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Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

jacquesmattheij.com

61–70 of 88 posts

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#61
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoops, it looks like you forgot to su and kill the Unix memes you are infected with.

Nothing wrong with such memes, they are like good bacteria. We are talking about memes that want you to take actions (coercive memes) like spending your money on one product/service, or join a religion and then bomb the temple of another religion.

I guess my point is no one is truly immune from meme infection as its a side effect of having a brain, its not something you can control.... "Enjoy." "I'm lovin it."

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#62
post #58

I am immune. The trick is to become conscious of the process. Put another way: the immune mind operates on a higher level of abstraction and can objectively see lower levels - you allow the memes to run in brain cycles but you are su and kill them. It's like when you are watching a movie and at some point you realize (feel) it is fake reality, then you learn to do it on purpose everytime: you watch the movie layer fr…

Unix meme aside, that's what I do. Awareness of manipulation reduces its effectiveness. Bringing in another meme, "I see the fnords!" ;) Hofstadter's stuff has also been instructive.

But once you see the fnords, you can't un-see them.

The paid content masquerading as journalism is particularly irritating. You can also see similar bias in the regular news stories. There are lots of tricks you can use to color the facts of a story to get the audience to respond in a particular way.

Lighting, framing, background, ambient sounds, subject placement--all these things can be employed for rhetorical effect. For instance, authority figures might be filmed at a slight upward angle from below the eye line, to make them appear slightly taller than anyone viewing the image. Fat people will be filmed from shoulders up if favored, from the waist up if unfavored, and from the neck down for vaguely defamatory stories. Pay attention to whose faces are shown with police mugshots, and whose faces are shown with license photos, military photos, school photos, or photos intended for other purposes. Watch out for different wording in captions and infobars. Listen for odd euphemisms that suddenly pop up in several places at once, or for different people who mysteriously say almost exactly the same things, as though they read from the same script.

It's almost harder to see anything that isn't a fnord.

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#63
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unix meme aside, that's what I do. Awareness of manipulation reduces its effectiveness. Bringing in another meme, "I see the fnords!" ;) Hofstadter's stuff has also been instructive.

But once you see the fnords, you can't un-see them. The paid content masquerading as journalism is particularly irritating. You can also see similar bias in the regular news stories. There are lots of tricks you can use to color the facts of a story to get the audience to respond in a particular way. Lighting, framing, background, ambient sounds, subject placement--all these things can be employed for rhetorical effe…

I beg to differ.

It's the tricks that you describe that are the "fnords". And once you see them explicitly as tricks, they lose their power over you.

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#64

Wise synthesis of a growing problem. Author says "I've decided to 'opt-out' of this war entirely." What mental gymnastics does he use when watching a YouTube ad for example? The subliminal effect of much advertising is pernicious and cannot be entirely avoided, it seems to me.

> What mental gymnastics does he use when watching a YouTube ad for example? No ads on youtube here so no mental gymnastics required. Probably one of ghostery, ublock or umatrix takes care of those for me. The only way they can reliably serve those is when they splice them onto the actual video but that hasn't happened yet. On some sites pre-roll ads do cause the main video to be paused for as long as the ad would ru…

Excellent. Thank you.

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#65
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unix meme aside, that's what I do. Awareness of manipulation reduces its effectiveness. Bringing in another meme, "I see the fnords!" ;) Hofstadter's stuff has also been instructive.

Indeed! GEB has been a bible in this regard (pun intended).

:)

Maybe it's better to start with I Am a Strange Loop.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#66
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with such memes, they are like good bacteria. We are talking about memes that want you to take actions (coercive memes) like spending your money on one product/service, or join a religion and then bomb the temple of another religion.

I guess my point is no one is truly immune from meme infection as its a side effect of having a brain, its not something you can control.... "Enjoy." "I'm lovin it."

Some memes immunize us against other memes. As a scientist, I'm immunized against all sorts of religious memes. But of course, carriers of religious memes are typically immunized (at least partially) against scientific memes.

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#67
post #25

It's not a war. It's evolution. Nature, red in tooth and claw . Ideas live in you, and they die in you, and they evolve. Reproduction: ideas spread, through words, deeds, and creations. Variation: communication inherently introduces errors, and thoughts change over time. Selection: ideas that are forgotten die without spreading. With reproduction, variation, and selection, you have evolution. Religion is a coherent,…

If ads are memetic WMDs, then maybe it is a war.

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#68
post #46
post #25

It's not a war. It's evolution. Nature, red in tooth and claw . Ideas live in you, and they die in you, and they evolve. Reproduction: ideas spread, through words, deeds, and creations. Variation: communication inherently introduces errors, and thoughts change over time. Selection: ideas that are forgotten die without spreading. With reproduction, variation, and selection, you have evolution. Religion is a coherent,…

I appreciate your point of view, but doesn't this deny human nature, replacing subjectivity with a kind of sterile mechanistic objectivity? We can make rational choices. For instance, we could remove advertisements from public places and roads.

The idea of removing advertisements is itself a meme that propagates and must compete with other memes.

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#69
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But once you see the fnords, you can't un-see them. The paid content masquerading as journalism is particularly irritating. You can also see similar bias in the regular news stories. There are lots of tricks you can use to color the facts of a story to get the audience to respond in a particular way. Lighting, framing, background, ambient sounds, subject placement--all these things can be employed for rhetorical effe…

I beg to differ. It's the tricks that you describe that are the "fnords". And once you see them explicitly as tricks, they lose their power over you.

They lose their power, but they never stop being annoying.

They constantly remind you that other people see you as an object to be manipulated, rather than as a person with its own individual motivations, thoughts, and opinions. And then you can also look at other people around you, and see that the same tricks still have power over them.

Re: Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes

#70

Shamelessly reposting an earlier comment of mine ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9909259 ) because I feel it's relevant here: --- >For quite some time I've felt that advertising/marketing, at least the sort we've had for the past century or so, is inherently immoral. The fact that it's a necessary evil in our economic system doesn't stop it from being an evil. >Modern advertising is not merely informing people…

I completely disagree and I find your choice of words - "it's too deep for you", "it's tricking you!", "it's eeevil!" to be distasteful. Seems like a political ad for going to the "righteous side" of being against ads. There has been only one brand that I can recall to have bought because of "hidden" advertising. Budweiser. I used to see the characters from my favorite series drinking it while eating pizza or other d…

> There has been only one brand that I can recall to have bought because of "hidden" advertising.

If you recall it, then they did not do a very good job at hiding it, right?

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