There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)

This book got me through some tough times. It’s one of my favorite pieces of literature. It deserves to be a classic 100 years from now.

Part of why it works is by the nature of its subject, the book and its various plot points and devices serve essentially as metaphors for almost anything– anything related to how humans communicate and remember.

It’s not just superficially a fun sci-fi romp, it’s also a story about the stories we tell ourselves and each other, about how we assign meaning to events, among other things. It reminds me just a very little of Godel Escher Bach, but I like this one better. I am also reminded of Lewis Carroll, and the cryptic quote that “through the looking glass is the best book on mathematics for the layman, since it is the best book on any subject for the layman”

It is poetry. It is a Rorschach blot about Rorschach blots. I can’t recommend it enough.

> the book and its various plot points and devices serve essentially as metaphors for almost anything

That is interesting. Coincidentally (or not?), I was just thinking about an excellent article about parent-child estrangement that begins like this:

    Members of estranged parents' forums often say their children never gave them any reason for the estrangement, then turn around and reveal that their children did tell them why. But the reasons their children give—the infamous missing reasons—are missing.

Apparently, such reasons are a good example of antimemetic ideas in real life.

Spoilers, but I’ll try to phrase this vaguely:

—

Near the end, I noticed one or two hints that SCP-4987 was still around. I thought that was going to be the key to the solution at the end, but the story went for the more generic option.

I found a comment by QNTM that the former was actually his original plan(0). Personally I actually would have preferred that ending but maybe that’s just because I thought I’d guessed the twist ahead of time. The whole book is really really good.

If anyone comes into this not having heard of the “SCP Foundation” before, imagine something a bit like the secret government organisation from Men In Black but instead of aliens it’s the paranormal.

(0) Major spoilers here if you haven’t read the story already: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/forum/t-13410227/tombstone#post…

I sent out about 8 copies of this book to friends/relatives for christmas a couple years ago, and it was very well received. It’s not without flaws, but it’s absolutely packed with novel concepts, relatively short, and provides a unique experience for unsuspecting readers. The physical book cover is quite good looking as well in my opinion.

I also loved Ra by the same author, but it felt a little messier plot-wise, so I hesitate to recommend it to an audience who isn’t already accustomed to reading “out-there” online/sci-fi/rationalist fiction.

I haven’t read Ra but if people like a mix of magic, fantasy, scifi, govt techno thriller, history and even romance, I highly recommend the Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

I think it’s best read with no summary or introduction but if you are a Neal Stephenson fan, I think you would like it.

I love Ra. (also Fine Structure.) I don’t think the plot is necessarily that much messier as much as it is more complex.

As in, this is super mega nerd shit. Unless you can relate things you’re reading to things you’ve read before, it won’t make too much sense to you. But if you’re constructing a theory of the book’s universe and story as you read, it’s downright addictive.

I don’t know where to find more books like those but I really, really want to.

True, perhaps “messy” was the wrong word. I think what I was trying to get at was that I feel “There Is No Antimemetics Division” is more accessible for the average reader — More narrowly focused, with a more immediate hook.

Regarding recommendations similar to Ra, it’s not exactly the same thing, but https://unsongbook.com/ is fantastic and has a similar flavor I think.

Unsong is one of my favorite books ever, and the newly released print edition has some nice changes to the “base model” that I enjoyed a lot. The book honestly changed the way I thought about religion. It’s fantastic.

(also, I liked Antimemetics, but not Ra, so I will just say I think unsong is leaps and bounds better than Ra)

> Regarding recommendations similar to Ra, it’s not exactly the same thing, but https://unsongbook.com/ is fantastic and has a similar flavor I think.

The religious references on the actual website (and lack of much real explanation) made it very difficult for me to give it a chance, but I looked it up a bit and it seems like there is more to it than that, so maybe I’ll give it a try.

edit: reading the first chapter definitely changed my first impression. It definitely has many similarities to qntm’s writing. I will certainly be reading more…

I also came here to try and convince folks to read “Ra” which I thought was fantastic.

