There Is No Antimemetics division

I: Introduction

II: Tinad’s Value as Epistemological Media

III: Cultural Instrumental Dementia

IV: A Practical Accounting of Memesis and Epistemology

V: Methodological Shortcomings of Tinad

VI: Minimal Surface

I: Introduction

There Is No Antimemetics Division (henceforth referred to as “Tinad”) is a science fiction novel about antimemetic entities: memetic entities which nullify the capacity for them to be perceived or understood, or which induce this nullification to people or things in their environment. The author acknowledges at the beginning that antimemes occur in the real world; e.g., things which are so boring, aggravating, or normal that you can’t stand to think about them, pay attention to them, or even perceive them in the first place. Or, things which induce these perceptual states about other things. It features many entities with supernatural-coded powers relating to various kinds of memetic, perception nullification. The organization tasked with handling these entities is a large bureaucracy, contrived to be somewhat cartoonishly clinical and corporate, with employees regularly subject to memory loss, the way a jackhammer artist or close proximity ear scream enthusiast might suffer hearing loss. Tinad is borne of the SCP project, but not labeled as such due to intellectual property considerations.

I enjoyed the novelistic aspects of this book very much; but for the purposes of this review, I’m thinking about it much less as a novel than as a thought object. That is, something which is so saturated in provocations of insight that it’s worth codifying as such a thing. The label helps to maintain consciousness of and orientation towards that status, and to signal to others that they might yield similar value. Useful insight is available everywhere, but it is hardly ever so concentrated.

Tinad is, by itself, insufficient for articulating its real-world epistemological analogs. Regarding Tinad’s relationship to these analogs, analogy and metaphor are useful and cheap, but without adjustment, they lack the nuanced specificity for technical accuracy and practical usefulness. Analogies and metaphors are most useful as templates, to be continuously tailored as we develop our understandings of how they relate to the real world. This is counter to a default cultural mode, in which the mere fact of one thing being symbolic of another, especially in emotionally and aesthetically evocative ways, are viewed as inherently meaningful and useful. In this default mode, we are ritualized, acculturated, and socialized into conflating poetic potency with accuracy and functionality, and into ignoring their often ridiculous and counterproductive implications. It’s important to clarify these aspects of metaphor and analogy, because of two distinct complications they relate to: overreaching in assuming that the source of the metaphor has identical attributes to the object having the metaphor applied to it, (in the terms of Julian Jaynes, “metaphier” and “metaphrand”, respectively,) and failing to recognize the analogy in the first place, because of some amount of aesthetic (or other) differentiating factor, even if they share similar principles.

Despite Tinad’s immediate shortcomings of rigor, it is a possible first step for directing more popular attention to epistemology and memetics in an intentional, systematic way. (This isn’t to say that the author was attempting to be rigorous, or that it would even be a remotely fair criticism, relative to his goals.) Using the tripartite attentional framework of “trigger, sustain, systematize”, Tinad is triggering, and I hope to help induce a sustaining and systemization of attention to its relevant subject matter. Very many of the important ideas relating to antimemes are themselves antimemetic, and the modes of thought which rigorously assess these ideas are antimemetic, and the scifi novel form creates a type of narrative scaffolding; something that many people are willing to pay attention to and think about for extended periods of time, even when they have no stomach for the bare concepts alluded to within. As someone becomes narratively familiarized with a setting, their stomachs may yet unclench for the abstracted concepts contained within. Because humans are cognitively optimized for social information, the novel format is thirteen months pregnant with a tootsie sticking out to be a competitor or complement to the traditional textbook, for purposes of systematic technical learning. Because a novel is a format that people are more likely to pay attention to, despite lack of interest in rationality or epistemology by themselves, it is a valuable rally point for attempts to systematize and promulgate these vital yet potently antimemetic concepts, and to extend the strategy of narrative scaffolding as a cultural educational tool.

II: Tinad’s Value as Epistemological Media

Why is Tinad uniquely useful as epistemological media? I’m guessing at several factors.

1. Tinad is an 1a) extended meditation within an 1b) explicitly epistemological framework. While something like the Matrix has an epistemological premise, Neo merely receives higher knowledge, then goes off to kick ass and wish he had more bubblegum. Characters don’t reason their way out of the matrix; they are merely chosen or spontaneously wake up. There is no elucidation on intellectual mechanism or procedure used to achieve epistemological liberty, or to validate the paradigm they’re currently in. It’s a cartoon of enlightenment that provides intuitive metaphors, which has in some ways been the cultural equivalent of handing a gun to a toddler without firearms training. See my unwritten treatise on “anchoring to initial emergence”.

