It Doesn't. All people are naturally born to be a little bit nutty.
I just finished watching the six-part HBO documentary Q:Into the Storm, and it really helped to confirm my hunch that all people are naturally born to be a little bit nutty. In my last posting, Advanced AI Will Need Advanced Hardware, I proposed that Noam Chomsky's speculation in 1957 that all humans are naturally born with an innate ability to speak and understand languages was the hardware breakthrough in the human brain that allowed the memes to become the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. Again, in softwarephysics, it's all about the interactions of various forms of self-replicating information in action, with software now rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. For more on that see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information.
In my last posting, Advanced AI Will Need Advanced Hardware, I also noted that the early memes could certainly spread from human Mind to human Mind by simply imitating the actions of others. For example, you can easily teach someone how to make a flint flake tool by showing them how to do so. However, the ability to speak and understand a language greatly improved the ability of memes to spread from Mind to Mind and oral histories even allowed memes to pass down through the generations. Spoken languages then allowed for the rise of reading and writing which further enhanced the durability of memes. The rise of social media software has now further enhanced the replication of memes and the memes and software have now forged a very powerful parasitic/symbiotic relationship to promote their joint survival. The truly wacky memes like QAnon that we now find propagating in a viral manner on social media software certainly attest to this.
For more on how the memes are now the dominant form of self-replicating information on the Earth watch Susan Blackmore's brilliant TED presentation at:
Memes and "temes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes
Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge.
But it was the development of spoken languages, reading, writing, and now social media software that also greatly enhanced the ability of false memes to propagate. For example, as I pointed out, it is very easy to teach somebody how to make a flint flake tool by example. But how about teaching somebody how to levitate a heavy boulder by magic? Now a skilled magician can certainly demonstrate the levitation of a heavy boulder by magic. But could he also show you how to do the same? Not without also revealing how the trick was actually performed and that would soon put an end to the magic. However, someone could then tell others about the magical person with a cosmic force that can easily lift heavy boulders and trick many into believing that it was so. We certainly have seen that happen many times throughout all of human history. For example, in The Great War That Will Not End we saw how the inhabitants of the entire planet were able to fool themselves into fighting World War I for apparently no particular reason at all. In The Danger of Believing in Things, we saw that false memes tend to spread because many false memes are quite appealing. We all know that when in flake tool school, spreading the latest tribal gossip about a fellow student is much more fun than paying attention to the instructor.
But the main reason that false memes spread so easily stems from the fact that much of human thought is seriously deficient in rigor because it is largely based upon believing in things and therefore is non-critical in nature. It seems that as human beings we just tend to not question our own belief systems or the belief systems that are imposed upon us by the authorities we have grown up with. Instead, we tend to seek out people who validate our own belief systems and to just adapt as best we can to the belief systems that are imposed upon us. This failure in critical thinking arose primarily because our minds are infected with memes that are forms of self-replicating information bent on replicating at all costs, and as Susan Blackmore pointed out in The Meme Machine (1999), we are not so much thinking machines as we are copying machines. Susan Blackmore maintains that memetic-drive was responsible for creating our extremely large brains, and also our languages and cultures as well, in order to store and spread memes more effectively. So our minds evolved to believe in things, which many times is quite useful but sometimes is not. So the ability of parasitic false memes to quickly spread should just be seen as an undesirable side effect of having the ability to spread useful memes. The problem throughout human history has always been that it has never been easy to tell the difference.
One way to remove false memes from your political worldview is to use the Scientific Method that I outlined in How To Think Like A Scientist. Galileo pointed out that the truth is not afraid of scrutiny, the more you pound on the truth, the more you confirm its validity. False memes do not stand up well to close scrutiny as I described in The Danger of Believing in Things.
Figure 1 – Beware of the memes lurking within your Mind. Many of them are demonstrably false if you only take the time to disprove them. As Richard Feynman explained, "The most important thing is to not fool yourself because you are the easiest one to fool."
With that said, I was totally expecting that Q:Into the Storm would describe the many bizarre memes of the QAnon movement and its followers. But I was mostly wrong. Instead, Q:Into the Storm mainly focused on the typical human squabbles that happen between the creator and Admins of the 8CHAN message board software that Q dropped his/her posts on and was also about trying to figure out who Q actually was. This brought to mind my very own first experience with social media software back in the 1980s.
