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.
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.
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.)
Could the analogy of irrationality as a memetic disorder be usefully extended?
Memes such as religions and New Age beliefs often contain anti-epistemology so as to stop people thinking too hard about them not actually making sense.
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.
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.)
Memes such as religions and New Age beliefs often contain anti-epistemology so as to stop people thinking too hard about them not actually making sense.