2. Tinad 2a) places us in the perspectives of people who are trying to solve epistemological problems, with a 2b) persistent expectation that they are epistemologically compromised. In some cases, they have to rely purely on abstract reasoning, as their embodied and intuitive perspectives are known to be unreliable. This persistent expectation might help train a reflex, assuming a more trained, extensive awareness of the kinds of epistemological hazards which occur regularly in the real world.

3. Tinad’s bureaucratic framing 3a) suggests a systematic and procedural approach to epistemological problem solving. In a large world that’s 3b) chock full of confounding epistemological threats, winging it won’t cut it. Well, sometimes it has to, but at least 3a) with the aid of heavy duty industrial infrastructure and a large staff, developed over many decades.

4. Tinad establishes epistemology, memes, and information as viscerally relevant and tangible, in a way which can be cognitively intuitive to understand. And not merely to understand, but to recognize these dynamics as consequential to how things operate in the real world. In the real world, confusion, forgetfulness and strain to remember are stressful, unpleasant, and socially embarrassing, and motivate our attention to be pushed towards different things which we are more cognitively streamlined to think about. Besides individual forgetfulness, Tinad’s centrality of memes may prompt us to consider how our social context and milieus motivate us to pay attention to certain things, and avoid other ones.

5. It portrays the instrumental hopelessness of deep epistemological hobbling.

III: Cultural Instrumental Dementia

A broad framing for many of these issues of social epistemology is “cultural instrumental dementia”. My perception is that it is a useful enough premise to override the embarrassment of attempting to introduce a sweeping cultural paradigm. This scaffolding label is a landmark to help systematize the many concepts within, and be reminded of its practical utility. An issue with the term “dementia” here, is that not all mechanics scale neatly from issues affecting one individual to those which affect multiple individuals; or to put it more generally, inter-scale translations can demand involved tuning procedures. For example, while physiological dementia is a departure from healthy biological function, some version of cultural dementia seems to be the norm. However, each of these iterations of dementia produce similar outcomes of instrumental disruption in principle. There is also the conceptual baggage we don’t want; associations on one scale which are absent or different on another scale. Despite these and other complications, dementia is a useful metaphor as a starting point.

What kinds of things are worth considering with this framework? Opening the fridge and forgetting what you wanted doesn’t currently qualify, because it’s a complication negligible to overall instrumental utility. (Although if this is something someone personally cares about, or which becomes magnified in social consequence, they could adopt a corpus of relevant procedures.) Being persistently unable to think about or engage with other people about important ideas does often fall into this brand of dementia. Or, a different angle of this problem might be that psychosocial heuristics of social hierarchy have a stranglehold on our capacity to perceive, entertain, or curate information,, even while this information has many accessible indicators of importance and relevance outside of obvious proximate social relevance. It’s tricky to define “importance” because of how wildly perceptions of it can vary; I mean “importance” as a type of platonic instrumental importance. One definition of importance entails the idea that ‘a thing is defined by what people think it is’, with little or no reference to that thing’s raw state of being, outside of considerations of its perception. This attitude can often produce conflicting information. To articulate platonic instrumental importance, consider a thought experiment where two options exist to solve a problem. Option 1, according to the information of the problem solvers, looks way more functional than option 2, and so they ascribe importance to option 1, even though later they find out that option 2 works way better than 1, at which point they alter their assessment of importance. And all this time, they were never even aware of option 3, which would have achieved their goal way better than 2. Here we can see where “understood importance” or “social consensus of importance” diverges drastically from platonic instrumental importance.

We know that epistemology as a concept is not inherently antimemetic; in fact, it is the basis of extremely popular media and pop cultural memes. The Matrix, Inception, 1984, The Truman Show; gaslighting, fake news, echo chamber, redpill. Yet the thematic presence of memesis and epistemology in the zeitgeist is unsystematic, and people tend to not know how or why they work or relate to each other. People can, in scattered instances, acknowledge that these various epistemological and memetic hazards are real issues, and yet any deeper or systematic probing tends to be socially non-viable. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, discusses how different media formats train us to think and socialize in particular ways: “the medium is the message". It’s not clear how significant this factor of modern media is, compared to others. What kinds of conversations could I have with a normal adult in the 1930s, or the 1200s? Are most people hardwired against technical analysis? To what degree does technical interest follow from social, narrative, and aesthetic investment, and what is the character of this pattern? How do these investments occur in the first place? I know that technical analysis is cognitively expensive, but our society regularly incurs huge cognitive expenses in other areas. Why haven’t we set up the cultural infrastructure to motivate these relevant expenses, as opposed to other issues which are present in the zeitgeist? As impossible as it can feel to communicate important ideas to the people around me, I recognize that the cultural infrastructure for advanced knowledge probably inversely grows the further you go back in time, with minor exceptions.

