模倣子 Dogmaticism and memento-genetic feedback

Macro-Memetic Monday!

 Warning: religious prejudice ahead!

This is a note I mostly wrote weeks ago but never sent. 

I was walking  behind a great crowd of young Christchurch recruits, all of them walking through town and up towards the park, in at least three or four different groups, each with its own T-shirt color. 

Basic memetic engineering already. Lots of young people moving together telegraphs “a lot of people agree with whatever it is we’re doing.”

This might be an Interesting point for a side note. Why big armies? At least some European countries have gone for an SAS approach. “Special Air Services” or a small number of ridiculously highly trailed navy SEAL  ninjas  as opposed to an army of hundreds of thousands. Is this a memetic thing, ie, having a huge army is intimidating, and more importantly sends a memetic message because of “lots of people agree with us”. 

I may still need a name for this concept, ie, the (fiction) that a lot of people have already been infected with a meme, and therefore the reliability of response to it is high. Thoughts?

Oh, by the way, the building of large buildings and public works has, I believe, a similar “memetic overwhelm” effect to large armies, or huge groups of attractive young people. That may be their primary function, as one would suspect as memetic researchers, that is, a memetic one, since any number of other, more effective, implementations. A lot of detailed research  remains to do here, but one example is a design for a Super City  built like a termite  mound. Enough on this for now. 

By the way, having multiple T-shirt colors and keeping them in separate groups was a brilliant idea, since it magnified the “perceived consensus effect” (maybe that’s the term I’m looking for). 

Let’s see if I can get to my memeto-genetic interference point. 

It’s documented by letters from the early nineteenth century that the Mormons were actively recruiting “nubile” (a direct quote) young women to come out to Utah to help settle (and populate) the place. This was presumably primarily more lascivious than anything else, but as macromemeticists we try to ignore the ostensible intensions or such and stick to the impacts of the behaviors involved and how they change the memetic landscape and promote or curtail other behaviors. 

So the fact of attractive young women heading out west has the effect of signaling to other young women that it’s a valid choice to go to Utah, to young men that there are beautiful  young women available out there were they to go, and just generally that there is a current of folk going that way, including folk who might have other opportunities. A lot of people doing something telegraphs that it’s the right thing to do, especially if it’s attractive young people doing it —a basic macromemetic principle. 

Christchurch would seem to be pursuing a similar strategy. It would be interesting to see if it could be documented that they are preferentially recruiting attractive people. That seems to be the case, and other churches do not seem to be taking that approach. 

Then comes the dogmaticism. Adhere to the church ️ teachings, and you get paired up with an attractive mate, one whose comportment has been vetted.  How exactly that works is a subject for further investigation. 

Then there’s the weaponization of attractive people. How does that work? How may they be recruited, and how can they be used afterwards? There’s research about how attractive people have more impact than “normies” which would probably inform these questions. For instance, one attractive person asserting a given meme might be worth the perceived consensus produced by a number of normal people. What about the group? A group contains a high density of attractive people might somehow seem more “credible”, in terms of spokespersons (even unattractive ones) putting out messages, for example. These attractive people had this message put out on their behalf, so they must support it (consensus) and they are attractive, so it must be true. 

I’ve definitely beaten around the bush of the memeto-genetic feedback question. I thought I saw a strong link. Getting more attractive people, especially attractive young women, gives a group more power, memetically, persuasively, and maybe that’s all there is to it. But instead of constructing a memetic edifice, ie, a powerful system of memes (including immunomemes), one simply recruits people who by their appearance exude power, and harness that.