[SEQ RERUN] Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization

Tyrrell_McAllister

[SEQ RERUN] Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization — LessWrong

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This came up in passing at the last London meet: a human-crashing meme as existential risk. I suggested that there are lots of very smart people working all the time to mirror other humans well enough to write utterly virulent memes to sell them toothpaste, and that scientific knowledge of cognitive biases would likely help this, but I did not think it would make the resulting memes dangerous (or even significantly more powerful) - using memes (with everything else we apply) to convince the other chimp to give you the fruit is one of the things we're specialised to, after all.

Then someone noted that if a human-crashing meme came along, it would be on 4chan tonight and "Basilisk of the Day" on Encyclopedia Dramatica tomorrow ...

(Remember, all those years ago, when you were shocked by Goatse?)

An important thing to remember about memetic basilisks is that, uh, they don't exist. Except possibly on a tuned individual basis. The motif of harmful sensation is a common trope in fiction, but I know of no real-life examples that are just information.

timtyler15y-10

The motif of harmful sensation is a common trope in fiction, but I know of no real-life examples that are just information.

You are famiiliar with Nick's "information harms" paper?

4[anonymous]15y

The motif of harmful sensation always intrigued me. My go-to "cached" example for this is the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, where properly-configured static can be used to "crash" a human's brain. I would guess that that type of thing, rather than the examples of people who have died laughing is what you're concerned about. It doesn't seem obvious to me that a human-crashing meme would be able to spread though. Memes become viral because people spread them by showing them to other people around them and repost them to more and more places. If a human-crashing meme actually existed, (I think) it would be too virulent to spread effectively, much like how the most virulent of traditional diseases cannot spread effectively because they kill their hosts too quickly (the canonical example being Ebola, if memory serves). Anyway, the death from laughter is an example of a meme that killed, albeit on an individual basis and without likelihood of becoming a true threat.

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