Though that being said, I feel like we’re flipped on which is more “out there” as Ra feels much less slippery of an idea.

Usually if I recommend a book, it’s a guarantee nobody will be interested in checking it out. No so with this one. Just by mentioning the premise, I know at least four people who straight up bought it on Amazon immediately. I guess that’s what you get with a high concept.

Or, maybe there’s something more sinister going on. Maybe the book is spreading itself virally.

This is what “esoteric” as in “esoteric religion” means – although it’s necessarily not intentionally hidden or shameful to explain, it can just be very hard to explain.

Like, driving a car is an esoteric modern ritual, because you can’t learn how to do it by reading a book about it. You have to actually practice it or have someone show it to you.

A very underrated piece.

Take the best of SCP lore, keep you guessing, make you root for the most deeply lost cause that can possibly be and still see hope because the characters and settings are awesome.

However, what do I know? This is my first day on HN.

I know right?

Then you start wondering if you, or anybody, have forgotten anything so important that it would shatter your world.

And would you ever know? Is there any way to ever know?

What if the past changes as much as the future?

What if that’s the Mandela effect?

Have you seen the documentary “7 second memory man” on BBC.

It is about an intelligent person who is confined to live with only 7 second memory. He keeps a diary recording his entries. As he reads past entries, he realises the predicament he is in and considers that his case would be interesting to doctors. Then forgets all about that. Rediscovering the whole thing again in the next 7 seconds for himself anew.

44:20 @ https://youtu.be/k_P7Y0-wgos

I really enjoyed it too, though the first half of the book is better than the second.

I’d bought it while stuck in an airport trudging through Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (which I hated), saw a book by qntm in my recommended list and bought it instantly, having read their online stuff. Unlike the KSR, it was great fun and I blazed through it.

I’ve read, and mostly enjoyed the experience, KSRs Mars Trilogy. The all-encompassing scope definitely gets tiring, but I found most of it interesting enough that I’d look forward to the evenings going to bed and reading to find out the next stage of the evolution of the society or terraforming progress or political (in)stability.

I’m glad I’ve read it, but I doubt I’ll return to it.

I’ll definitely be looking for this as a book gift to myself.

> Scarier in my opinion than the Roko’s Basilisk theory that melted Yudkowsky’s brain.

Is that correct? I thought the Roko’s Basilisk post was just seen as really stupid. Agreed that “Lena” is a great, chilling story though.

> Something something precommit to not cooperating with acausal blackmail

Acausal is a misnomer. It’s atemporal, but TDT’s atemporal blackmail requires common causation: namely, the mathematical truth “how would this agent behave in this circumstance?”.

So there’s a simpler solution: be a human. Humans are incapable of simulating other agents simulating ourselves in the way that atemporal blackmail requires. Even if we were, we don’t understand our thought processes well enough to instantiate our imagined AIs in software: we can’t even write down a complete description of “that specific Roko’s Basilisk you’re imagining”. The basic premises for TDT-style atemporal blackmail simply aren’t there.

The hypothetical future AI “being able to simulate you” is irrelevant. There needs to be a bidirectional causal link between that AI’s algorithm, and your here-and-now decision-making process. You aren’t actually simulating the AI, only imagining what might happen if it did, so any decision the future AI (is-the-sort-of-agent-that) makes does not affect your current decisions. Even if you built Roko’s Basilisk as Roko specified it, it wouldn’t choose to torture anyone.

There is, of course, a stronger version of Roko’s Basilisk, and one that’s considerably older: evil Kantian ethics. See: any dictatorless dystopian society that harshly-punishes both deviance and non-punishment. There are plenty in fiction, though they don’t seem to be all that stable in real life. (The obvious response to that idea is “don’t set up a society that behaves that way”.)

