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2026-05-28

The core of memetics versus scaling what works

Disclaimer

• target audience - honestly this writing is 75% aimed at myself, I want to understand this question better
• I suck at politics based on lots of empirical evidence, take all my opinions with a big grain of salt.
• Contains politically sensitive info

Summary

• The core of memetics
  • What?
    • Ideally you should "create something so good that people spontaneously tell their friends about it." This is the core of memetics.
  • How?
    • Create a new religion or political ideology - Most ambitious thing a human being can possibly do, but extremely hard and probably extremely slow to both create and spread
    • Create a mutation of an existing religion or political ideology, such that it also takes a stance on ASI risk - Very ambitious and hard, but could be worth doing
    • Become a politician for an existing ideology, do not convince people of anything new, but also take a stance on ASI risk, and address people's immediate job or relationship related suffering - Hard, but it helps if you are already powerful, otherwise grind on social media first
    • Create some content (such as music, art, etc) that spreads virally, but also has ASI risk content as a trojan payload.
• Scaling what works
  • What?
    • This only adds fuel to the fire after someone else has already figured out core memetics for some target audience.
    • For instance Yudkowsky has figured out core memetics for young atheist technical nerds without a locked in life path and with atleast existentialist experience. Hence you can just spam Yudkowsky's ideology at more people in a similar bracket, atleast some fraction of them will get convinced. You can do billboard ads or protests outside QS ranked colleges, you can run social media ads on the university club's websites and so on.
    • If you attempting scaling to new audiences without solving core memetics for that audience first, results seem quite unpredictable to me. It can work or it can backfire in all sorts of interesting ways.
  • How?
    • Cold emails, Social media ads, Social media reply guy (or automated reply guy), Signed petitions, In-person protests, In-person protests then spread over social media, Billboard ads
    • Track open rates, collect good data, once we have good data we will know which of these is most effective.

