Disinfect Your Mind

This blog has moved to the new home

2006-09-10T16:32:00.000-07:00

The previous location at http://mindviruses.blogspot.com/ will be still around, but new posts will go here, to http://www.disinfectyourmind.com/articles/. The change was needed for quite a bit, but I simply did not have a time to do that. Now, I will get blog articles on the same spot as the information on the book and other materials. I am also moving from Blogger to WordPress: first, it cuts a dependency on a free service, an existence of which is hard to predict and control, and the blog gets categories and RSS feed for anybody interested. Unfortunately, I was not able to migrate the comments, but hopefully, you will fix that soon :-). Hope to see you there!

The Thyroid Diet by Mary J. Shomon

2006-07-30T18:51:00.000-07:00

The Thyroid Diet: Manage Your Metabolism for Lasting Weight Loss by Mary J. Shomon – ISBN 0-06-0524444-8 It’s annoying how many authors repeat all the same sins again and again with – I assume, it’s possible – genuine good intentions, especially in the area of self-help health books. This particular book talks about how thyroid problems – that is problems with a small gland that depends on iodine and produces some critical hormones in our bodies – can result in overweight and a lot of accompanying problems. While the main premise of the book is likely to be true (I actually believe it, but as I am not a physician and expert in hormonal therapies, I’d rather pass the judgment to somebody more qualified), the book itself commits every typical memetic crime against your minds that so many health books do. First, it starts with scary stories allowing the reader to identify her/himself with the subject of the book. To make it more convincing, a little self-diagnose intro is placed right after that with usual bows toward laws restricting such practices like “you could have…” or “you may want to talk to your physician if…”, in this case “The risk of developing thyroid problem is greatest if:” Now, what ‘if’s are we talking about? Let me give you just a couple of examples:

If you are or were a smoker. (Yeah, who weren’t?)
If you have had a stomach infection or food poisoning… (Show me one person who never had a food poisoning…)
If you use fluoridated water… (That’s majority of US population.)
If you’ve been exposed to certain chemicals (e.g., perchlorate)… (That’s the rest of US population who have their water treated with chlorine instead of fluoride.)
…

You see? It’s cover-all list. That’s not a really helpful list of hints, that’s simply a memetic sales-weapon targeting every potential buyer who may go through the pages. And once she starts to give symptoms… oh, mine… Quote (again, just a few of them with my comments in italic):

You may be hypothyroid if
You are extremely exhausted and fatigued (with people working 10+ hours a day, who does not?)
You feel depressed, moody, and/or sad (economy and gas prices help this a lot, and, God forbid, don’t listen to blues…)
You’ve lost hair… (right, cover all bold guys and women with long hair)
You have an abnormally low sex drive (sure, who does not want more of that?)

You see? She basically tried every anchor in the book to get you on board. I don’t like such behavior, but I cannot blame her either, since there is a lot of people who cannot recognize these techniques and provide a commercial justification for such practices. Don’t forget, memetic environment is evolutionary, and every evolutionary environment has a co-evolution of hosts and parasites. Don’t blame a flu virus, just wash your hands, use a face mask, beef up your immune system and don’t show up on work, if you still got a flu. Same here, with mind viruses. Beef up your mind’s immune system and notice when you are sneezed on from the pages of the next health book.

Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain by Ron Hale-Evans

2006-06-04T02:24:00.000-07:00

Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain by Ron Hale-Evans, ISBN 0-596-10153-8 If you already read my book Disinfect Your Mind, some parts may look familiar to you. For example:

Hack #11: Psychologist George A. Miller concluded in a classic 1956 experimental survey that human short-term memory can hold only seven items at a time plus or minus two.