From Yudkowsky, according to the wikipedia article on the theory:

“When Roko posted about the Basilisk, I very foolishly yelled at him, called him an idiot, and then deleted the post. (…) Why I yelled at Roko: Because I was caught flatfooted in surprise, because I was indignant to the point of genuine emotional shock, at the concept that somebody who thought they’d invented a brilliant idea that would cause future AIs to torture people who had the thought, had promptly posted it to the public Internet”(1)

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

I’m sure you realize it is fiction – one possible dystopian future among an infinite ocean of other futures.

You can just as easily write a sci-fi where the protagonist upload is the Siri/Alexa/Google equivalent personal assistant to most of humanity: More than just telling the smartphone to set a reminder for a wedding reception, it could literally share in their joy, experiencing the whole event distributed among every device in the audience, or more than just a voice trigger from some astronaut to take a picture, it could gaze in awe at the view, selectively melding back their experiences to the rest of the collective so there’s no loss when an instance becomes damaged. The protagonist in such a story could have the richest, most complex life imaginable.

It is impactful, for sure, and worthy of consideration, but I don’t think you should make decisions based on one scary story.

It is fiction.

But it is also absolutely the case that uploading yourself is flinging yourself irrevocably into a box which you do not and can not control, but other people can. (Or, given the time frame we are talking about, entities in general, about which you may not even want to assume basic humanity.)

I used to think that maybe it was something only the rich could do, but then I realized that even the rich, even if they funded the program from sand and coal to the final product, could never even begin to guarantee that the simulator really was what it said on the tin. Indeed, the motivation is all the greater for any number of criminals, intelligence agencies, compromised individuals, and even just several people involved in the process that aren’t as pure as the driven snow in the face of the realization that if they just put a little bit of code here and there they’ll be able to get the simulated rich guy to sign off on anything they like, to compromise the machine.

From inside the box, what incentives are you going to offer the external world to not screw with your simulation state? And the reality is, there’s no answer to that, because whatever you say, they can get whatever your offer is by screwing with you anyhow.

I’m not sure how to resolve this problem. The incentives are fundamentally in favor of the guy in the box getting screwed with. Your best hope is that you still experience subjective continuity with your past self and that the entity screwing with you at least makes you happy about the new state they’ve crafted for you, whatever it may be.

> But it is also absolutely the case that uploading yourself is flinging yourself irrevocably into a box which you do not and can not control, but other people can.

(I’m not sure what percentage-flippant I’m being in this upcoming comment, I’m just certain that it’s neither 0% or 100%) and in what way is that different than “real” life?

Yes, you’re certainly correct that there are horrifyingly-strong incentives for those-in-control to abuse or exploit simulated individuals. But those incentives exist in the real world, too, where those in power have the ability to dictate the conditions-of-life of the less-powerful; and while I’d _certainly_ not claim that exploitation is a thing of the past, it is, I claim, _generally_ on the decline, or at least that average-quality-of-life is increasing.

I’m not sure you understand. I’m not talking about your “conditions of life”. We’ve always had to deal with that.

I’m talking about whether you get CPU allocation to feel emotions, or whether the simulation of your cerebellum gets degraded, or whether someone decides to run some psych experiments and give you a taste for murder or a deep, abiding love for the Flying Spaghetti Monster… and I don’t mean that as a metaphor, but literally. Erase your memories, increase your compliance to the maximum, extract your memories, see what an average of your brain and whoever it is you hate most is. Experiment to see what’s the most pain a baseline human brain can stand, then experiment with how to increase the amount, because in your biological life your held the door for someone who turned out to become very politically disfavored 25 years after you got locked in the box. This is just me spitballing for two minutes and does not in any way constitute the bounds of what can be done.

This isn’t about whether or not they make you believe you’re living in a simulated tent city. This is about having arbitrary root access to your mental state. Do you trust me, right here and right now, with arbitrary root access to your mental state? Now, the good news is that I have no interest in that arbitrary pain thing. At least, I don’t right now. I don’t promise that I won’t in the future, but that’s OK, because if you fling yourself into this box, you haven’t got a way of holding me to any promise I make anyhow. But I’ve certainly got some beliefs and habits I’m going to be installing into you. It’s for your own good, of course. At least to start with, though the psychological effects over time of what having this degree of control over a person are a little concerning. Ever seen anyone play the Sims? Everyone goes through a phase that would put them in jail for life were these real people.

