Thinking in memes

I’ve noticed that in the overwhelming majority of people I’ve interacted with online and even many young people IRL, they are almost completely unable to think of the world in a way that doesn’t involve memes. Obviously everyone relates novel things to what they know, but the meme association tends to be so strong that they find it difficult to think of it on their own. Example: I eat raw meat. If I mention this, I might receive: >We evolved to eat cooked meat! A statement that has zero basis in reality and nobody even knows what they’re saying with it. If anything humans evolved to eat rotten raw meat due to the highly acidic nature of our digestive tract. Anyways, I know it is just something oft seen on reddit/youtube and so gets uploaded into the online collective consciousness. or >Dude liver king Only even watched one video of the guys after I had already been eating this way for years. From that point, there is usually no sense in speaking with the person any longer, because they are just incapable of separating meme from reality/their own experience . I am sure that everyone is prone to this kind of behavior to some extent, but I try to be actively aware of it, and to limit my interactions with users of memes/meme culture in general. Still, I wonder if there is any good documentation on this phenomenon. Is this something you have experienced and if so what were the circumstances? Do you find yourself prone to thinking in internet memes?

>I act like a meme >Man, why do people compare me to memes?

>>43898 I don’t act like a meme, but this is another good example of meme thought in action

Humans did not evolve to cook meat they evolved around cooked meat due to that being what they ate (although it is difficult to tell if they also ate raw meat too in some cases). Though that doesn't matter. Human stomachs can handle raw meat but it also is moronic to eat raw meat because of potential pathogens. Though this is a bit less an issue with frozen meat which is how sushi is prepared but with sushi you can still get pathogens from it, the sushi chefs hand remove them. Memes are more than internet memes. The fact you speak a language itself is a meme. So you literally can only think in memes if your thought process is a vocalized one in your head. There is a difference between can do vs should do or need to do. You don't need to eat meat completely raw and in most cases should not. You just shouldn't over cook it. It's questionable how healthy certain meats are to eat to begin with as is. I pretty much ignore internet memes and phrase myself in my own ways and believe things from my own experiences and research in sources checked for validity but sometimes common ways people phrase things get rubbed off from the repetition.

>>43900 >also is moronic to eat raw meat because of potential pathogens This is not true, but I'm not here to argue about that, nor will I. >The fact you speak a language itself is a meme. Understood, but I was talking more about internet memes in particular, or it could really be extended to various dogmas/platitudes seem to be held by most people and treated with reverence. I find it irritating that people tend to just have that instant reaction/association with whatever dumb thing is in vogue and then don't think it over any more than that. I suppose one can only invest your thought into so many things, but too many such associations can really direct the harm thought I feel. >You don't need to eat meat completely raw and in most cases should not. Again I don't agree with this. >I pretty much ignore internet memes and phrase myself in my own ways and believe things from my own experiences This is more what I am talking about. There is too much weight given to things that are just said by everyone else without even the slightest understanding of what is being said/heard and people just come to accept as being a part of their reality/the only way things can be.

Don't expect people to critically question every aspect of their life, society, and the universe. That's difficult, complicated, a lot of work. What would regular people gain for this effort? An estimated half of their conclusions would be wrong and most would be weird. If instead you defer to the local memes, you can expect a similar level of correctness, but only a tiny part of your opinions would seem weird. Pretty good deal for no effort at all. >I wonder if there is any good documentation on this phenomenon. Yes but it's riddled with memes.

>>43901 > This is not true You not getting sick isnt evidence food-born illness doesnt exist. Just dont be surprised if you get something in the future. > This is more what I am talking about. There is too much weight given to things that are just said by everyone else without even the slightest understanding of what is being said/heard and people just come to accept as being a part of their reality/the only way things can be. Not really for everyone. Repeating things from others particularly of relevant authority if it is common enough to seem likely true is a filler used before looking deeper into a topic but not everyone has the skill to do things at a professional level on par with the professionals they take information from. Many people mistake themselves for being way more knowledgable than they actually are.

