Powerful Ideas

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/powerful_ideas/

by duck • 16 years ago

47 47 16 years ago

dilbert.com

rbanffy• 16 years ago

The folks at laptop.org even have a shipping product that could be used for that.

pdx• 16 years ago

He didn't actually take the metaphor this far, but as I was reading his essay, what I wanted it to be about is this.

If the corollary to virus is meme, than what is the corollary to t-cell?

We can't engineer real t-cells, but wouldn't it be fun to engineer their idea-space equivalents?

Snopes.com, for example, is sort of a t-cell that can attack and kill a lot of memes, if the infected person is vaccinated with snopes after exposure.

andreyf• 16 years ago

I think the interaction between ideas is a little more intricate than that. For example, holding some ideas in high regard makes you more susceptible to other ideas and immune to others. The most infectious kind of idea is one transmitted through gossip.

Travis• 16 years ago

This works just as well for the human immune system as well. Having certain diseases makes you more susceptible to others. Case in point, the HIV virus causes AIDS, but generally death is described as "complications due to AIDS", e.g., non-Hodkins Lymphoma causes about 28% of death due to AIDS related complications (http://www.hivandhepatitis.com/recent/2008/082608_a.html).

Also, if you consider gossip as an unavoidable negative trait (i.e., society will never eliminate it, but we all kind of wish we could), then there are direct analogues in biology. Diarrhea, for example, is analogous to gossip in that sense. And it is a major vector for biological infection.

I suspect you could stretch the analogy even further, but my point is that biological systems have some pretty complex interactions as well.

khafra• 16 years ago

There's a theory that religion, as well as being a parasitic meme, is also an inoculation against newer and more damaging memes: http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...

theoj2• 16 years ago

I wanted to say the same thing as soon as I saw the article. You can look at religions as memes or viruses that propagate from person to person.

cperciva• 16 years ago

I wouldn't say that education is the antidote to war; rather, I'd say that education is the vaccine for war.

anamax2• 16 years ago

> I wouldn't say that education is the antidote to war; rather, I'd say that education is the vaccine for war.

Based on what? Education doesn't seem to have reduced the incidence of war.

Since education made large scale war possible....

klbarry4• 16 years ago

Death by violence has, though, increased drastically since hunter gatherer societies: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

yters9• 16 years ago

Were the Nazis and the USSR and the rest of the western world well educated?

yters9• 16 years ago

I'd say Christianity has been the most successful large scale war restraining ideology. Not that it is perfect, but name a better large scale ideology.

Symmetry• 16 years ago

I'm not sure the historical record bears that out. The problem that popular moral philosophies have is that over time they accrete rationalizations for allowing their adherents to do what they wanted to do anyways. Thats one reason why converts, who might not have been exposed to the culture surrounding these ideas, are often the most fanatical.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Free markets married to wide-scale individual liberty protected by a democratically elected representative government.

dboyd• 16 years ago

> ...name a better large scale ideology.

OK. Civil rights.

Have two countries that grant full legal equality to both men and women ever gone to war?

icegreentea• 16 years ago

I think they're all pretty much equally bad. I mean... inter-European wars from fall of the Roman Empire to the 17/18th centuries was pretty much all amongst proclaimed Christian nations and kingdoms.

Not only does Chritianity as a whole create yet another tribe for people to get divided by and fight over, it doesn't even enforce it's tribal rules (failing not killing, at least try to kill only the infidels) that well. Spanish history will attest to that. And even then it can manage to fracture itself and attempt to rip each other part into pieces.

I don't think the idea of 'but they're my brother in faith' ever really stopped someone from going to war when they realize 'hey, they just took my land'.

m0th87• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonald...

bugsy• 16 years ago

Yes.

Also, Yugoslavia had McDonald's franchises since 1988 and was subsequently attacked by the United States and several other countries, acting under UN pretenses.

A more interesting point on war and business would be that no country which has decided not to sell oil it controls to the US in US dollars has NOT been subjected to war.

MrDunham• 16 years ago

Reading through the comments at the end of his entry, it is sad to see how many people missed the point entirely.

Everyone got so caught up on his meme that they didn't see the power in memes. Evidenced by everyone discussing the meme and forgetting the point.

poet3• 16 years ago

This scratches the surface of an unmatched essay by Harold Goddard called Atomic Peace. Both pieces seek a virus (or a chain reaction) that could end war, but Adams falls short. Indeed, education is not enough and can actually encourage war. Although I'm hesitant to omit even a piece of Goddard's essay, I've reproduced excerpts from the beginning below.

The Atomic Bomb is the outstanding fact of our time-- not just as a scientific triumph and military weapon but as a symbol of what our so-called civilization has brought us to. As Emerson remarked, "Civilization crowed too soon." How shall we meet the menace of modern scientific war-- not the menace of atomic attack but the menace of the bomb itself, of the ugly fact of its existence? The fission of the atom is an intellectual achievement of the first order.... we can understand what Emerson meant when he declared that "pure intellect is the pure devil". Over the entrance to Plato's Academy at Athens was the inscription, "Let none ignorant of geometry enter here." If I could choose a similar inscription for the entrance of all the colleges and universities int he world today I would pick that great sentence of Montaigne's "All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and goodness."

