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I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas

by Murfalo 12d ago

I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from). There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this. Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents

cyanydeez 12d ago
Memes are what we are talking about.
- IshKebab 12d ago
  Dawkins memes.
  - cyanydeez 11d ago
    Mostly the same thing.
Muromec 12d ago
Our enlightened ideas and their dangerously agitating propaganda (literally a virus). The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.
- drdaeman 12d ago
  > The framing of something as a disease Is a well-known cognitive quirk, Sapolsky covered that in “Behave” and “Determined”. As I get it, our morality piggybacks on the sense of disgust from insula activation, which lights up the same way as with pathogen avoidance. So comparing social groups to rodents, insects, or disease is a popular propaganda trick. Same here with viruses.
deleted 12d ago
[deleted]
goatlover 12d ago
Wasn't aware that memes were an accepted part of evolutionary biology. They're not inherited like genes through reproduction that are subject to natural selection via biological fitness. Or any other evolutionary mechanism.
- robotresearcher 12d ago
  The word was invented by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. He described ideas as reproducing with variation under selection pressure, which is the definition of the evolutionary mechanism. There is a more recent use of ‘meme’ to refer to what we used to call an ‘internet image macro’. So the meme of the idea ‘meme’ has itself evolved to have a more specific variant of the general idea.
- mitxela 12d ago
  Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents.
  - bbor 12d ago
    You explained the idea perfectly, which is a great way to see how flawed it is. To say the least, the main driver behind toothpaste adoption was not mass fatalities!
  - loose-cannon 12d ago
    >Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents. That's parenting and the passing of tradition. I wouldn't call it a meme. Also I can't tell if you're joking with people dying due to teeth disease.
    - 12d ago
beloch 12d ago
>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in." You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book. I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.
- greenowl 12d ago
  For many of us, AI adoption is really an AI mandate.
  - scotty79 12d ago
    If you are an employee, the employer has control over how you should do your work. IF you don't like that, transition to being a contractor and sign service agreements where you are going to be paid solely for results not for how you achieve them.
    - coldtea 12d ago
      That will change things for him, or any others taking the same course. Hundreds of millions can't all become contractors, and realistically wont all become contractors. So the issue described is a real social issue, whether he can "just" quit and avoid it or not.
      - simianwords 11d ago
        How it reads is that the world has converged on an obviously bad technology. If only you had the chance to control it from top down and you wouldn’t let this mistake happen for you know what’s best for the world. Not only that, it’s double bad because you can’t do anything about it because everyone is under the illusion except you and a few other sensible people. And you would reject the notion that you have agency to change things. Can’t take it seriously.
mannanj 12d ago
Yeah I mean if everything is virus that word seems to hold no meaning =) So thats the reality behind language itself. Communication itself really starts to mean everything and nothing simultaneously, at least as a deeper philosophical truth. You can start to poke holes in jsut about everything this way.
zzzeek 12d ago
Agree I was immediately mentally substituting "the telephone" and "printed books" for "LLM" and both fit quite well
ribs 12d ago
The prevalence of LLM-generated text masquerading as otherwise and incorporated into a significant fraction of all published text distinguishes this info-organism from all others.
satvikpendem 12d ago
Speaking of memetics and favorite books, check out There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm who also wrote some seminal short stories including the one that inspired the Alex Garland show Devs. The book is about how to deal with beings that make you forget you ever saw then, a sort of opposite mind virus.
- mjmjmjmj 12d ago
  great book
bryanrasmussen 12d ago
your friend would be a possible infection point (not a virus) for the memes encoded in the book. As a form of memetic transmission a book, if read all the way through, is especially potent - take Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged as an example. Books are many memes assembled together into a stable culture that reinforces the memes. The virtues of selfishness as a meme would be weak and probably die pretty quickly without all the support the book offers. Friends probably are not wide spreading infection points, the way reviews in professional journals are or the idea that successful people have recommended things, but they are especially successful at making the transmitted meme stick, as you will keep getting reinfected from them over time. Unless you break up that dangerous friendship!!
SllX 11d ago
> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing. The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.
- andai 11d ago
  >The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield. This is also how I was made, I think.
  - patrickmay 11d ago
    You don't remember?
  - SllX 11d ago
    Slightly different process but it’s in the ballpark… down the street, playing a different sport. lol
- dagss 11d ago
  The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument. Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.
  - SllX 11d ago
    > The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument. You admitted you don't know me, yet you still managed to jump to this conclusion. Good job, mate.
wseqyrku 11d ago
> the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable Nah, sometimes you should just come out say it. Those who get offended need to hear it more than anyone else.
andai 11d ago
The word meme appears in the paper, but only once (except for keywords and references). I'm wondering why that is. Maybe they avoided using it because most people think it means something else. (I've certainly had a hard time talking about them, for this reason!)
watwut 11d ago
> That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from). OK, but that is just meaningless pseudo philosophical claim. The actual (small) science part of evolutionary biology does not have perspective about ideas being genes. And the evolutionary biology that does is as much pseudoscience as any other pseudoscience.
BenoitP 10d ago
> Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? In that case the book would be a virus, and your friend a host. But it generalizes way wider to ideas. Religions are viruses too for example. With very strong viral mechanisms sometimes. Some religions are so much entrenched so that they have become part of the fabric for entire societies or countries, morphing their culture; the same way that sometimes viral RNA can become part of the DNA of the host.

by Murfalo 12d ago

cyanydeez 12d ago

Memes are what we are talking about.

IshKebab 12d ago
Dawkins memes.
- cyanydeez 11d ago
  Mostly the same thing.

