There Is No Antimemetics Division
I liked There Is No Antimemetics Division. It gave me a lot to think about in a way that few books do. But two things made it a little harder to enjoy for me personally:
- The book is horror sci-fi and I don't like horror.
- The last third of the book had fewer "deep" ideas or maybe I didn't pick up on them.
Below are the ideas the book left me with (indirect spoilers follow).
Antimemes
If there are ideas that travel very well (memes), there are also ideas that don't travel well. This is independent of their usefulness or truth-value. There is just something about them that makes them people not want to spread. You have to work extra hard to find them.
Reflecting on this, here are some categories of ideas that don't spread:
- Spreading them is disadvantageous for the speaker. For example, if I have some alpha on company X that will help me trade, I'll keep it to myself so that nobody front runs me.
- They are unpleasant to talk about. Many health issues, for example pregnancy side-effects, are underdiscussed compared to their prevalence.
- They threaten "our social order". If there are obvious downsides to democracy, I will not be discussing them openly because I'll be called a fascist, even when I think democracy is the best we've got.
- It is unethical to even consider them. For example, Sophie's Choice forces us to consider one of those. Another one is "Would you shoot the pilot to save the plane?" gets at the boundary of what people are willing to consider to solve an ethical problem.
- The unpleasant ideas are about you. If you are being fired, you are probably the last one to hear about it.
How we relate to antimemes
If these ideas don't travel well, then people are usually finding them on their own "for the first time". For example, all financial institutions get attacked by fraud. But nobody wants to publish "We lost $10M to fraud this year". So, each new financial institution learns about the magnitude of fraud from scratch.
So, when you think you are dealing with an antimeme, you have to speed run through its implications by yourself because there are no primers on them.
The book hints that there are some people are better at spotting antimemes than others. For example, Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson seem interested in ideas with "the wrong shape". "The healthcare system is about signaling" is not the most charismatic idea. The label "high-decoupler" feels related.
Contributions to Meme Theory
One of the antimemes in the book is also a meme. It spreads rapidly (meme) but you can't see it spread (antimeme) until it gets to you.
In the book, memes are fighting each other "in idea-space". This feels very true. The idea of Communism spreads incredibly well regardless of facts or outcomes. You can't reason with Communism, you can't "outcompete it". During the Cold War, the United States, West Germany and "the West" outcompeted Communism and Socialism as economics systems and won by a landslide. But at the same time, the idea of Communism remains.
According to the book, to fight an idea you need another idea that wins over it in some way.