<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>
--
[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.
We call this Parasitic Processing because it's like a parasite in that it
takes up life within you, and it takes life away from you! It causes you to
lose your agency. It causes you to suffer. And here's what's important. This
capacity for your cognitive brain to be self organizing, heuristic using,
complexify, to create complex systems and functions with emergent abilities,
has a downside to it.
This is a complex, self-organising, adaptive system! If you try and intervene
here the rest of the system reorganizes itself around your attempted
intervention. It can adapt and preserve itself as you tried to destroy it.
Why? Because it's making use of the very machinery by which You adapt, and
make use of the things that are trying to destroy You!
I think this was kind of known for a long time, and pithily described in the well known phrase, "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".
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.