Memetic Warfare: Dangerous Memes & Fallacies

We live in times of memetic warfare. Mechanisms like authority and popularity bias, which might have been useful in earlier times, have been amplified by social media to a degree that resembles a warzone. People split into different "communities" which often live in completely different realities (e.g., in regards to COVID-19), interacting with each other not via discourse but with memetic warfare. This presentation looks at the phenomenon of memetic warfare on the meta-level and looks at some dangerous memes and fallacies in detail. Some meta-questions: - What is memetic warfare? - What does it mean for society at large and one's personal life? - How to stay sane in an insane world? Some concrete examples of memes in the "scene" we look at: - Everything has to be decentralized - The Internet will route around censorship - The market will fix it. - Bitcoin fixes this. - Just use a smart contract. - Linus's law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". We also try to classify these dangerous memes and fallacies into classes to make them easier recognizable and to develop strategies for memetic immunization.