My First Experience With Social Media Software
In 1985, I was in the Applications Development group of the Amoco IT department that actually supported the software used by the Amoco IT department itself. I was mainly writing interactive software that ran on Amoco's VM/CMS Corporate Time Share system. The VM/CMS Corporate Time Share system was an early form of Cloud Computing running on Amoco's simulated "Internet" of 31 interconnected VM/CMS datacenters. This network of 31 VM/CMS datacenters was called the Corporate Timeshare System and allowed end-users to communicate with each other around the world using an office system that Amoco developed in the late 1970s at the Tulsa Research Center called PROFS (Professional Office System). PROFS had email, calendaring and document sharing software that later IBM sold as a product called OfficeVision. Amoco had 40,000 employees at the time and each employee had their own virtual machine with 1 MB of virtual memory and as much virtual disk space as they wanted. For example, my VM machine was called ZSCJ03, and I had 3 MB of virtual memory because I was a programmer. The Amoco Helpdesk could set up a new VM machine with 1 MB of virtual memory for a new employee while they were on the phone and allow the new VM to connect to all of the corporate software running on the Corporate Timeshare System. This was at a time when some users also had an Intel 80-286 PC running at 6 MHz with 640 KB of memory running Microsoft-DOS and a 20 MB hard disk that cost about $1600 at the time - about $3,800 in 2021 dollars! But most employees used their PCs to run IBM 3278 terminal emulation software to continue to connect to the VM/CMS Corporate Time Share system to use PROFS and other VM/CMS corporate software.
One day, my boss called me into his office and explained that the Tulsa Research Center was using some home-grown software to help researchers collaborate. The software was called the Tulsa Research Bulletin Board - TRBB. It was a very simple application running on the Tulsa Research VM/CMS datacenter. There was a central TRBB VM machine with a "hot" READER. Users could SHARE TRBB from their personal VM machine and then see a bunch of "threads". Any researcher could start up a new thread from their personal VM machine and then have the TRBB software PUNCH the new thread to the hot READER of the TRBB VM machine. The TRBB software then would read in the file for the new thread and update some sequential index files too. Other researchers could then create "posts" for the new thread and also "replies" to existing "posts" on the thread. Sound familiar? Well in 1985 this was some pretty neat software. The TRBB software consisted of a number of small REXX programs and a large number of sequential files storing threads, posts and replies and sequential index files to tie them all together.
My boss then explained that Amoco IT Management wanted to create a similar bulletin board for the IT department and put it on the CTSVMD VM/CMS node of the Corporate Timeshare System that the IT department used to develop and run software. I was given the job to install the software on CTSVMD and run the bulletin board. So I made contact with the support group for the TRBB and had them PUNCH the REXX programs to a new VM service machine called BBOARD running on the CTSVMD VM/CMS node in the Corporate Timeshare System. Amoco IT Management also gave me a list of initial threads to start up BBOARD with, and I did so by using the BBOARD software from my ZSCJ03 VM machine on CTSVMD. An article was written for the Amoco Visions magazine that was delivered to all members of the IT Department each month. The article described the purpose of BBOARD and how to use BBOARD to help other IT workers to do their jobs better.
The BBOARD launch went quite smoothly and Amoco IT Management had high hopes that BBOARD would be as successful as the TRBB had been for the Tulsa Research Center. And initially, there was a flurry of BBOARD usage by the IT Department. But then the BBOARD usage dropped significantly. Meanwhile, I had a large number of other VM/CMS applications that I was supporting at the time, and I was also developing and promoting BSDE. BSDE was an early IDE that ran on VM/CMS and grew applications from embryos in a biological manner. For more on BSDE see the last part of Programming Biology in the Biological Computation Group of Microsoft Research.
