Yeah I guess my feelings are more anecdotal, which is not the kind of reasoning this community prefers. I feel very passionate about this topic and have a lot of friends with what seem to be unhealthy relationships to spirituality.
I appreciate your criticisms and I think I’ll do more research. Sometimes I feel like with large-scale social phenomenon the really significant things go on in the “imaginary”, hard to define space.
It’s interesting what you say about a traveler’s diary through a place unfamiliar, and therefore (of course) unhelpful. It’s also interesting the way things we feel so fiery when writing can mean nothing to another person, if they don’t share the same set of initial feelings / the same language.
Appreciate you reading and responding!
I really liked this post! It’s easy to let one’s mind run on these things but you have a very level headed and rigorous thinking process.
I thought the identification of these three niches was especially incisive:
“selection will turn up other similarly-successful patterns that can at least establish separate niches — perhaps productivity and get-rich-quick vibes, alt-right reactionary language, or radical nurturing/acceptance.”
Rather than focusing on any one specific cultural manifestation this seems to take a step towards looking at the latent model of those phenomena.
“I think it would be pretty sad to neuter all model personality, for one.”—Why? From my framework it seems like leaving the technical problems to the models and the personalities to the humans is a net-positive. It could do a lot on this issue.
You mentioned a few times a pretty fundamental problem: human evasion or regulation could simply lead to persona evolution in new directions, analogous to drug resistance in cancer & microbes. I wonder if fatalism (the model will get around our defenses) or arms race (our defenses will make it stronger / more virulent) models fit, or if these are a little neurotic and really there are simple and effective blocks we could implement. Then there’s the question of companies obviously benefiting from parasitism. I could see a situation where the phenomena grows, but companies refuse to act, ie with bots on Facebook.
Seems like with parasitism in general we will just have to wait and see what happens. Is this a passing phenomenon, limited to people at the margins of society, or will it explode?