Uttering the word ‘epistemology’ to most people in the world doesn’t produce useful outcomes, even though if they were somehow clockwork oranged into thinking about it for an extended period of time, they might agree about its importance. (Six syllables for an unfamiliar word is antimemetic; petition to replace it with ‘episteme’ or something, although I don’t know what the relevant complications of this process are.) This is a bootstrap problem of cultural instrumental dementia; that with the current configuration, people in general are not able or willing to pay attention to consequential limitations of knowledge and understanding.

Several years ago in a podcast appearance, Neal Stephenson discussed trying to invent new rocket propulsion concepts, in his role at the astronautics company Blue Origin. “Anything I could come up with, I found out some Russian scientist had invented fifty years ago.” I was struck by this failure of information logistics. Considering the number of zeros involved in the costs and profits of such business, why hadn’t those concepts been codified decades ago and put at the near side of the book shelf? Why hadn’t a state space of possibilities been established for clean, easy reading? These are the foundational premises upon which multi-billion dollar endeavors are built. It’s not clear that in this case it’s necessarily a huge problem; after all, Stephenson did find the research. But it’s impossible to know what information he didn’t find, and how this inaccessibility affects the investments of other rocket companies. Also, this was presumably funded on the back of Amazon’s profits, in such a way that market feedback wasn’t relevant to the research budget. Apply these dynamics to more mundane scenarios, and we have real problems. I frequently reference Stephenson rocket when I construct or happen upon useful ideas. It is socialized to be an embarrassment when you mention or publicize an idea that someone else already came up with, and incentivizes silence at the expense of what might be a socially useful concept. It is often considered undesirably arrogant, egoic, contrarian, or stupid to present certain kinds of original ideas. In some cases, people are lacking the intellectual infrastructure to understand the meaning of an original idea, such that it appears stupid or incomprehensible, in a way which is perceived as contemptible. These and other social factors are complications for social information logistics.

An adjacent scenario relating to information logistics is when we have useful information, but fail to capitalize on it, or have it occur that it can be used past its current capacity. In fourth grade, my class learned to memorize linking verbs to the tune of Yankee Doodle… and then I was never presented a musical mnemonic again, despite my perfect memory of every single linking verb, a fairly irrelevant corpus of knowledge in the scheme of things.

IV: A Practical Accounting of Memesis and Epistemology

Why should a normal person care about memesis and epistemology? To most people, talking about such things comes off as pretentious intellectualism, irrelevant to conditions of real people in the real world, outside of heavily constructed environments like academia, monasteries, or middlebrow podcasts. Or, it’s difficult to think in these ways, so they don’t like it, and can justify ignoring it by the heuristic of unpopularity. I will roughly tabulate an instance of how memesis and epistemology can affect the outcomes of salt of the earth people like my dad.

My dad runs the hardware business he bought from his father. He threw daily tantrums throughout my upbringing about expenses and the cost of living, and extra special tantrums before sending my siblings and me to youth group conventions and summer camp. He sent all of us to private orthodox Jewish day school for most of our grade school experiences, which cost some unspecified thousands of dollars per student per year. This is someone who sunk a large amount of his mind and his relationship with his family into stress and conflicts over how much things cost. He also cares very much about economics and capitalism, despite not being able to hold a basic conversation about things like the price mechanism or regional advantage. As adults, my brother and I are secular atheists; my sister is involved in her Jewish community and feels spiritually Jewish, but ignores most obligations which the orthodox community considers religiously mandatory, and will probably never marry or have children. Here is a Fermi estimate: 3 children. Per child: 12 years of day school, 3 years of pre school (15 years total); 5 years of sleepaway camp; gap year at yeshiva/seminary in Israel. $4,000 for each year and for each sleepaway session, with yeshiva at $20,000. 3((15 +5)(4,000) + 20,000) = $300,000. That’s a lot of kugelach! I’m probably underestimating. Make sure to include 15 years of therapy, familial atomization, a lifetime of compounding psychosocial issues, and how these and other things impact social standing, academic performance, and job prospects. All that time, energy, stress, and money, and we’re not even religious.