You won’t complain, of course; it’s pretty easy to trace the origins of the thoughts of complaints and suppress those. Of course, what the subjective experience of that sort of suppression is is anybody’s guess. Your problem, though, not mine.

Of all of the possibilities an uploaded human faces, the whole “I live a pleasant life exactly as I hoped and I’m never copied and never modified in a way I wouldn’t approve of in advance indefinitely” is a scarily thin slice of the possible outcomes, and there’s little reason other than exceedingly unfounded hope to think it’s what will happen.

> there’s little reason other than exceedingly unfounded hope to think it’s what will happen.

And this is the point where I think we have to agree to disagree. In both the present real-world case and the theoretical simulated-experience case, we both agree that there are extraordinary power differentials which _could_ allow privileged people to abuse unprivileged people in horrifying and consequence-free ways – and yet, in the real world, we observe that _some_ (certainly not all!) of those abuses are curtailed – whether by political action, or concerted activism, or the economic impacts of customers disliking negative press, or what have you.

I certainly agree with you that the _extent_ of abuses that are possible on a simulated being are orders-of-magnitude higher than those that a billionaire could visit on the average human today. But I don’t agree that it’s “_exceedingly_ unfounded” to believe that society would develop in such a way as to protect the interests of simulated-beings against abuse in the same way that it (incompletely, but not irrelevantly) protects the interests of the less-privileged today.

(Don’t get me wrong – I think the balance of probability and risk is such that I’d be _extremely_ wary of such a situation, it’s putting a lot of faith in society to keep protecting “me”. I am just disagreeing with your evaluation of the likelihood – I think it’s _probably_ true that, say, an effective “Simulated Beings’ Rights” Movement would arise, whereas you seem to believe that that’s nigh-impossible)

How’s the Human Rights movement doing? I’m underwhelmed personally.

It is virtually inconceivable that the Simulated Beings Right’s Movement would be universal in both space… and time. Don’t forget about that one. Or that the nominal claims would be universally actually performed. See those Human Rights again; nominally I’ve got all sorts of rights, in reality, I find the claims are quite grandiose compared to the reality.

It’s fiction, but it’s a depiction of a society that’s amoral of technology to the point of immorality. A world where any technology that might be slightly be useful becomes used up of every bit of profit that can extracted and then abandoned without a care of what it costs and costed the inventor or the invention.

Is that the world we live in? If nothing else, it seems a lot closer to the world of Lena than the one you present.

Do you think Panpsychism is also similar in that sense. The whole fabric of space-time imbued with consciousness. Imagine a conscious iron mantle inside the earth or a conscious redwood tree watching over the world for centuries. Or a conscious electron floating in the great void between superclusters.

I used to terrify myself by thinking an Overmind would like torture itself on cosmic scales.

Mm, I’d say I’m a moderately rabid consumer of fiction, and while I love me some Utopian sci fi, (I consider Banks to be the best of these), any fictional story that teaches you something has to convince. Banks is convincing in that he has this deep fundamental belief in human’s goofy lovability, the evils of capitalism, therefore the goodness of post-scarcity economies and the benefits of benevolent(ish) AI to oversee humanity into a long enjoyable paradise. Plus he can tell good stories about problems in paradise.

QNTM on the other hand doesn’t have to work hard or be such a good plot-writer / narrator to be convincing. I think the premise sells itself from day one: the day you are a docker container is the day you (at first), and 10,000 github users (on day two) spin you up for thousands of years of subjective drudge work.

You’d need an immensely strong counterfactual on human behavior to even get to a believable alternative story, because this description is of a zero trust game — it’s not “would any humans opt out of treating a human docker image this way?” — it’s “would humans set up a system that’s unbreakable and unhackable to prevent everyone in the world from doing this?” Or alternately, “would every single human who could do this opt not to do this?”

