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Post by Gray Librarian on May 5, 2015 4:18:55 GMT
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 5, 2015 4:36:42 GMT
Not really. It was your post that got me thinking about memetic hazards in the first place, but I have no particular reason to expect you to be irresponsible about this sort of thing. It's aimed generally.
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Hadassah
Regular
Posts: 107
World: Pantheon
Pronoun: She/Her
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Post by Hadassah on May 5, 2015 10:01:50 GMT
I do greatly appreciate that there is a limit being placed on the import of extra-virulent infectious information. I had only been recently placed on duty identifying possible multidimensional rifts given recent poor interactions on our plane. Because this forum's server isn't located locally, I do not expect I would have the power to shut it down, but only attempt to block it, should anything dangerous begin leaking into the rest of our local internet.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 5, 2015 17:30:09 GMT
I'm sorry to hear that you've had bad experiences recently. I hope you can find friendlier interactions here.
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Hadassah
Regular
Posts: 107
World: Pantheon
Pronoun: She/Her
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Post by Hadassah on May 5, 2015 18:59:43 GMT
Thank you very kindly. Most of our world's interaction with others is perfectly peaceable and safe as I expect it will be here, but I wanted to say I appreciate the moderate concern for other plane's social homeostasis.
We only recently had an unfortunate event that has, among other things, provided myself with more responsibility and the opportunity to observe multidimensional interaction platforms.
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Nifl
Poster
Posts: 35
World: Nexus
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Post by Nifl on May 5, 2015 19:04:49 GMT
What sort of thing is meant by 'memetic hazard', exactly? Is it possible to describe examples without the description itself being hazardous?
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 5, 2015 19:57:41 GMT
It is possible.
What I mean is any message that is, in itself, directly dangerous or harmful. Usually the danger is relative to a particular type of mind; for example, rapidly flashing images are dangerous to people with photosensitive epilepsy, computer viruses are dangerous to users of the platform or architecture that the virus targets, and Berryman-Langford basilisks are dangerous to humans.
Major subtypes are cognitohazards, which are dangerous to perceive (such as flashing images or the brown note); memetic hazards, which are dangerous to comprehend (such as computer viruses or rhetorical basilisks); and infohazards, which are dangerous to mention (such as the True Names of certain demons and fey).
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Hadassah
Regular
Posts: 107
World: Pantheon
Pronoun: She/Her
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Post by Hadassah on May 5, 2015 23:18:27 GMT
Depending on your theory of virulence, ideas with less power than a True Name are also possibly dangerous. Ideas are already infectious, such as the dancing dog with hats videos, or bad knock-knock jokes, or banal facts about historical figures. These ideas spread very quickly, but are usually benign, and do nothing but reduce productivity. Telling someone to mix ammonia bleach and certain other chemicals could be very, very dangerous, especially if you claim it helps clean things "better" and someone gets hurt. I would recommend double checking any facts you find on the internet as a result.
Religion and political ideology can be both viral and antiviral, but recently a Deity from a nearby universe tried to convert our mostly defenseless world to Their worship via use of a divine language that rewrote neural pathways in the human brain. We lost most of southern Florida to the plague, but it is mostly contained now. Which is why I expressed appreciation of the caution used by this forum.
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Post by Andrew on May 5, 2015 23:36:19 GMT
A language can rewrite human neural pathways? This confirms my plan to not post summoning instructions here. Usually they’re kept secret, and I have no reason to break that secret in general. I thought this might be a special case, especially if summoning doesn’t even work outside of my Earth (as seems likely). The risk is just too great, though; if somebody who knew that language learned how to summon….
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 6, 2015 1:10:34 GMT
It's true that the boundary between memetic hazards and ordinary memes can be somewhat fuzzy. My aim is to enable people to communicate, and any judgment calls I have to make will be based on that goal.
It's not practical for me to try to stop people from posting bad advice. I have to draw a line somewhere, and it's somewhere in between "an idea that would be dangerous if acted upon" and "an idea that would be dangerous just by thinking it."
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Hadassah
Regular
Posts: 107
World: Pantheon
Pronoun: She/Her
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Post by Hadassah on May 6, 2015 9:43:11 GMT
Perfectly excellent bounds. I was just trying to define dangerous information that might be virulent, a la those that like to spread false information for fun. I do not believe that there can be an arbiter of all dangers.
Letting alone the fact that there simply is no way to interact in any great detail if there are universes with different chemistries, which would make it impossible to guess at what suggestions in one universe might be highly dangerous in another.
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Post by Archangel on May 7, 2015 1:44:29 GMT
On precautions: the Foundation takes this kind of threat seriously. Requesting that people not post unmarked memetic hazards is a step in the right direction, but will not prevent negligence let alone malice.
I’m not reading anything here directly. All images get replaced with something similar-looking but known to be safe, and I see that instead; likewise a text analysis program paraphrases everything on this forum. (If I miss wordplay or idioms, this is probably why.) It also gets relayed through intermediaries piece by piece. Some memetic threats have noticeable effects before the victim knows the entire content, so this makes it easier to catch before anyone is completely affected. They—and I for that matter—will be periodically evaluated for any unexplained mental changes.
I’ve been cleared to mention some of the precautions because containing memetic hazards is important and anyone who tries to circumvent Foundation precautions would have guessed those ones anyway. The full set of protections should neutralize all known threats and at least eighty percent of unknown ones.
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Post by Andrew on May 7, 2015 2:10:21 GMT
I read the post about memetic hazards in the announcements section to indicate that Mother Starlight would actually prevent those from being posted. I suppose I was further assuming that she wasn’t susceptible to most or all such hazards herself, being a unique type of being.
I suppose it’s always a good idea to have extra security, though.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 7, 2015 4:15:43 GMT
I believe that I can keep the forum safe with respect to memetic hazards, but this has not yet been tested against any serious threat in the wild.
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Post by Archangel on May 8, 2015 19:37:57 GMT
While I appreciate the extra layer of protection, no mind is completely safe from this category of threat. While there has been proven to be no upper limit on how robust against memetic hazards minds can be, and so some people are effectively immune for all practical purposes, there is always something theoretically possible that can bring it down.
Aside from the fact that this means you yourself aren't provably safe, the difference between minds is large enough that something completely safe to one person may cause nearly any result in another. Even differences between humans from the same world are sometimes large enough to matter. Considering that this forum has manifested in at least two worlds already that contain things it is unsafe to know about, I strongly suggest that everyone take whatever precautions they can and not rely solely on Mother Starlight's presumably very competent protection.
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