Comment by andai
12 days ago
>TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology
Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind.
I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.
Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos. Like the actual meaning of the word.
Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.
The SCP Foundation pages[0] have something similar, a danger classification for "Memetic Hazards" which are basically informational viruses that affect memory, cognition, and perception.
[0] - https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/understanding-memetics
My favorite example is actually one that I believe could be true[0]: self-reinforcing cycles of human conflict, that resemble the life cycle of a parasite. From an old (2014) SlateStarCodex essay[1]. Some of it is going to be controversial read today[2], so I'll just give you the relevant "money quote" from the end:
<quote>
What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?
Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.
From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.
</quote>
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[0] - In whatever sense models are "true", i.e. a nice way to describe reality, that's succinct and has good predictive power, or something.
[1] - https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag...
[2] - Which is not the same thing as saying it turned out wrong.
6 replies →
https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm
See also John Barnes' Century Next Door books, where "memes" are basically computer viruses that jump to running on human brains, not just silicon chips. The results are... not pretty.
Dawkins original definition was an idea that replicated unchanged, in an analogy to a gene, which is essentially a unit of DNA small enough to replicate unchanged.
mostly unchanged (or rather, unchanged most of the time). Mutations still happen and are necessary for evolution.
Attention-seeking is indeed the original genetic algorithm.
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