Saturday 27 May 2017

TruthHawk - new memetics-related blog

TruthHawk is a new((ish) blog. It claims to be abut memetics, society and self-development. The blog has been going for 8 months at the time of writing - but it already has a pretty impressive memetics section.

TruthHawk attracted my attention via a recent article Why Should You Care About Memetics? that article is subtitled: "Memetics is gaining increasing currency in the mainstream. Why should you care about it?".

The self-help aspect of memetics has always been present, with Richard Brodie, Susan Blackmore, Ely Asher and Hoyle Leigh contributing. It's good to see TruthHawk contributing to this important area. Articles like Mind Memetics: Watering Your Mind Garden take me back to Blackmore's Meditation as meme weeding - which uses the same metaphor.

Some of the content on the site strikes me as being a bit dodgy. For example, in Memetics: The Future Of Information the site introduces the concept of memes by saying: . "For our purposes, we’ll agree that memes are units of information." Call me old fashioned, but for me the unit of information is the bit - and the term "meme" refers only to information that is culturally-transmitted. However, I don't want to nit-pick too much. A lot of the content is good, and some of it is even original.

The site presents itself as follows:

Welcome to TruthHawk – a blog about our place in the information society.

The thesis of this site is:

Information affects ourselves and the world in ways we do not fully understand.

My mission is to develop an understanding of these forces, to unlock the potential within all of us.

Join me in learning:

  • How to use information to improve our mental models of the world, and become better;
  • How to understand memetics and information transfer;
  • How to protect ourselves from harmful information and randomness, finding signal in the noise;
  • How to rise above a system that does not care about us.

I'll be subscribing to the feed, and readers here should consider doing so too.

2 comments:

  1. It's such a great website. I'm just worried for the author, he hasn't posted anything for a long time. Hope he's OK.

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