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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3063 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 17, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What do you find so appealing about the egregore framework? I found it…unhelpful. Like it didn’t add anything.

The Maajid Nawaz post is probably the most valuable, although the rest of it is also worth reading.

The vast majority of people believe there are people who are making things worse, and want to name them. Name, shame, and destroy them, to either stop whatever processes the bad people are using to make things worse, or to fix it for good. This is the primary mode of most tribal thinking, as well as unfortunately, a lot of modern politics. However, the concept of the memespace egregore explains the uselessness of this mode. It's greater than any individual, or organization, and also explains how individuals and organizations that don't coordinate at all can still end up spouting exactly the same bylines and using the same marching orders.

In the run up to the Vietnam war, it worked like the diagram on the left. Arguably it worked that way in the run up to the Iraq war as well. But those were both before the internet came to fully dominate our lives, before the media business model shifted to match, before the echo chambers tightened into groupthink neural networks that propagated virtual brain waves in the form of memes, and before the groupthink entities deep in the media bubbles began to use the postmodernist reality construction framework to not only propagate themselves but update themselves on the fly to become more inherently viral.

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A distributed agenda by an egregore would look like a coordinated agenda to a conspiracy theorist.

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[on Qanon] If they wrote something that the echo chamber didn’t like, then it wouldn’t go viral.

This is much more insidious than a shadowy cabal or even the newer and more accurate concept of the Cathedral. From an understanding of memespace egregores and what they are, as well as how they update, comes the realization that they cannot be successfully fought or resisted with outdated tactics. It also explains the difficulty people have in defining specifics around the egregore - it's definitionally optimized for what's viral, therefore anything specific is a weakness.

Solzhenitsyn knew the the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. But I don't think even he could have foreseen that the quest for clout, for maximizing eyeballs, engagement and ad revenue in a world that communicates at lightspeed would have instead ended up making us all victims of a network that maximizes good and evil for attention and routinely chums the water on the other side of that line to prove that there are sharks.

There's an argument to be made that corporations are already shitty AIs, which makes sense to me on some level and bodes ill for whatever AI research ends up deploying. I think understanding that everyone is subject to information silos and social pressures to enact the behaviors promulgated by a memespace egregore, at scale, allows us to better model them and their communities. It also helps us identify in what ways we ourselves are captured by the egregore. In memespace, arguments and evidence don't matter as much as what's viral. The two don't always coincide.

Or hey, you could just say it's a fancy way of saying how everything sucks now thanks to the rank cowardice of literally everyone driven by perverse incentives and malicious social networks that are too useful to turn off.

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