WANTED: a force for good as potent as the atom bomb is for evil, a force, preferably, to complete the analogy, that produces a vast result out of a chain reaction of little forces each of apparently negligible amount-- a result, however, not of disintegration and destruction, but of integration and creation.

It its widest manifestation life itself as revealed in the process of organic growth is such a force and it is not chance that the bomb came into existence for the express purpose of defeating that process, as if it recognized in it its natural and opposite enemy. For what is cellular proliferation but a chain reaction of millions of tiny forces each contributing to a tremendously disproportionate total result of integration and creation? This chain reaction of the tiny into the mighty may be observed, though on a smaller scale, in the mental and spiritual life of man even more convincingly and often at a more rapid tempo than in his physical development....

Goddard goes on to explain this mental and spiritual force in detail. I simply cannot do his work justice with with excerpts from the rest of the essay. You'll have to go read it. It may be the most important thing you ever read.

cglee• 16 years ago

I couldn't find much online about this essay. Is the text online anywhere?

jodrellblank• 16 years ago

Looks like it was published in 1951 and so should[1] be out of copyright, but I also only found one Amazon seller at $25 and a finished eBay auction.

[1] http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm

poet3• 16 years ago

The text is not online as far as I know. It's available here for like $10 shipped: http://www.pendlehill.org/bookstore?page=shop.product_detail.... That's where I got my copy.

It was republished in a collection of essays in 1971, so imagine it's still under copyright. Hrm.... I'll take a look at what the collection says when I get home.

yters9• 16 years ago

Another dark ages? Maybe the process is self correcting...

mynameishere• 16 years ago

I assumed from the title "Atomic Peace" that the essay was about how the atom bomb prevented full-scale wars. But still, there's its own answer.

jcfrei• 16 years ago

why stop at ideas / eg. catchy phrases? I think the bigger topic Scott Adams actually adresses is subversion. Manipulating peoples behaviour and ideals has long been practiced by many governments. Just take a look at old war posters: They're actually quite catchy.

theoj2• 16 years ago

This reminded me of this summer's blockbuster movie Inception. Much like this article, it examined how ideas are planted in our minds and what effects those ideas have once they take over the mind and become impossible to eradicate.

bfung• 16 years ago

From the movie:

  Cobb: What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? 
  An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain 
  it's almost impossible to eradicate.  An idea that is fully formed - 
  fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.

kabuks• 16 years ago

A wanted truth is always stronger than an evidenced truth

Ouch. That one hit me hard. What I would give to switch that around in myself.

jhen095• 16 years ago

Reminds me of Terry Goodkinds 'Wizards First Rule'

"Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true."

Although the wording from the book is quite strong, essentially 'people are more likely to believe things if they want them to be true, or if they are afraid of them being true'.

So far I have found it an important and practical lesson for many situations.

yters9• 16 years ago

Why's that a problem? People might have good instincts, in which case they should trust their instincts as well as their reason, especially if they are stupid.

giberson• 16 years ago

I think Scott needs to re-engineer his idea virus, it's not quite on the mark. Ultimately, it will only ever (at best) end up as a famous quote like "Give peace a chance" for similar mentioned reasons, but also because the virus doesn't offer immediacy. It's not something that an individual whose been infected with the virus can act on, rather it's something that will ultimately require collective action on. To be more power, Scott should revise the idea virus such that the transfered idea is something simple, and can be taken on by an individual that will ultimately lead to the end of war.

I'll leave the revision to Scott himself, but I will offer an example.

For instance, if my goal is to ultimately solve cancer: A simple catchy saying "Donate $1 today, Write it off Tomorrow -IRS.".

The idea is catchy because it implies personal benefit as a direct compensation. "Writing it off", hell every one wants a way to reduce how much money gets sucked up by taxes every year. To imply that being generous, we can alleviate some of our tax woes, the idea gains traction with people. Of course, the truth is you need a certain net amount of donations to really write it off, and even if you do, you don't gain any money you simply choose where it is spent--the over all net result is still a loss. But that simple matter isn't caught by those rational filters.

Obviously, the idea doesn't constrain what is donated to and as such could be donated to some opensource project not even related to cancer research. Nor would a single dollar donation likely benefit any cause, much less cancer research. However the net effect of the idea, is an overall increase in charitable giving. More money is given, by more people, as the idea spread. The best part about the idea is the immediate positive feedback. Unlike Scott's initial "Education is the antidote of war", an idea like "Donate $1 today, write it off tomorrow" is more likely to spread and achieve it's ultimate goal.

I think Scott should revise his approach by simply adding a fourth trait: An idea virus must be actionable on the individual level.

stretchwithme• 16 years ago

Reason, logic, science, requiring evidence before one believes something. These are what prevent conflict.

Education is way to vague and seems to me to imply wisdom imparted from a position of authority to those who internalize it, which is not something that necessarily promotes reason or logic.

yters9• 16 years ago

The most effective way to put an end to all war is nuclear apocalypse or viral pandemic. Maybe both at once.

As long as people want stuff and stuff is finite there will always be war.

Powerful Ideas

Related Stories