Despite the corny sponsor's advertising and the elitism inherent in the opening blurb (which I'm sure most of the participants would reject) - these TED talks are really worth checking out. Not only are interesting things explained, but they're explained by experienced public speakers, so its good entertainment.
Anyway, I really liked this talk because Mr. Dennett (or Danny D, as I like to call him) clarifies some thinking that I've had for a long time, but it never crystallised for me until now. So check it out...
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of meme
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14 comments:
Good video, thanks for that.
Ok, so clearly some principle of game design could be useful in effecting less viral memes, or rather, nuetering the virality of toxic memes. What do you think that might be?
I think a great part of what is b3hind the p0wer of memes comes from their repositioning of a person's value system - and so the person moves into a challenge-reward cycle with respect to the teleonomy of the meme. That is, a meme usually has an interpretation that can be couched in terms of real-world actions, like consumerism. Purely abstract ideas probably aren't thoughts that would be rabidly infectious among a general populace. So someone gets ahold of some new idea, they get a whole new set of triggers for their pre-conscious teleonomies (like anorexics), and they subsume their former triggers into the new ones (closest example I can think of, though slightly artificial - Christian Bale, 'slimming down' for The Machinist, subsumed his hunger into a desire for reading).
If we take Dennett on face value, this is like a virus reprioritising the behaviour of its host.
So obviously, yes, if you have a challenge-reward cycle that you want to break, game design should be a fertile field of suggested tactics. I would pick obfuscation of goals first. Or maybe screw around with the value of the reinforcers, until people are too confused to want them.
What has Dan Dennet got against parasites anyway? Cant we all just learn to get along...
sV8G3d Very good blog! Thanks!
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Nice Article.
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Hello all!
actually, that's brilliant. Thank you. I'm going to pass that on to a couple of people.
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