Memetic Inoculation

I came across the idea of memetic inoculation in the article Every Complex Idea Has a Million Stupid Cousins. The basic gist of it (summarizing it is ironic when you understand the article) is that a complex idea is very difficult to communicate. So, those trying to communicate it, tend to simplify it. The simplified idea can seem stupid at the first glance. The listener attributes the apparent stupidity of the abstraction to the idea itself. The more "stupid" abstractions the listener comes across, the more the belief the idea itself is stupid take root in the mind of the listener. It can easily reach a point where at the mere mention of the idea, the listener dismisses it without trying to understand it.

This is the concept of memetic inoculation. Multiple encounters with stupid abstractions cause the complex idea to be rejected outright. Mark P Xu Neyer, the author of the article puts the concept in these steps (mostly taken from the article, with editorializing for me to better recall later - ironic, I know):

• Complicated ideas take more energy to transmit than simple ones
• For every complex idea, there are a large number of stupid ones
• Accurate beliefs help a person navigate reality more effectively
• Most people can't articulate an idea even if they understand it. So, they mostly reproduce and transmit a simpler variant of the original idea
• For some people, the simple version of the idea works well enough (mental shortcuts).
• Thus, all remotely subtle of complicated beliefs should be expected to be outcompeted in the marketplace for ideas by their own stupid cousins
• Intelligent (jaded?) people tend to rely on the simple heuristic (mental shortcut) "I've seen this idea before" in order to avoid wasting their time with cranks
• People get defensive when an idea they identify with is dismissed out of hand, so in response to having their heuristic dismissed as nonsense, many people will defend the stupid copies of subtle ideas and many will even reject the more complex form

My take-away from this

If one wants to guard against the effects of this, they would have to consider each idea or the simplified version of the idea from scratch, throwing away the heuristic one has developed for it. This is extremely hard in itself and might be very mentally taxing on the listener. This also doesn't consider the part the transmitter of the idea plays. The agenda of the person transmitting the idea also matters and can be split roughly into three types:

1. Honestly trying to get an idea across with either no understanding of their personal biases, or trying their best to suppress it
2. Trying to get an idea across, but have an agenda that is sometimes more important than purely transmitting the idea
3. Not interested in transmitting any idea, but simply to waste your time. We call them trolls, and it's best not to feed them (another heuristic)

All this makes giving each idea it's due, expensive - mentally and in time. Simply telling people to consider each idea on it's own merits is a great sentiment, but can't be managed practically, given the constraints. Specialization and trust in others to be good actors seems to be the only way out of this.

Specialization is easy enough to accomplish and is what most people end up doing. This, however, leaves us vulnerable to bad actors, because understanding whom to trust involves understanding what they are communicating to some extent. Talk about back to square one.

This might explain why with increased information, we also see the rise of influencers. The breadth of information causes people to depend on someone to curate the information for them. This curation is done by those whom people trust, thus influencers.

Weird conclusion

I didn't think I'd form this hypothesis.
I'd always thought that increased information would result in people being more informed; that we would make up our own minds about everything, by checking/researching. (Null hypothesis)
Instead, increased information seems to result in Influencers. (Hypothesis 1)

This should be studied (probably already has), but I do not know how to go about it. Time to find some trusted sources to understand how to do this. I realize the irony in the statements. I don't have a better way to approach it.