Feeding My Ignorance

I have to admit that I 'collect' what the online world has taken to calling "memes".  Now I have been collecting them since before they were called that (I think) - certainly before it was part of popular usage - when they were 'merely' aphorisms.  (and yes - I do realise that in the accepted sense "memes" are more than 'just' "aphorisms")

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This note was spawned due to a particular one that popped up on my LinkedIn feed the other day - and, to be honest, although it was described as a "meme" by a number of those who responded, I do not really think it qualifies as one!!  Rather, it asked a simple question - "if you could remove one thing from the world, what would it be?".

The responses were interesting.  At the time that I viewed them there were nearly 200 and an impressive 7% of those were of the form "things like this meme on should not be on LinkedIn"!  This got me thinking.

First of all, those responding clearly felt that such posts were 'inappropriate' or possibly just "a waste of time" - which is fine, they are entitled to that opinion - but if that is the case surely the obvious thing to do is NOT respond, since that both feeds the problem by making it seem more popular and also (presumably) wastes some more of their time making the comment!  Is this not just a little hypocritical?

Here we have intelligent people acting in a way that exhibits a certain amount of "irrationality".  Their filters have picked up something that they see as a "mis-use" of the technology, they respond by (effectively) asking the original author to be "more careful" in future - which is a pretty altruistic thing to do - on the face of it.  Unfortunately they choose to do so in a way that causes more people to waste more time. (as those who see the post as "wrong" not only have to ignore the original post, but now also have to ignore the "corrective" response)

OK - so this is a VERY trivial point - but there is a more important lesson.  It is very easy to be trapped into behaviours that would - under normal circumstances - be seen as 'wrong' or 'inappropriate' or just downright 'stupid'.  There are a lot of ways in which this might manifest itself, but often the trigger is something which itself could be classified as 'wrong' or 'inappropriate' or just downright 'stupid'.

Getting to the positives, the other responses were a very interesting mix.  Just over 25% were what I would lump together as "the big problems" - such as hatred, greed, poverty, disease, evil.  A further 10% or so were "humourous"!!

The remainder - over 50% - were, on the whole "one off" responses (although I did include ignorance, stupidity and religion in this group - each of which had a few responses) most of which you would get pretty universal agreement that they were things that we would be better off without - although I am not so sure about the couple of responses that suggested that the human race is what needs to go.

What are the lessons to be learned - well there is broad agreement on a number of things that ought to be removed and there are a large number of things that 'annoy' individuals - some of those were "tongue in cheek" responses which would probably be traded of for one of the "big problems" if the opportunity arose - others were, perhaps, smaller problems that might be easier to achieve - however although perhaps easier to eradicate than "evil" might be, most of those listed would prove almost as difficult.

One thing that was common to everything in the list was that there were no "easy answers" about how we might get rid of them.  From the trivial to the profound all of these things were pretty deeply rooted in the world as it is now and 'eradication' isn't likely.  So - should we concentrate purely on what we think we can change - or should we aim for the ultimate successes such as the elimination of all wars?

That well known source of all knowledge - "gut-feel" - tells me that we should compromise - go for "reduction" rather than elimination - but perhaps, for some things, dream of extinction.

As this is about memes, I will close with one of my recent favourites :

There are two rules for success...
1) Never reveal everything you know