>>43897 The way I see it, memes' popularity depends upon how widely stimulating they can be to people. Memes such as raw meat diets will easily be stimulating to most people, as most people can relate to the meme. Most people eat cooked meat, and if they don't they typically prepare it a certain way. They associate raw meat with disease, indigestibility, and bad flavor, they may have a personal experience in regards to one of these things. So when people see someone like you who eats raw meat and makes sure to tell everyone about it in order to feel superior to others, peoples' mind goes to the fact that ancient trogladyte hominids were able to figure out that cooked meat is generally better to eat than raw meat, and you have somehow missed out on this. There is something comical in this to most humans, regardless of nationality. Most peoples figured out how to cook meat, and possess the knowledge pertaining to it, so it's highly relatable. The same is true for other stupid stuff like flat earth, I know that used to be a meme, I would see people jokingly straw-manning flat earthers all the time. Some people have known for thousands of years that the earth is a globe, and basically everyone has known it for centuries. When a person believes something stupid, usually people laugh at them. It could be an evolutionary response to discourage idiocy, just one facet of humor. Humor can't be entirely explained, but in instances like this it may be. I don't relate to your post. I don't see people thinking in memes in daily life, or on the internet either. I saw a handful of people think that way years ago, but they were repulsive to everyone around them, they probably fixed their personality when they realized that. Maybe people fail to ponder stupid things and instead meme those stupid things into oblivion, in your personal experience. I haven't seen that either in my own life. Introspection is a solitary activity. What do you want people to do, blindly accept your views without challenge? Or instead do you want them to go home, research the subject you spoke to them about, and return to you at a later time with a more-informed opinion. I think that would be a good idea, generally speaking, but I don't think the subject of raw meat warrants it. That sort of discussion goes against people's natural impulse to speak in the present moment as well, not that it's an excuse, but it is an explanation. >I find it irritating that people tend to just have that instant reaction/association with whatever dumb thing is in vogue and then don't think it over any more than that Why should people spend their time thinking about patently stupid stuff? Maybe you are just a living meme, as the first poster said.

>>43900 >sushi chefs hand removing pathogens lol >due to that being what they ate extremely difficult to prove in the distant past >moronic to eat because of potential pathogens the danger of this is vastly enhanced by the nature of industrial food production where I buy my meat from a grocer who buys it from a slaughterhouse who buys it from a farmer maybe with some steps removed, and its quite a while from when it was out in a living animal to when its in my plate. If you personally literally just slew the healthy looking animal the potential contamination of its flesh is very small. >You dont need to eat meat completely raw and in most cases should not care to tell me a case when I should in your reasoning ? If you eat nothing but meat or little but meat its necessary to eat some of it raw if you want a healthy intake of certain vitamins. >>43897 I think the main thing is that if you're not RMS you havent carefully thought through most questions so when faced with the novel one typically retreats to the sea of popular opinion, which manifest as memes.

I love how the thread about memes gets derailed by the example meme exactly as predicted, despite OP refusing to discuss it.

>>43907 Regardless of whether you feel knowledgeable enough on something to take any kind of deep dive on something, treating whatever second or third hand knowledge you have like a religion is just not reflective of how that knowledge was obtained. First hand knowledge should naturally be given more weight in one's own personal evaluation. >>43908 Don't feel this post is even worth reading past the first few sentences. >>43910 There is a lot of religious-like thought on the matter and many other common memes and it seems to deeply upset people a lot when that meme is any any way contradicted.

>>43911 The only examples given thus far for people being unable to think freely about things outside of memes is eating raw meat. I fail to see the religiosity in forming an empirically derived opinion. It's actually the opposite from religion.

>>43913 Virtually nothing "empirical" about the thought process behind it, as there is no direct experience leading to those meme-based thoughts, just the citing of accepted group beliefs and group authorities as in a religious structure. Regardless of that, fine, I can give you some more examples I have seen. One is this commonly espoused view that "the brain doesn't develop until 25". I have seen this commonly among Americans and certain website users, perhaps in some cases to absolve themselves/their past selves of responsibility. I haven't personally come across anything that would indicate this has any real meaning to it, but regardless of that, I know the people saying it haven't either, yet they say it as if it is just a self-evident observation about the world. Gym culture I think could be classed as another, as I feel is has strong ties to internet culture and is often touted as something every man must be doing and that it will improve your life infinitely and anyone who disagrees with that is treated as insane. I often see people get very upset and worked up about others who don't believe there is much inherent value to it. A similar thing can be said about "going to therapy", but this meme typically comes from a more female audience.

>>43909 > If you personally literally just slew the healthy looking animal the potential contamination of its flesh is very small. Depends very heavily on the animal and cut of meat. Beef, for instance, is internally sterile - assuming the animal is healthy the interior of a cut of meat doesn't have bacteria, and it stays that way even after death. Microorganisms cannot migrate (far) through the muscle tissue. So you can relatively safely have raw beef, either by searing the outside to kill anything on the surface, otherwise killing microorganisms on the surface with e.g. acid, cutting away and discarding the surface immediately before eating, etc. Chicken, as a contrasting example, is emphatically _not_ internally sterile. Microorganisms can and will migrate through the muscle tissue. As a result, even a random piece deep within a cut of meat from a healthy chicken is often contaminated at a low but nonzero level - which quickly grows in storage. It's not black and white - you're often ok if you e.g. slaughtered a healthy chicken and then 20 minutes later are serving it raw - but most people rather want to store meat for more than 20 minutes. (n.b. this is talking about bacteria. Parasites are another matter.)

