Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of meme
Despite the corny sponsor's advertising and the elitism inherent in the opening blurb (which I'm sure most of the participants would reject) - these TED talks are really worth checking out. Not only are interesting things explained, but they're explained by experienced public speakers, so its good entertainment.
Anyway, I really liked this talk because Mr. Dennett (or Danny D, as I like to call him) clarifies some thinking that I've had for a long time, but it never crystallised for me until now. So check it out...
posted by zenBen at 3:17 PM
14 Comments:
Good video, thanks for that.
10:00 PM
Ok, so clearly some principle of game design could be useful in effecting less viral memes, or rather, nuetering the virality of toxic memes. What do you think that might be?
10:11 PM
I think a great part of what is b3hind the p0wer of memes comes from their repositioning of a person's value system - and so the person moves into a challenge-reward cycle with respect to the teleonomy of the meme. That is, a meme usually has an interpretation that can be couched in terms of real-world actions, like consumerism. Purely abstract ideas probably aren't thoughts that would be rabidly infectious among a general populace. So someone gets ahold of some new idea, they get a whole new set of triggers for their pre-conscious teleonomies (like anorexics), and they subsume their former triggers into the new ones (closest example I can think of, though slightly artificial - Christian Bale, 'slimming down' for The Machinist, subsumed his hunger into a desire for reading).
If we take Dennett on face value, this is like a virus reprioritising the behaviour of its host.
So obviously, yes, if you have a challenge-reward cycle that you want to break, game design should be a fertile field of suggested tactics. I would pick obfuscation of goals first. Or maybe screw around with the value of the reinforcers, until people are too confused to want them.
9:26 PM
What has Dan Dennet got against parasites anyway? Cant we all just learn to get along...
10:42 PM
sV8G3d Very good blog! Thanks!
3:02 PM
WjmnfV Please write anything else!
5:09 PM
Please write anything else!
6:05 PM
Thanks to author.
6:54 PM
Magnific!
7:42 PM
Please write anything else!
8:48 PM
Nice Article.
10:23 AM
Wonderful blog.
2:58 PM
Hello all!
5:05 PM
actually, that's brilliant. Thank you. I'm going to pass that on to a couple of people.
5:55 PM
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