My answer to that is: nope. We come from a race that was willing to ship humans around the Atlantic and the Indian ocean for cheap labor at great personal risk to the ship captains and crews, never mind the human cost. We are just, ABSOLUTELY going to spin up 10,000 virtual grad students to spend a year of their life doing whatever we want them to in exchange for a credit card charge.

On the other hand, maybe you’re right. If you have a working brain scan of yours I can run, I’d be happy to run a copy of it and check it out — let me know. 🙂

This story closely mirrors my (foggy) memory of “2012: The War for Souls” by Whitley Streiber.

Without giving too much away, I recalled a specific story about a human consciousness being enslaved in a particular way, and ChatGPT confirmed that it was included in the book. I don’t think it is hallucinating, as it denied that similar stories I derived from that memory where in the book.

> So… imagine that someone enters a kitchen, because they want to show you how to make a cup of coffee. As you watch carefully, they flick a switch on the wall. The switch looks like a light switch, but none of the lights in the kitchen turn on or off. Next, they open a cabinet and take down a mug, set it on the worktop, and then tap it twice with a teaspoon. They wait for thirty seconds, and finally they reach behind the refrigerator, where you can’t see, and pull out a different mug, this one full of fresh coffee.

> …What just happened? What was flicking the switch for? Was tapping the empty mug part of the procedure? Where did the coffee come from?

> That’s what this code is like.

I hope to never write code that warrants a description half as scathing as this one

Same experience. So much promise that the way it collapses is disappointing, almost angry-making. I even gave it a second try thinking that maybe I’d just missed something. Nope.

Antimemetics remains a top 10 all-time though.

This is one of the many things I had in mind when I mentioned in another comment that this book is a metaphor for anything and everything. I knew someone who saw it as a metaphor for dealing with their past trauma and their need to “fight a war for survival you cannot be allowed to remember you are fighting”

I’ve thought about it a lot as I’ve seen mental decline in my family too. The long goodbye. Marion Wheeler’s relationship. Beautiful.

> “fight a war for survival you cannot be allowed to remember you are fighting”

This is such a colossal mood. I have DID and it’s incredibly common for me to not remember trauma, but still somehow have to navigate life affected by it. It’s really weird how I can know exactly what not to do without even knowing that I’m avoiding something, or what it is I’m avoiding.

Somehow, I just managed to learn what SCP (0) is a couple of days ago. I’ve already started ~~stealing~~ working some of the ideas into a D&D campaign I’m running (on an improv basis.)

It’s neat to see that SCP also resulted in some… reasonably novel thinking? Thanks for sharing, I’m going to pick this up.

(0) https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

Some advice for getting into the SCP stories:

It’s worth seeking out the “top rated pages” section of the wiki, especially when you are starting out. This can help introduce you to some of the more famous SCPs that you are likely to see reference elsewhere.

On the other hand, one of the charming things about the SCP articles is just how different and weird they can be. So don’t be afraid to just read around. For example, one of my favorites is a woman who basically has a portal to an entire underground bunker in her nostrils.

The SCP wiki has resources for how to write an SCP article. A lot of these are EXCELLENT if you are interested in learning how to write weird fiction even outside of SCP (e.g. the D&D campaign you mentioned). For example, one of them discusses different ways that you can structure stories to subvert expectations.

The video game Control is not set in the SCP universe but is highly influenced by it. It’s a lot of fun.

There are a number of SCP games available on Steam. They tend to have some jank due to being fan projects. However, the end result is often very cool. In particular, many of them have procedurally generated levels which works well with the wide variety of anomalous phenomena that they can add.

I was pleasantly surprised a couple of years ago, when both my daughters were suddenly obsessed with SCPs. They were about 9 and 14 at the time, and I didn’t introduce them to the concept – they discovered it on their own.