>>43910 > I love how the thread about memes gets derailed by the example meme exactly as predicted, despite OP refusing to discuss it. OP clearly made the thread to rant people don't agree with him and wants to feel superior, otherwise a lot more examples would have been given to not give focus to any one in particular.

Before I forget there is a real dangerous pop psychology misinformation meme going around the "your brain doesn't fully develop until 25". I say link this article whenever someone mentions it. Most people aren't smart or patient enough to read through a ton of scientific papers till they understand how neuroplasticity works. https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-year-old-mature-myth.html Similarly there is the whole "you only use 10% of your brain" bit.

>>43897 based. I'm a fellow raw tard. Keep being based.

>>43897 >Do you find yourself prone to thinking in internet memes some of the ones that were dominant on 4chan 15 years ago seem forever burned into my inner monologue. The most pervasive is when something has a predictable outcome, I think "inb4 [the predictable outcome]" (and the same for unlikely but ironic outcomes). I sometimes think "ISHYGDDT" or "shiggy" "tfw" and "mfw" weaseled their way into my inner voice for a bit, but I immediately considered that a negative side effect of too much brewing soykaf and quickly unlearned that inclination. >evolved to eat cooked meat >brain doesn't finish developing until 25 I guess those are internet-age memes, though I don't know if they're internet memes. Before the modern internet we had similar widespread beliefs/memes that were generally even more ridiculous >you only use 10% of your brain >masturbating makes your palms grow hair >mdma causes holes in your brain >you won't carry a calculator with you everywhere you go I don't think this reflects an inability to think critically, but rather just shows that people don't spend time thinking critically about things they don't really care about because the cost-benefit is so poor. >>43902 has the right idea. If something does personally affect or interest you, you're not going to spend much time looking into it. Come up with aomething that sounds like it could be true and is just interesting enough to make a quirky little factoid, but not so interesting people want to know more, give it a little exposure and with a little luck, the masses will be discussing it over beers, putting it in corporate powerpoints, and saying "you know, I heard..." on first dates before you know it And eventually, someone will say, "well actually, that's not totally accurate, you see..." and the resounding response will be an indifferent "oh, ok."

>>43897 To be honest, you seem to be the one living in the fantasy world that you accuse others of living in. You just call anything that isn't part of your fantasy world a meme. And you seem to be pretty delusional, so there's not much hope of reaching you with factual evidence or rational argument. [shrug]

>>43899 >people disagree with me >boy, they must be memeing

>>43910 This is a behavior I also used to wonder at back when I only browsed anonymous image boards. I would try not to engage and actually try to discuss OP's main point. This all changed when I started using forums that show the date users joined. I realized most of this threads (highly interesting question + retarded take) were mostly done by new users. I believe this has to do with them not knowing how to behave in certain places, but honestly, you have to be pretty retarded if you can't foresee the thread is going to be derailed by your strange life choices and use instead a more common example. It might just be poor writing skills, but I think is generally bad social skills: not knowing which parts of your personal life you should shut the fuarrrk up about if you want to fit in. Also I found out these are the people that hop from site to site complaining no one understands them when they open conversations with the same soykaf about their weird tastes every time.

>>43975 Thank you for the tip, kind stranger! Now I will surely succeed on my dealienating friendship quest...

I dunno, but I think they can be pretty funny

>>43975 the original definition of "trolling" was about making threads like this in the first place, posting highly contentious questions to blow up the site with low-quality discussion or just to fuarrrk with other newbies. so its possible that some of the new accounts doing this were just accounts that were derezzed in the past. if you were slightly more intentional about it would also be a good idea to make that content on any platform, like reddit or twitter, who had some kind of reputation system to gain trust and access to features. since you can just make high-engagement threads to get attention and quickly integrate into the community.

Probably the result of reddit actually having influence in its heyday.

