Re: virus: Belief and Knowledge

Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Thu, 17 Jul 1997 14:13:19 -0500


Josh Logan wrote:

> > Sure. But who cares? Have you seen MIB? Very funny. If something
> > is generally experinenced it gets into the media. The media is also full
> > of shit becuase, in general, that's what people like. One needs to get
> > experienced filtering out the shit. This process is refered to as "critical
> > thinking" and is the basis of science.
>
> I'm sorry, this is my first stab at this. But, isn't part of really
> understanding memes the not filtering out of what you label bullshit?
> If people just automatically filtered out what they thought was
> bullshit, then it would be very hard to convince them of anything short
> of complete media saturation. I'm just trying to figure out whether
> this group is trying to promote openness towards information or
> awareness of information.

I beleive that the idea is to look at the media, analyze the meme's with
"critical thinking" (and other tools like memetics), and make a
judgement like "bullshit" or "valuable". Remember, the *first* rule of
memetics is *conscious* variation of memes. Becuase chances are the
meme's that push themselves on you are not the valuable memes at all,
they are the "good memes", meaning the ones that propagate well.

ERiC