I have read something very similar to this someplace else before reading this article (on a side-note. This is the very first article I ever read completely on Less Wrong, and had I not contracted H1N1 at the end of September I would have joined Less Wrong at that time).
I too have read A Year Living Biblically. Mostly so that I would have ready material should I ever have to talk to my Evangelical Aunt and Uncle who are busy preparing a huge number of people in Texas for the Rapture and Second Coming of Christ (Hoo boy?!?).
I seem to recall in the article that I read about Toxic Memes (I am almost positive that is the Title of the article) in second and third world countries that they too mentioned that we have developed memetic anti-bodies in the west to things such as pornography and free-speech, where people living, say in Muslim countries do not have the cultural antibodies that are necessary for defense against the memes in question. This causes a pathological relationship with the meme, resulting in things like blaming a woman for why a man would rape her—to him, it was the pornography’s fault for suggesting to him that women are all sex objects.
Obviously, this is wrong, yet those who have been infected by a toxic meme are not going to understand why their understanding of the situation is wrong, any more than we would not understand why an extraterrestrial culture might thought it is wrong for humanity to be playing with their hyperdimensional fecal matter (from another post I made where I discuss that it might be the case that some alien race has feces that is capable of opening up wormholes in space-time). The simple fact of the matter is that the memetic resistance is non-existent.
Duh! It was an article by Jamais Cascio (Toxic Memes. Strangely, it is also a supplement for a game published by a friend of mine in Texas)
I have read something very similar to this someplace else before reading this article (on a side-note. This is the very first article I ever read completely on Less Wrong, and had I not contracted H1N1 at the end of September I would have joined Less Wrong at that time).
I too have read A Year Living Biblically. Mostly so that I would have ready material should I ever have to talk to my Evangelical Aunt and Uncle who are busy preparing a huge number of people in Texas for the Rapture and Second Coming of Christ (Hoo boy?!?).
I seem to recall in the article that I read about Toxic Memes (I am almost positive that is the Title of the article) in second and third world countries that they too mentioned that we have developed memetic anti-bodies in the west to things such as pornography and free-speech, where people living, say in Muslim countries do not have the cultural antibodies that are necessary for defense against the memes in question. This causes a pathological relationship with the meme, resulting in things like blaming a woman for why a man would rape her—to him, it was the pornography’s fault for suggesting to him that women are all sex objects.
Obviously, this is wrong, yet those who have been infected by a toxic meme are not going to understand why their understanding of the situation is wrong, any more than we would not understand why an extraterrestrial culture might thought it is wrong for humanity to be playing with their hyperdimensional fecal matter (from another post I made where I discuss that it might be the case that some alien race has feces that is capable of opening up wormholes in space-time). The simple fact of the matter is that the memetic resistance is non-existent.
Duh! It was an article by Jamais Cascio (Toxic Memes. Strangely, it is also a supplement for a game published by a friend of mine in Texas)