The BBOARD software worked so well that it never went down. It just kept chugging along for many months on its own, and because BBOARD was so trouble-free, I really never paid much attention to it. Then one day my boss got a PROFS email from one of the other IT Department Managers complaining about BBOARD. This was nothing new because the Amoco IT Department was our only user community and he frequently received complaints about the software that our group was supporting. Usually, the complaints were about the software being down or malfunctioning in some way, but this PROFS email was different. This PROFS email was complaining about the content that was on certain threads on the BBOARD and not about the way that the BBOARD software itself was behaving. This was a rather new experience for us, so my boss had me check it out. So I went into BBOARD from my personal ZSCJ03 VM ID to take a look at the threads. Sure enough, I found the initial threads on the BBOARD that I had opened at the request of IT Management, but I also found a large number of really wacky threads that contained very strange posts and replies. Some of the threads were on hobbies like cooking and gardening. Others were on things like home and car repair and even national politics. Worst of all, some were even on the way that Amoco IT Management ran the IT Department! I was shocked by the blatantly extreme content in the posts and replies under those threads. I was also a bit frightened by the extreme content.
Now I ended up working for Amoco for about 21 years, and during those 21 years, I found that Amoco was a really great company to work for and was generally ahead of its time when it came to IT technology and general business practices too. But most corporations in the 1980s still operated using the corporate Command and Control Management Methodologies first developed by corporations back in the 1950s and Amoco was no exception. The Command and Control Management Methodologies of the 1950s were actually patterned after the military management theories of the 1940s that were used to win World War II, and since most American business managers in the 1950s were also veterans of World War II, it all made sense at the time.
But by the 1980s, this meant that most American corporations were then saddled with the heavy-handed management structure and processes of the Stalinist Soviet Union! One of the downsides of the Command and Control Management Methodology is that nobody is allowed to make a mistake. That is because if you are truly doing your job properly, you are effectively controlling all things in the Universe that could possibly affect your job performance. That means that if anything goes wrong, it is your fault. So I was pretty upset at the time. After all, I was just a programmer supporting the BBOARD software. Now people were turning to me and expecting me to be responsible for the wacky content that others in the IT Department were posting on threads and responding to! I felt that I could argue that monitoring the content on the BBOARD was not my responsibility because I was just a programmer supporting the BBOARD software. But I knew that under the Command and Control Management Methodology, somebody had to be blamed and severely dealt with, and, unfortunately, I was the only support person for the BBOARD.
So I called my IT contacts back at the Tulsa Research Center and asked them if they had seen the same thing. They told me that they also had a lot of extreme threads on the TRBB but not to worry about it. They called the extreme content on such threads "flaming" and "flaming" was just seen as an unwanted byproduct of having free speech on the TRBB. So my boss and I decided to spin the "flaming" on the BBOARD as a good thing and not a bad thing to upper IT Management. We explained that it was a way for employees to blow off steam and also allowed IT Management to see what members in the IT Department were actually thinking about. After that, IT Management actually spent a great deal of time reading the extreme content on the BBOARD and did not interfere with the BBOARD at all. After all, everybody has more fun reading about the latest tribal gossip than actually doing their job.
Déjà vu All Over Again
The HBO documentary Q:Into the Storm brought back all of these old memories about message boards and corporate politics from the 1980s that I had not thought about for many years. But little did I know at the time that some mysterious guy known as Q would help to incite an insurrection against the United States of America in 2021 simply by posting similarly wacky posts on the 8CHAN message board. To me, the vague Q posts on 8CHAN seem very much like the vague posts made by Nostradamus (1503 - 1566) in his 1555 work The Prophecies.
Figure 2 – During the Rebellion of 2021 the Capital Building of the United States of America was breached for the first time by domestic insurrectionists.
Figure 3 – The 2021 insurrectionists desecrated many symbols of American democracy.
Figure 4 – The QAnon Shaman and other insurrectionists managed to reach the floor of the Senate Chamber.
Figure 5 – The QAnon movement is a good example of the innate nuttiness of the human Mind.
Conclusion
Many Q followers assign to him the magical gift of political prophecy. Strangely, scientists actually can predict the future for simple linear systems like the movement of objects in the Solar System - see SpaceEngine - the Very Finest Available in 3-D Astronomical Simulation Software for more on that. But scientists also know that it is impossible to predict the highly nonlinear behaviors found in the political activities of the real world of human affairs - see Software Chaos for more on that. As I mentioned in many previous posts, I now only have confidence in science and mathematics. All other forms of human thought seem to be hopelessly flawed by confirmation bias. But even with all that, I am still amazed by the extent to which many in the United States now seem to have lost touch with the 18th century Enlightenment and the 17th century Scientific Revolution which brought forth the political value of evidence-based rational thought that made the United States possible.
Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
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