From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jan 26 1999 - 03:46:17 MST
"Billy Brown" <bbrown@conemsco.com> writes:
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
> > You mean like the psychology of persuasion/attitude change or
> > advertisement psychology? Both are areas where quite a bit of serious
> > reasearch is going on. But most of it is non-memetic, i.e. relies on
> > direct exposure rather than spread from other people.
>
> Yes. These areas could eventually lead to real memetic engineering. The
> thing that is lacking now is predictability - 90% of everything is based on
> personal opinion, hunches, and guesswork. In principle it ought to be
> possible to put the field on a firmer footing than that.
Is it? Last time I looked, there were plenty of empirical studies. The
problem seems to be how to create useful theories and frameworks, this
is where more work is likely needed.
> > Actually, this is an interesting angle to add in the above fields, how
> > to create a mindset able to resist these methods. There are
> > publishable research papers in it :-)
>
> The subject deserves a lot more attention than it gets. Of course, I'm not
> sure how you would perform an experiment...
Perhaps something like cognitive therapy, you instruct one group of
subjects in a certain mental technique or a schemata, another just
gets a spiel about critical thinking and a third nothing, and then you
expose them to a meme or other form of persuasion and study how many
are convinced.
> This is a very long discussion to get into. I'm writing up a full
> explanation of my current theories about it at the moment - would you be
> interested in a copy?
Yes, certainly!
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:02:56 MST