Main

• In my heads, memetics is divided into two brackets - core memetics and scaling what already works.
• Why do I believe this distinction exists?
  • I am an almost religious believer in Paul Graham's maxim - "Build a product so good people spontaneously tell their friends about it."
  • I also think this straightforwardly applies to creating content of any sort (videos, blogs, music, etc.)
  • MrBeast agrees with me. If your content is good enough that people spontaneously tell their friends about it, you won't need to spend on any ads or protests or anything, it will virally spread on its own.
• The core of memetics
  • The most ambitious way of doing core memetics is to literally invent a religion, thereby becoming a God yourself.
    • Create an ideology as influential as Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha or Ram did.
    • You will have to unite the core of all the positions on the MtG colour wheel. See also: MtG colour wheel applied to politics
    • You will have to take a consistent position on all the topics of social dark matter and all the myriad intersections of all these topics. These topics include sex, family/relationships, death, physical and mental health (substance abuse), money, politics and so on.
    • All your positions will have to be consistent with each other over hundreds of millions of people applying them (and misapplying them) in a vast variety of different circumstances, and yet neither the people nor the ideas should self-terminate.
    • Converting people to your ideology will probably be slow if it requires people to detach from their family / friends / etc to join your religion. Most traditional religions literally took literal centuries to spread to where they are now. ASI might be here first.
    • (I am not 100% sure on this point though, I don't know what would have happened if there existed internet access when any of these traditional religions was started, would they have spread faster?)
    • See also: Why I am not currently starting a religion around ASI or similar topics
    • About my stance here as of 2026-05
      • I am personally not this ambitious, and I have no time to attempt a problem this ambitious, and I am not convinced I have a good fit for it anyway, although I'm less sure about the last part.
  • The slightly less ambitious (but still extremely ambitious) way is to target an existing religious or political demographic, but also actually persuade them about ASI risk.
    • Every religious or political demographic has some sacred values or beliefs. Do not directly attack any of these beliefs. For instance christians have sacred beliefs around marriage. Atheist libertarians have sacred beliefs around guns and privacy. And so on.
    • Figure out a way to mutate any of these political ideologies to capture any of these demographics. For instance you could figure out an anti-ASI flavoured version of christianity or an anti-ASI flavoured version of leftism or an anti-ASI flavoured version of communism.
    • Only someone who actually truly believes the ideology will be able to spread it to hundreds of millions of people. If you are not actually a communist, it is extremely difficult to get millions of communists to listen to you. (There are some people who are capable of successfully lying this well, but most people are not.)
    • If you are not a communist for instance, but you want to reach communist audience, your best bet is to probably find someone else in your immediate network who is good at persuasion and a communist, and help them get good at persuading larger audiences.
  • The slightly less ambitious (but still extremely ambitious) way is to do all sorts of political fuckery that runs most govts of the world most of the time.
    • Don't try to persuade anyone of anything. Just act as the spokesperson for the things that some demographic already believes, and become a politician.
    • You can target people who are suffering due to job loss or relationship loss or similar, and help ameliorate these problems (or pretend to, but don't actually solve anything).
    • You can try to merge various single-voter blocs.
    • You can make deals (aka bribes) with businessmen and intelligence community members and media houses and social media channels.
    • If you are running for politics in this way, it is possible you don't have to create all that much ideology, but you mostly need to sell yourself.
    • If you aren't already powerful to begin with, your way to do this is probably still a social media channel (and maybe also do protests). Become a political youtuber targeted at a specific political demographic.
    • Social media channel is not the only route to political power. For instance, in many countries you can first become a filmstar or sportsperson or similar, then transition to politics.
    • About my stance as of 2026-05
      • I think my plan around cyberattacks falls into the same category of political fuckery as everything listed above. See also: I am looking for a cofounder to cyberattack the US govt and US AI companies
  • The slightly less ambitious (but still extremely ambitious) way is to create something so good that people tell their friends about it, that is not about ASI risk, but also contains an ASI risk payload.
    • For example, create music or create art or create a movie or similar.
    • The primary reason people are watching this content may not be anything to do with AI.
    • But if they watch it, some of them might also get redirected to watching content about ASI risk.
    • For example, some of Grimes' recent music videos fall into this category for me.
• Scaling what works
  • If you are working on anything else, this probably already means you are doing the less ambitious thing. The ambitious thing is to "create something so good people spontaneously tell their friends about it." Anything else is less ambitious.
  • Adding ads is fuel to the fire only after you have something that already scales.
  • Even if you can wish a magic genie to drop a copy of Yudkowsky's IABIED to the doorstep of every person on Earth, this would not in fact be sufficient to get an AI pause tomorrow. IABIED is not memetic enough to reach billions of people.
  • People are attempting a long list of things that in my head fall into the category of "scaling what works"
    • Cold emails
    • Social media ads
    • Social media reply guy (or automated reply guy)
    • Signed petitions
    • In-person protests
    • In-person protests then spread over social media
    • Billboard ads
  • If you are aiming these at a target audience on which persuasion already works (i.e. someone else has already made a dent into "core memetics"), then all of the above strategies add fuel to the fire.
    • As of 2026-05, anti-ASI persuasion is primarily working on young atheist technical nerds who aren't locked into a career path yet.
    • This means your cold emails and social media ads and social media replies and signed petitions and in-person protests and billboard ads and so on, should be aimed at young atheist technical nerds who aren't locked into a career path yet.
  • If you are aiming these at a target audience on which core memetics does not work yet, then the results are a lot more unpredictable, atleast to me.
    • You can inform people of all sorts of demographics that you (and many others) have your beliefs around ASI risk, but this alone is not enough to persuade them that your beliefs are right, or that your proposed political leaders are worth voting for.
    • If they don't have strong beliefs on ASI risk to begin with (and also don't strongly defer to someone with strong beliefs on ASI risk, either positive or negative), maybe you can persuade them via groupthink alone.
    • If they do in fact have strong beliefs on ASI risk (or defer strongly to someone with strong beliefs on ASI risk, either positive or negative), then this alone won't work. You have to go back to core memetics to actually get these people, spending more on ads and protests won't be enough.
  • I have noticed there is this concept called "open rate" which is common across all of these methods.
    • Open rate is what fraction of people saw your message/ad/protest/petition/etc, versus what fraction of people actually liked it.
    • If you understand your exact target audience very precisely, you can increase your open rate. For instance if you know that NeurIPS people who have already previously attended a MIRI talk are more likely to receive further messaging, then maybe you can just cold email these specific people and get a high open rate. If you instead cold email thousands of university students, you will get a much lower open rate.
    • I totally think protests and billboards also have an "open rate", this concept is not reserved for cold emails. For social media ads, this is called a "clickthrough rate."
    • If you understand which physical spots your target audience visits, you can organise protests or pay for billboard ads at those specific spots, thereby increasing your open rate there. If you understand which websites and channels and tags and similar your target audience visits, you can pay for social media ads or do cold emails, thereby increasing your open rate there.
    • If your target audience is young atheist technical high IQ nerds without locked life path and atleast one existentialist experience, then some good protest and billboard ad spots are just literaly outside various top QS ranking colleges, some good websites are the websites of whatever university clubs these people visit and so on.
    • I have not measured open rates very precisely, I have a bit of an intuitive sense for it. Once enough people are doing enough stuff, I think collecting stats on this is worthwhile. If you eventually have enough stats, you can also find out which of these strategies is most effective instead of brute forcing all of them.
    • Delayed feedback loop is another challenge in tracking this stuff. Someone who saw your protest today may only end up convinced and switch their life path towards an AI pause one year. Repeated messaging helps with persuasion. People chew through ideas slowly, and especially so if those ideas involve the core of memetics (i.e. overturning a previously cherished belief of theirs).

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