memetics — Timeline

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