How does the mind virus really work?
As they say, actions speak louder than words. And once you've been infected with the slippery words of a misinformationist, it doesn't really mean anything until you act in accordance with those words. The problem is that it's usually not something you do knowingly. It's insidious, because it first becomes a belief, and beliefs are not something we think about too much, in fact, much of our beliefs are unknown to us. You can ask someone about their beliefs, and get a bunch of answers, and then watch that person over time, watching what they do, watching their actions, not their thoughts and not the words they use, but their actions, and in the end you will get a different picture of who that person is and what they believe in.
A really sneaky way this is done is in the field of racial bias, where you give people a screensplash of both profile pictures and positive-negative words like good-bad or happy-sad, and ask them to sort the words into positive-negative categories but while looking at supposedly unrelated face images. The trick isn't about getting them to accidentally say that [blank] people are scary or whatever, it's to measure in microseconds the delay in categorizing a "good" word while looking at a "bad" face. (Probably easiest to call it a "response-time metric", maybe even a response-time differential.) Using this trick to support something about race-based policies and laws has become too political to be useful for those purposes, and somebody probably doesn't like associating these response-time differences with the actual beliefs of a person, but the revelation that we are likely unaware of many of our beliefs is hard to resist.
All this to say the nexus point that connects our ideas, taken from other people, into behaviors that can then be measured as health outcomes, for example, or socioeconomic status more generally, is for ideas that manifest as behaviors. Because it is through this line that we can connect things like the people you hang out with and the amount of A1C floating in your blood. Recall a TED Talk circa 2013 suggesting obesity is contagious - are we unwittingly infecting our friends with our "obese microbiome"? No, we're infecting them with the idea that bagels and beer for breakfast is great. So, via a memetic framework, is obesity using us to spread itself through the human population via things like beer and couches, or the greater TV Dinner Megaplex? Or are couches and third-party food-delivery services spreading themselves through the population via obesity? (Because the heavier you get, the harder it is to get out the door, thus the more likely you are to have your food delivered)?
This idea becomes a lot harder to parse when you consider that infectious disease, by its nature, is spread through a social network, which is the same network that spreads memetic viruses:
Social connections are key to preventing disease, study finds
Feb 2025, phys.org
Other people's ideas prompt behaviors that can have serious health outcomes, and so it almost looks like a social network transmits the disease itself, but it's just the behaviors, the culture, the extended phenotype of you will...
Their study—which focused on malaria prevention in ten villages in India—looked at how different factors influence people's use of preventative measures like bed nets, insect repellent and protective clothing. It involved detailed interviews with over 1,500 adults, gathering information about their health practices and social networks, and found that exposure to preventative behaviors within someone's social network is the main factor influencing whether they adopt those same behaviors—in other words, if your friends and family use insect repellents, you are much more likely to use them yourself.
Funny because so much infectious disease is spread by the social network. (This study looks at malaria.)
via University of Manchester, University of Birmingham, NYU and the Indian Institute of Public Health: András Vörös et al, A multilevel social network approach to studying multiple disease-prevention behaviors, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-85240-7
Mostly completely unrelated image credit: AI Art - Dad Energy - 2024 - but the world needs to know - how did Mark Zuckerburg get in there bottom right??
US health department condemns private equity firms for role in declining healthcare access
Feb 2025, The Guardian
Just virus-like things in general:
“[Private equity investors] don’t announce that they’ve acquired something. They often keep the old name of the firm. They’re like a brain virus or a cancer inside the body of this new firm. It doesn’t announce itself until it gets very late,” said Martin Kenney, senior project director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy and author of Private Equity and the Demise of the Local.
Activity Update on the Mind Control Machine:
Propaganda outlet leverages AI to amplify content without any loss in persuasive power
Apr 2025, phys.org
Morgan Wack and colleagues found that prior to September 20, 2023, much of the content on the site was simply lifted from other right-leaning outlets. After that date, however, the stories were generally rewritten by AI, allowing the site to use a broader range of sources but with the tone and emphasis tweaked to better suit likely aims of the propagandists.
DCWeekly.org is a Russian propaganda outlet and part of a broader network disseminating pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian narratives. Authors examined 22,889 articles on the site before and after the September 2023 shift. AI allowed the propagandists behind the site to more than double their rate of publication and increase in the breadth of topics covered.
Authors also conducted a survey of 880 American adults and found that the content maintained the same level of persuasiveness.
via BBC and Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub: Morgan Wack et al, Generative propaganda: Evidence of AI's impact from a state-backed disinformation campaign, PNAS Nexus (2025). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf083