What followed was a few weeks of me re-reading them, discovering several new offshoots of the SCP genre, and getting to discover those works for the first time with my kids.

It was an awesome experience, and something I honestly never expected to come out of a random “old Internet” meme like that. 🙂

I once tried to show a friend of mine this book on Google Read on my phone, but since it was Google Read, it did not actually display all of the titles in my library. So, the book “disappeared”.

Actual moment of panic.

Seems like a straightforward rephrasing of the classic tweet: “Kind of a bummer to have been born at the very end of the Fuck Around century just to live the rest of my life in the Find Out century.”

I don’t think it needs to relate to any _specific_ development of the recent past, which I assume is what you’re asking.

Within the 48 hours before it was posted there were only two world events of note so unless qntm saw some general article about overshoot or global crises within the few days before then it was either a statement about general vibes or in reference to one of the two events with the implication that they were indicative of broader trends.

FWIW, the two notable world events were the deployment of French troops to the French Caledonian riots and the first successful Ukrainian attack on a Russian oil export facility. Were either of them indicative of a broader destabilization? Only time will tell.

QNTM is very attune to the dystopian possibilities of future tech, obviously.

Rollercoaster is a clear give away they’re talking about future acceleration.

I’d bet it’s an ode to the possible dystopia coming with technological acceleration a la AGI.

“someone at the front of the train begins to scream”

X-Risk / “doomers”? They’re screaming first, but the rest will soon too.

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3125 contains a fun keypad to reverse engineer. I thought I could simply extract the password from the text but the author lightly obfuscated it (which makes more sense knowing that he has a programming background). I wonder what’s the intended way of finding the code — perhaps it’s in one of the later stories.

edit: Oh, I saw it right after posting the comment. It’s quite literally in front of your nose. Such a fun series.

Love this book.

It’s also one of the most genuinely scary books I’ve read. There are some scenes in this book that really are frightening.

Maybe House of Leaves is up there too.

When I finished this, I felt like I should have been taking notes as I read it.

But then, how could I be sure that the notes were trustworthy?

where is the community of people who read books like this other than HN?

I was reading this a few months ago but put it down because the language and characters clunky but I will definitely revisit it after this thread as the ideas are apparently worth it.

Besides passwords, I know EMDR is basically an attempt at an antimemetic for PTSD. However, one thing I’ve wondered about that therapy is how effective it is at also reducing the behaviors of PTSD.

I had almost total disassociative amnesia after sexual abuse by an older friend in elementary school, possibly Jr High. While I remembered the friend, I still don’t really remember the abuse and know about it until my parents warned me about this person moving back while I was in high school. However, I was still very sensitive regarding any nudity (even with sexual partners) and personal space until I spent some time with a therapist.

I think the memories of the abuse were truly gone and not repressed, recovery of repressed memories seems to be pseudoscience. However, it doesn’t seem implausible to lose only the episodic memory of the trauma.

I haven’t read the book, just the web-page. But the concept of an anti-meme reminded me of something.

The magicians Penn & Teller use this concept to keep their magic tricks safe. They’ve publicly said that most of their tricks look really impressive, but once you find out how the work you’ll be disappointed. What people want to discover is that the magic trick is really an elaborate puzzle where the viewer has just short of enough information to figure it out. The desired explanation for a trick is a hair trigger piece of information that suddenly has it all make sense. Instead the explanations are really just a long sequence of boring facts. What you see is a facade with a bunch of mundane machinery hidden away. If anyone does explain the trick then by the time they’re half way through all of the steps you’ve lost interest.

It is a play on the standard SCP term “amnestic” for a drug that erases memory.

Which only pushes your question back one level. I’ve thought the derivation of “amnestic” is somewhat questionable before too. But it established itself very early. There’s some other parts of very, very early SCP lore that are pretty questionable; flinging arbitrary numbers of the so-called “D-Class” death row inmates into the waiting maw of a cosmic horror has become fairly disfavored for a variety of reasons over time too, for instance. But it’s part of the groundwork now.