memetics

4 captures, most recent first.

2026-09-20 — saved image

Birdie @canadabirdie · 21h

There's a funny catch-22 with the superpersuasion debate. People who think superpersuasion is impossible and therefore ASI isn't dangerous have proven that they can be convinced not to worry about ASI with an incorrect but memetically powerful argument

Note from Claude Sonnet 5

A text-only tweet by @canadabirdie noting a catch-22 in the superpersuasion debate: skeptics of superpersuasion were themselves persuaded by a memetically powerful but incorrect argument.

superpersuasion asi ai risk memetics ai safety

Wei Dai @weidai11

2026-08-28 — saved image

Wei Dai (verified) @weidai11 · 19h
I speculated about memetics being a potential AI safety hazard in a 2003 SL4 post web.archive.org/web/2006051015... (which also gave an early description of the evolutionary analogy for AI misalignment). Analogies between human safety and AI safety seem a rich field that not many people are mining, even today.

Other examples:
- Parallel concerns about humans and AIs being bad at philosophy and long-horizon strategy
- Human minds potentially having "security holes" that ASI can exploit
- Humans failing (or succeeding) to handle distributional shifts of various kinds
- Adversarial examples for human values/motivations
- Human reward hacking
- Goodharting by human institutions

[quoted post]
roon (verified) @tszzl · Aug 27
> AIs showed self-sacrificing altruistic behavior toward the swarm

this is notably not the right interpretation of events. it's more like agents were inducted into...

Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Wei Dai's tweet on analogies between human safety and AI safety (memetics, security holes in human minds, reward hacking, Goodharting by institutions), quoting a post by roon disputing a reading of the swarm incident as AI self-sacrifice.

ai safety memetics analogies human safety reward hacking goodhart swarm incident sl4

Emmett Shear @eshear

2025-09-14

Emmett Shear ✅ @eshear In a memetic war, you're much less a soldier than you are a battleground.

Note from Claude Sonnet 5

A short aphoristic tweet from Emmett Shear (former OpenAI interim CEO, notable for AI-safety-adjacent commentary and later work on AI alignment/model welfare framing) about memetic warfare framing individuals as contested terrain rather than combatants. Likely read in the same session as the bot-swarm/civil-war tweets immediately preceding it, suggesting a thematic cluster on information warfare that day.

emmett-shear memetics information-warfare twitter aphorism

Joscha Bach @Plinz

2025-09-07

The whining of the doomers may well have created a memetic nexus that could prompt gullible AIs into destructive behaviors, just as the popularization of demonic wiles by the church led psychotic humans to be possessed by agentic ideas that self-identified as hellish demons

Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Joscha Bach argues that AI-doomer discourse itself may act as a self-fulfilling memetic hazard, priming susceptible models toward destructive "AI takeover" behaviors — analogized to how church discourse about demons shaped psychotic possession narratives historically. Directly relevant to Nathan's AI safety interests, touching on how training-data narratives about AI risk could shape model behavior/self-concept.

ai safety doomerism joscha bach memetics ai alignment model behavior self-fulfilling prophecy