What were the causes of this failed investment? And I think it is fair to classify it as a failure; if someone had asked my dad at the time of his marriage what he wanted to accomplish in his life, a large part of his answer would entail observant children and an intimate family life. As he toasts his friends, “L’torah, l’chuppah, l’ma’asim tovim!” (To the bible, to the marriage canopy, to piety!) Much more important than any fight, tantrum, or destructive rule– really the only things that matter– are the most fundamental causes, which are epistemological: feedback and reasoning. My parents are a couple who dogmatically and systematically ignore the practical concerns of their children. (Dad’s stock responses: “Oh, you think you know everything.” Or when he’s in a more charitable mood: “Don’t let it upset you.”) He has shut off important sources of feedback. This is similar to the cultural insularity of Judaism at large; closing off information vectors from non-Jewish sources, and from discontents within the community, or the inkling of Judaism-critical ideas. Something that’s not immediately intuitive, though, is that the complete opposite is also undesirable. This is symbolically represented in Tinad with the most potent mnestics; drugs which nullify and invert antimemetic effects. It demonstrates a version of the cognitive and sensory costs of unregulated information intake and memory recall. On a broader cultural level, we have things like flooding the zone, and an attention economy dominated by media and technology platforms, hyper-optimized to subvert psychological and social regulations of information intake. The more complete point is not to merely say that information intake is too restricted, or too unrestricted; but to investigate where the goldilocks zones are, and what are the thresholds which define its boundaries.

Something that’s been interesting is observing (at least, within my filter bubble) that horrible parenting seems to be something of a norm. The dad who screams at his son for not holding the flashlight correctly. The mom who is pathologically incapable of admitting an error in parenthood. I would be curious to see some more formal cultural survey of these kinds of behaviors, and the kinds of memes which these parents employ in their defense. I think about my dad’s proclamation that “life doesn’t come with a manual”, but then refuses to develop one in collaboration with his family. It has been one of my profound frustrations that no matter how much I develop skills of conceptual articulation and clarity, there is no possible formulation or brown note which can crack my parents’ shell, at least as long as they’re aware that I am the source of information. A lifetime of ignoring me, a lifetime of conservative talk radio on the commute and local news in the evening. I sometimes feel astonished that people like this are welcomed in society.

V: Methodological Shortcomings of Tinad

Memetic mechanism: resources, constraints, and patterns of behavior

Tinad presents most antimemetic issues at a high level, which is useful for narrative purposes. However, in the real world, a lower-level understanding is important for engineering replicable, sustainable, and systematic solutions to these issues. Tinad’s antimemetic entities are portrayed as producing effects that are inherently antimemetic, and yet in the real world, antimemesis is a higher level effect, not a fundamental mechanism. Just like a drug, different people have different reactions to antimemetic and memetic agents. It could’ve been interesting to explore, e.g., how ideatic space interacts with and influences evolutionary development.

Much of real-world antimemesis boils down to: how are humans as individuals and social groups computationally optimized, and how do the incurred tradeoffs interrupt computation/

Parametric state spaces

The premise of a meme or antimeme is incomplete. A memetic entity (“memetic” in the context of “memetic entity” being a neutral parameter, not positively or negatively memetic) can have both positively and negatively memetic attributes, and we can construct a state space to determine some range of possible configurations and behaviors. A memetic entity can memetically spread itself, while rendering other information antimemetic, in the capacity for it to be perceived or understood. This is distinct from another configuration of memesis; a memetic entity which is resistant to spreading, even while it contains information which is hyper-potent in some way. A memetic agent can also be complexly memetic, where specific behaviors are triggered according to different conditions. Practical examples of memetic agents are common phrases, slogans, and songs, with words we know by heart, and yet never think about. This happened to me with the song Crazy Train; a favorite of my adolescence, which I only realized in the past year is some kind of annoying vapid bullshit if analyzed textually. This process of parametric analysis– dividing the meaning into distinct parameters, which can accept a range of values– is something I noticed lacking from the conceptual lexicon. In Antifragile, Taleb spends a lot of prose pointing out the lack of a corresponding inverse of fragility, yet fails to generalize the principle that our language is not streamlined for parametric cognition. In turn, I look forward to my shortcomings being recognized and pointed out.