Muromec 12d ago

Our enlightened ideas and their dangerously agitating propaganda (literally a virus). The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.

drdaeman 12d ago
> The framing of something as a disease Is a well-known cognitive quirk, Sapolsky covered that in “Behave” and “Determined”. As I get it, our morality piggybacks on the sense of disgust from insula activation, which lights up the same way as with pathogen avoidance. So comparing social groups to rodents, insects, or disease is a popular propaganda trick. Same here with viruses.

deleted 12d ago

[deleted]

goatlover 12d ago

Wasn't aware that memes were an accepted part of evolutionary biology. They're not inherited like genes through reproduction that are subject to natural selection via biological fitness. Or any other evolutionary mechanism.

robotresearcher 12d ago
The word was invented by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. He described ideas as reproducing with variation under selection pressure, which is the definition of the evolutionary mechanism. There is a more recent use of ‘meme’ to refer to what we used to call an ‘internet image macro’. So the meme of the idea ‘meme’ has itself evolved to have a more specific variant of the general idea.
mitxela 12d ago
Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents.
- bbor 12d ago
  You explained the idea perfectly, which is a great way to see how flawed it is. To say the least, the main driver behind toothpaste adoption was not mass fatalities!
- loose-cannon 12d ago
  >Memes are inherited. You brush your teeth because your parents do. Memes are subject to selection via biological fitness. The people who didn't brush their teeth died sooner of tooth disease, so those who brushed their teeth had more children. Memes mutate. You don't brush your teeth identically to your parents. That's parenting and the passing of tradition. I wouldn't call it a meme. Also I can't tell if you're joking with people dying due to teeth disease.
  - 12d ago

beloch 12d ago

>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in." You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book. I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.

greenowl 12d ago
For many of us, AI adoption is really an AI mandate.
- scotty79 12d ago
  If you are an employee, the employer has control over how you should do your work. IF you don't like that, transition to being a contractor and sign service agreements where you are going to be paid solely for results not for how you achieve them.
  - coldtea 12d ago
    That will change things for him, or any others taking the same course. Hundreds of millions can't all become contractors, and realistically wont all become contractors. So the issue described is a real social issue, whether he can "just" quit and avoid it or not.
    - simianwords 11d ago
      How it reads is that the world has converged on an obviously bad technology. If only you had the chance to control it from top down and you wouldn’t let this mistake happen for you know what’s best for the world. Not only that, it’s double bad because you can’t do anything about it because everyone is under the illusion except you and a few other sensible people. And you would reject the notion that you have agency to change things. Can’t take it seriously.

mannanj 12d ago

Yeah I mean if everything is virus that word seems to hold no meaning =) So thats the reality behind language itself. Communication itself really starts to mean everything and nothing simultaneously, at least as a deeper philosophical truth. You can start to poke holes in jsut about everything this way.

zzzeek 12d ago

Agree I was immediately mentally substituting "the telephone" and "printed books" for "LLM" and both fit quite well

ribs 12d ago

The prevalence of LLM-generated text masquerading as otherwise and incorporated into a significant fraction of all published text distinguishes this info-organism from all others.

satvikpendem 12d ago

Speaking of memetics and favorite books, check out There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm who also wrote some seminal short stories including the one that inspired the Alex Garland show Devs. The book is about how to deal with beings that make you forget you ever saw then, a sort of opposite mind virus.

mjmjmjmj 12d ago
great book

bryanrasmussen 12d ago

your friend would be a possible infection point (not a virus) for the memes encoded in the book. As a form of memetic transmission a book, if read all the way through, is especially potent - take Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged as an example. Books are many memes assembled together into a stable culture that reinforces the memes. The virtues of selfishness as a meme would be weak and probably die pretty quickly without all the support the book offers. Friends probably are not wide spreading infection points, the way reviews in professional journals are or the idea that successful people have recommended things, but they are especially successful at making the transmitted meme stick, as you will keep getting reinfected from them over time. Unless you break up that dangerous friendship!!

SllX 11d ago

> Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! You are correct. I frequently do this with religions & specific ideologies which seem to root themselves in people the same way that religions do & it certainly isn’t intended to be a charitable framing. The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield.

andai 11d ago
>The core of a virus in biology after all is essentially a packet of information which gets injected into host cells in order to replicate the virus in order to spread itself further afield. This is also how I was made, I think.
- patrickmay 11d ago
  You don't remember?
- SllX 11d ago
  Slightly different process but it’s in the ballpark… down the street, playing a different sport. lol
dagss 11d ago
The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument. Many things that you personally think are good (I don't know you but say for instance ideas around democracy or liberty) can also be described as viruses in the same way.
- SllX 11d ago
  > The point was that when you do this you participate in name-calling/slurs, not making an argument. You admitted you don't know me, yet you still managed to jump to this conclusion. Good job, mate.

wseqyrku 11d ago

> the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable Nah, sometimes you should just come out say it. Those who get offended need to hear it more than anyone else.

andai 11d ago

The word meme appears in the paper, but only once (except for keywords and references). I'm wondering why that is. Maybe they avoided using it because most people think it means something else. (I've certainly had a hard time talking about them, for this reason!)

watwut 11d ago

> That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from). OK, but that is just meaningless pseudo philosophical claim. The actual (small) science part of evolutionary biology does not have perspective about ideas being genes. And the evolutionary biology that does is as much pseudoscience as any other pseudoscience.

BenoitP 10d ago

> Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? In that case the book would be a virus, and your friend a host. But it generalizes way wider to ideas. Religions are viruses too for example. With very strong viral mechanisms sometimes. Some religions are so much entrenched so that they have become part of the fabric for entire societies or countries, morphing their culture; the same way that sometimes viral RNA can become part of the DNA of the host.