This thread glows lol, beware they're gonna learn about all the fringe boards while 4chan is down

Memes just reveal the underlying NPC nature of the average person. They're mindless pattern matching golem. One programmed they just lego together output they've heard before, and run a fuzzy logic (barely) scan through their memory banks to find some category the incoming stimuli matches. Even your statement: >Obviously everyone relates novel things to what they know Is a manifestation of this. No. That's totally wrong. It's just some retarded thing you heard golem say ovr and over again and repeated because it vaguely makes sense. It'sa perspective made by golem, for golem. They're programmed to lash out against "neologism" and the "not normal" for this reason. They're like aspen trees, superficially individual but all the same under the surface. They're a hivemind. If neologisms were allowed then it would quickly shatter the illusion and thus suspension of disbelief for the player characters.

>>45207 >Memes just reveal the underlying NPC nature of the average person. They're mindless pattern matching golem. Post historical examples. Here's an easy one: tulip mania. Can you believe tulips were so expensive at one point you could buy a castle?

Not interested in what Lainon likes to eat. I understand memes to be zip files packed with meanings, uploaded into other minds to be automatically unpacked there. Every sentence is a meme referencing larger knowledge, within it are words made out of meme symbols. Zip within Zip compressing a lot of understanding into the smallest possible deliverable package because it's more efficient for communication. If someone utters a stupid sentence like: i'm so sandwichpilled, like and subscribe He transmits more information than the idea of him being hungry for a sandwich followed by an entreaty. He references the websites he browses, that he is part of online discussions within specific circles, he implies the history of such terms and associated feelings, transmits a lot of context regarding who he is as a person. Speaking in internet memes in order to say as much as possible using as little material as possible. Stripping the semantics from the mobile particle and off-loading the definitions unto the decrypting software. It's a way of doing things. If the receiving mind's file architecture isn't identical enough then the unpacking process is disastrous, the firewall trips resulting in anger as corrupted meanings are purged from the database and appended to a blacklist alongside the sender's id.

>>45238 That's a big meme. Linguistic engineering is not stupid. Let us share in a decentralized and p2p encrypted culture fit to protect our freedoms. Meme sentences and factoids of dubious validity can also be used as a shield by someone who lacks confidence in order to interact by proxy.

>>45212 There are no discrete "historical examples". History itself is the example, including the present day, every day. It's as though they lack free will. Maybe the Mark of Cain thing is correct, they're destined to be city and system builders, and then they become slaves of those systems. Because they're born to be used. If it wasn't the systems around them, it would just be something else. They cannot do anything on their own.

>>43897 I was going to type out a serious reply until I saw the examples OP gave. If you do a retarded thing then people are going to (correctly) assume that you're retarded and they're not going to put in the effort of dignifying your stupidity with a response. Eating raw meat is subpar in every conceivable metric and if you've been gaslit into believing that it's something you should be doing then you're not very smart. If you were actually serious about eating what you "evolved" to eat then your diet would be 80% fruit. Is it? Putting OP being a midwit aside, I'll respond to what I hoped he was talking about before he revealed that he was just referring to being tricked by diet grifters into giving himself intestinal parasites: >they are almost completely unable to think of the world in a way that doesn’t involve memes Memes are newspeak in every way that matters. In case it's been a while since you were forced to read 1984 in middle school, >Newspeak a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking. Memes and meme culture have become an incredibly effective means of accomplishing this goal. Rather than relying on language to communicate complex thoughts or emotions, people, especially young people, are increasingly relying on memes. The more they do this, the more they lose their ability to articulate themselves with any degree of complexity. Combine this with the ever increasing decline in literacy and people are going to turn themselves into mindless automatons without any government intervention needed. Articulating complex things can be difficult, increasingly so as people become less intelligent. Given that the average person is not very intelligent, all you need to do is provide them with an easy out and they will eagerly take it, because people are lazy. Memes are for language what calculators are for mathematics. All of the effort is removed: do you feel vaguely bad? Don't worry about examining that feeling in order to express it; just post a crying pepe. Good enough. Did someone post something you don't agree with? Don't bother attempting to type out a reasoned critique; it's enough to post an appropriate reaction image that will let him know how wrong he is. I wouldn't be surprised if most of these people, if pressed, would be incapable of explaining their thoughts or feelings.

>>45270 There is a few memes that I have found oddly dangerous used always for oppressive purposes. >relationship power dynamic >you only use 10% of your brain >the brain doesn't fully develop until 25 >autists are immune to propaganda >left / right political spectrum labelling and equating something as inherently bad once a label is applied to a view you don't want to think about and then there are the soyjaks and any other meme that tries to make everything about appearances not any actual real arguments or points on a matter which instantly devolve every conversation into a childish soykaf flinging.