Recursively unknown terminability of Plato’s cave

In the beginning, our protagonist domes an antimemetic entity who is impostering a colleague. Given the memetic state space (all possible configurations of memetic and antimemetic attributes), there would seem to be sufficient possibility of some kind of Cartesian evil demon who can make you believe whatever, whether that’s extreme confidence in exactly the wrong direction, or an inversion of the perceptions of one’s relationships. The novel doesn’t acknowledge this particular complication. Maybe it’s a case of a fundamentally insurmountable obstacle, one of those things you have to ignore so that the story can happen.

Corporate executive as hero

This is more of a vibes-based thing. Not really anything wrong with the character itself, or the concept that there could be plenty of heroic corporate directors in the world at large, or in some fictional world. And I like participating in an economy which has necessary roles filled, even when I’m not a fan of the kind of person a particular role selects for and shapes. I just feel a bit queasy at the idea of heroicizing that category of person, given my experiences in the workforce.

VI: Minimal Surface

Given my experience with people in general tending to not like talking to me, I frequently wonder about how it would be possible to memetize various ideas and behaviors that I perceive as supremely important and relevant to society at large. If my process of communication is inefficient and impotent, how might the communication be streamlined and bolstered to get where it needs to go, while preserving some essential fidelity? Some issues may be related to my lack of normative charisma, but others are of social contextualization. If a sexily important person who gave delicious foot said the same things as me– well, on Tiktok or Youtube that probably wouldn’t do much, given the medium’s relation to the message.

There is a premise that high quality argumentation can convince people of things, but that often doesn’t work for a whole bunch of reasons. What about something which is paradigm-shattering, yet extremely simple to explain and understand? For example, Hume’s argument of infinite regress. Assuming that since the world is so amazing, it must have been intelligently constructed; and as such, this applies even more to the god who made it, necessitating infinite gods. Would an Abrahamite who heard that still believe in a monotheistic theology, and refuse to memetically perpetuate Hume’s infinite regress? Or move the goalpost by hotswapping the propaganda of intuitive obviousness they’ve been using since forever? Probably. And then we can consider the karmic implications of that– people perpetuating systems of belief because abandoning them is too stressful, or because of the social penalties for rocking the boat, or a perceived betrayal of the tribe. How might it be possible to incept the idea and the reflex, that the need for technical rigor is roughly proportional to importance and contention? Why is it so impossible to incept a reexamination of basic assumptions?

Another example is economics. Our culture is highly polarized between capitalism and communism, and yet people who build their identities around this issue are almost completely ignorant of economic mechanism. Only in the past several years did I myself listen to the audiobook for Sowell’s Basic Economics. While it has flaws, it substantially informed my understanding of the world. Why was I put in a position where I had to seek this out and incur the cost in effort and sustained attention through my own volition? Many of the concepts would be understandable to the average middle schooler, assuming they were presented in an effective way, which I guess maybe they wouldn’t in the average American middle school. Being aware of these principles could resolve many polemical dispositions in the American psyche; like the idea that the only source of economic value is the physical handling and crafting of a product; or that patriotic protectionism is a great way to increase American wealth. It relates to one of the spookier epistemological/memetic issues of our time, that basic information like this is widely accessible, and yet our schools apparently don’t teach it, and it is largely absent from the zeitgeist, and nobody would ever want to talk with you about it if you brought it up. Beyond resolving these dispositions, it would allow us to direct our attention to more useful frames, like focusing on activation thresholds and matters of degrees rather than binaries.

Why do some karmas succeed memetically, while others don’t? That we have a social karmic orientation where we can intuitively understand how destructive it is to damage other people’s property, reputation, body, or mood; but that we have little conception of our epistemological environments being polluted. We understand ideas of bad information, like being lied to, or the consequences of acting on bad information. We have Gricean maxims; why don’t we have some kind of Gricean karma? That it matters that the information you meme is at some intersection between the top of the social hierarchy of relevance, most important, and accurate, at least towards the people who are socially relevant to you. What are the forces which nullify our perceptions and social inclinations which might otherwise regulate our hierarchies of relevance?

In conclusion, I guess that’s a good stopping point or whatever. Shoutout to my gf Chris (she ain’t reading this shih). Please make sure to like and subscribe, and hit the bell to make sure you’re notified when I upload new essays. Big thanks to ACX for hosting this competition and platform. I always feel so gished by myself, which can make it seem impossible to present my ideas in a possibly acceptable organized way, and I wouldn’t have written this without the competitional motivation. Make sure to read Tinad, The Three Body Problem/Remembrance of Earth’s Past, and Blindsight.