From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Feb 23 2000 - 11:10:42 MST
QueeneMUSE@aol.com writes:
> KPG: <<<The ``The First Immortal'' reminded me somewhat of various Heinlein
> books
> due to the preacherous approach, which I have an allergic reaction to.
> It set off my big, red ``CONDITION RED:MEME INFECTION ATTEMPT'' warning signal
> so it hardly made any impact in my meme pool.>>>
>
> Yeah, I find books that are too obvious about their "messages" to be
> actually insulting to my intelligence. I actually laughed out loud
> at Ayn Rand, clumping long-ass lectures into a so-called plot, then
> using her "characters" like baseball bat to drum her "ideas" into
> people's heads. It seemed so obvious and dumb!
I wonder if our meme radars and immune systems might not have become
more sensitive over time? Today we are surrounded by a larger
bandwidth of information than a few decades back, filled with highly
adaptive and pushy memes and influence-attempts. It would not seem
unreasonable that individuals who do not succumb totally to believing
*everything* (are there any such individuals at all outside
television?) would develop highly discriminative immune systems and
tend to react strongly to clumsy or overt takeover attempts.
After somehow surviving a diet of 70s Swedish childrens programs
(let's just say they were quite red and green) as a kid I note a
distinct dislike of any obvious manipulation attempts that I react
negatively even when the meme pushed is actually one I support. I
guess this holds for many other people, and in turn suggests that
some transhuman media strategies have to be changed.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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