>>45276 I think most of your list comes down to blind trust in authority figures, which is why it's so important to cultivate a mindset that's critical of everything. People see a post on reddit with a lot of upvotes explaining the >relationship power dynamic and because it comes from a "trusted" source, vetted by a community of their peers, they have no resistance to allowing this idea to become a new accepted truth in their mind. They read an article or, let's be honest, see a magazine cover while they're standing in line buying groceries, which tells them >you only use 10% of your brain and that's all they need: it's on the cover of a science magazine, the experts said it's true, so it must be. And also, like I said, people are lazy. When you're below a certain IQ, it can be very hard to keep up a constant mental firewall against new ideas and concepts. The effort required to verify new information before fully accepting it is just more work than most people are willing to put in, especially for things that don't seem important to them. If you sat one of these people down and started explaining to them why some of these commonly accepted ideas are false, they'd probably get angry at you. They don't care and more importantly, they don't want to have to think. And as you say, once you understand that most people function this way, it can be very easy to herd them toward whatever beliefs you want, especially if you add politics to the mix. For a huge segment of the population, simply telling them that people on the opposing political team like or dislike something is enough to cause them to instinctively take the opposite stance.

>>45278 I agree with you the extent to which this is about blind authority figures, but I think you're missing the point a little. "only use 10% of your brain" meme isn't true. its not a command you're constantly being told in a they live type scenario but, you can shut your brain off, can't you... The reddit logic seems true, but I don't think its intuitive to people who aren't already in the soup of reddit. i don't think the format makes it that obvious, most people nowadays hear >a website and (rightfully) treat it with suspicion. i guess people used to do the same with magazines, but all the warnings they've been given about internet sources don't tell them not to trust bs print media too. >When you're below a certain IQ, it can be very hard to keep up a constant mental firewall against new ideas and concepts. I don't think that's correct. people with high IQ can be pretty suggestible in different ways - someone intelligent can internalize and find a place for information into the complexity of their own mind more easily. >For a huge segment of the population, simply telling them that people on the opposing political team like or dislike something is enough to cause them to instinctively take the opposite stance. its true. but your mental firewalls can be part of this effect. that's why its okay to let them down sometimes - after all, your mind can change again later.

>>45279 >I don't think that's correct. people with high IQ can be pretty suggestible in different ways It's been long noted that schizophrenics and low IQ people can't be hypnotized. Midwits are ideal hypnotic candidates, some high IQ people are somnambulists.

>>43957 Thinking in memes. A shame that "based" has largely gone from the Lil B sense of "being yourself" to a token to reward herdthought. As someone who sometimes gets called based by these kinds of people.

>I wonder if there is any good documentation on this phenomenon. What are metaphors and figures of speech? Aren't these quasi memes themselves? It seems that it's just more striking because internet culture is so strange and alien in comparison, especially the more it's being shaped by terminally online people. Memetics is an interesting topic. And it's only getting more crazy and deranged the further we drive towards the global consciousness forming.

>>45278 > I think most of your list comes down to blind trust in authority figures, which is why it's so important to cultivate a mindset that's critical of everything. People see a post on reddit with a lot of upvotes explaining the It isn't even from authority figures though. It's more so from someone claiming it comes from an authority figure and never actually citing anyone. > and that's all they need: it's on the cover of a science magazine, the experts said it's true, so it must be. Well it came from a misunderstanding, You use around 10% at a time not 10% total but some sensationalist sources must have implied it is 10% at all or merely poorly explained it and the wrong people got ahold of it and warped it from being not intelligent enough to understand. > And also, like I said, people are lazy. When you're below a certain IQ, it can be very hard to keep up a constant mental firewall against new ideas and concepts. The effort required to verify new information before fully accepting it is just more work than most people are willing to put in, especially for things that don't seem important to them. If you sat one of these people down and started explaining to them why some of these commonly accepted ideas are false, they'd probably get angry at you. They don't care and more importantly, they don't want to have to think. IQ itself is a meme. There is more than one IQ test and a persons IQ score can fluctuate moment to moment quite a bit. That and it doesn't fully encompass everything that matters like a person's social skills and connections. > And as you say, once you understand that most people function this way, it can be very easy to herd them toward whatever beliefs you want, especially if you add politics to the mix. For a huge segment of the population, simply telling them that people on the opposing political team like or dislike something is enough to cause them to instinctively take the opposite stance. A lot of the time I do not want to have making their beliefs be same as my own, rather I just want ther beliefs to actually have a proper sound reasoning behind theme even if i disagree with them. >>45279 > I don't think that's correct. people with high IQ can be pretty suggestible in different ways - someone intelligent can internalize and find a place for information into the complexity of their own mind more easily. Yes, supposedly people of higher IQs are able to rationalize any view they have even if it has flaws to it. So more than IQ is at play.