Epi-meme-iology: How to Prevent the Spread of Mind Viruses and Kill Bad Ideas Once and For All
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Ideas are like the hydra
The American War on Terror has shown that if you cut off the head of one terrorist, you create three more — his brother, son, and father.
Facebook and Twitter have shown that if you ban one dissenting news outlet, you create Gab, Minds, and Mastodon.
The constant ire of CNN, MSNBC, and other Democrat-leaning news outlets gave Donald Trump over $4 billion of free press before the 2016 primaries.
It’s time for America to learn: ideas can’t be killed by force.
Ideas can only be killed by disinterest.
The best way to create disinterest is to present an alternative so superior as to render the bad idea obsolete.
This is difficult to do, because one of the key ways the new idea must be superior is that it must actually address the grievances and concerns of the people who currently believe the bad idea.
How to recognize a superior idea
A superior idea gives people what they truly need, not what they say they want.
As a result, a superior idea often has the quality of offending people on both sides of a controversy. This is a sign of a unifying narrative.
Narratives that unify are the way of the future.
A protocol for killing bad ideas
I’m building a marketplace for identifying superior ideas at ideamarkets.org. If you think this is important, get involved or read more about it here: https://medium.com/@harmonylion1/decentralizing-the-search-for-truth-using-financial-markets-648bf4408b5c
Update Oct 2019: Just found out Nassim Nicholas Taleb used the Hydra metaphor when describing ideas long before I did, in his book Antifragile.
