As I noted, crashing individuals is often possible. (c.f. the forbidden post, and the valley of bad rationality.) But something mass? As you note, it just doesn't work epidemiologically.
Of course, bad ideas spread quite effectively, as long as they don't kill their host.
Thanks, I hadn't read those before.
That's an interesting observation; I would think that in most cases good ideas would out compete bad ideas if they deal with the same subject (flat earth, young earth creationism), but obviously people hold many irrational ideas all the time. Could the analogy of irrationality as a memetic disorder be usefully extended? (I have read the sequence article about reason as an 'immune system' for the mind, but it seems as though the concept could be expanded.)
Today's post, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization, was originally published on 16 March 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Blue or Green on Regulation?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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