worked, constantly, deriving and mashing up ideas is all we do. Ideas are weird and "I own that" really doesn't work for derivation, we have this inherent idea that if we add enough of ourself to it then we have at least some ownership of something that's not subordinate to someone else's ownership. Our ownership of the idea is intuitively relative to how much we add vs re-use... and that is our society-organism's gradient descent. ;) And maybe that gradient-descent is why the idea of your friend claiming those ideas as his own is offputting, or getting caught lacking on something you don't know well that you spoke too rashly about - it's an error in the backprop, if you will, and socially we know that and that's why it's taboo. It's fine to estimate the backprop a bit wrong (some fuzz even can improve results!) just try not to fire grossly wrong too much or in an adversarial fashion. (and in this model... self-plagarism isn't really a thing. I cited me, that's who I'm always citing, there is no error in the social backprop there, that's why it doesn't really "feel" wrong.) Memes as elements of cultural communication are interesting in that light because there's an explicit physicality to it that isn't present in just a raw idea. We definitely have a cultural idiom for "that's my image you can't steal it", despite it actually being a token/stimulus/idea itself in our culture ("the sign becomes its own pure simulacra" dot meme). Because that intentionality is also present in any act of creation. Art doesn't have to be good art, it just has to be trying to communicate a message, and the element implicit to that act of creation is really intentionality. Just a random interesting tangent I've been thinking about lately. Completely independent idea with no input from current events or anything else happening or being discussed by anyone else - original idea do not steal. You're all on notice, better cite your shit, cause my ownership of those ideas is clearly the most significant! /s (anyway the real meme weapon was Metal Gear all along. The Orange, pretty good, kept you waiting huh, even the idea of surpassing metal gear? All according to the will of the patriots... in 1992 nobody was prepared for a memetic weapon of that kind. It caught humanity unprepared. It's hilarious that one of the greatest theses about memes is itself an absolute memetic powerhouse, Kojima is really a William Gibson-level visionary about where things were going to go and also a master of the medium before it even existed. Modern meme but also not an unfair summary of Kojima's work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTqxL_6Ysg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTqxL_6Ysg )