Actually, as this book notes, recent research suggests the magic number may be even lower – students at the University of Queensland did not perform better than a chance when analyzing statistical dependence between five variables ([2]), and even with four they performed much worse than with two or three. Although, IMHO, some systematic factor may be in place. E.g. ancient Romans with their lead pipes probably would have performed poorer compare to their countryside counterparts. Today it could be a widespread of soda and hamburgers, drugs in schools or even cultural changes. Of course, it’s merely speculation which is very hard to prove and hence, if it’s true, even harder to get rid of. [1] Miller, George A. 1956 “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” The Psychological Review, 63. http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html [2] Halford, Graeme S., Rosemary Baker, Julie E. McCredden, and John D. Bain. “How Many Variables Can Humans Process?” (January 2005). Psychological Science. Abstract at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-03/aps-hmc030805.php

Conspiracy Bridge

2006-05-07T23:25:00.000-07:00

In my book “Disinfect Your Mind” I wrote that there is no sense to build long bridges, as it takes too much effort and time. However, there are no rules without exceptions, and I’d like to talk about one such exception today. Let me remind first, what a bridge is. We all have a number of anchors embedded into our minds. Anchors normally have preprogrammed reactions, like food and sex are good, while death and sickness are bad. Not that they cannot be overridden or slanted in some way, but normally they are there. Once you can link something to an anchor, you get the reaction for the anchor. Say, slogan “Pepsi is cool” links a mix of sugar, water, and a bunch of questionable chemicals with an anchor “cool”, already linked to a preprogrammed anchor of social acceptance, hence pushing the sales up. In contrast, message “High fructose syrup in sodas leads to diabetes and death” induces an opposite reaction. No magic, everything is quite straightforward. The reactions are in the anchors, choose the anchor you chose to link to, get the reaction you want. However, it is often very hard to link to any primary anchors without a significant leap of faith on the side of your victim. Which is usually not granted by any reasonable person. In this case, you need a bridge. A bridge is another anchor, not a preprogrammed biological one, but rather built by the society; an element of the current culture or subculture, which is linked to one or more preprogrammed anchors. For example, norms of behavior in a society are usually linked to social acceptance, with extreme cases supported through social control and survival. One such artificial anchor, which works as a nullifying bridge, is a “conspiracy theory”. Did you ever thought that it’s enough to claim that your opponent’s statement is a “conspiracy theory” to almost completely nullify it without any other reasoning? Amazingly, that’s the case. “Conspiracy theory” is a commonly encountered bridge to falsehood carefully installed in the brains of most Americans, and not only Americans for that matter. In contrast to usual bridges, it’s not really evolved on its own, but clearly had a help of several groups of people having vested interest in having such a bridge around. It’s almost like… well… you know… conspiracy theory. Is it? Actually, real conspiracy theory does not hold here. Classic definition of a conspiracy theory is “an explanation through the actions of a group of people who secretly push their agenda out of private interest, and who become the main sole reason for some change, event or phenomena.” This definition assumes existence of a single group, organized enough to consistently push through their agenda, and long living enough to implement their plans, not to mention consistent leadership over that time and ability to control the silence of the members. Fortunately, the modern world is too pragmatic and egoistic to resort to such kind of schemes in a real life. However, this does not annihilate private interests, temporary alliances that may last for decades, and self-interest of the people involved to keep their mouths shut. Who is interested in DMCA (Digital Millennia Copyright Act)? Video and records industry. Who is interested in high oil prices? Oil companies. Who is interested in wars? Military-industrial complex. Think for a moment. Say, you have 30 millions in oil stock. You have an opportunity to destabilize Middle East, get oil prices bumped up, and make your stock worth 100 millions. What would you do? Just don’t think politics, think money. How many people would be able to resist that? But say “conspiracy theory” and BOOM, the thought is eliminated from your mind and put to a far shelf along with UFO stories and urban legends. Sometimes, it’s amazing how it works. Let me give you an example, which made me think about it. My daughter had a project in the school to research the reasons of World War II. As one of the reasons, she mentioned that some world leaders at the time believed that the war will be good for their countries, including British Prime-Minister Winston Churchill. Her teacher insisted that this bullet point is removed because “it’s a conspiracy theory.” I ask you, how does it fit into the original definition of a conspiracy theory? Well, it does not. The only item left is the private interest, even more, private opinion. But for a senior high school teacher it was enough to rubber stamp it as a conspiracy theory and hence, nullify it altogether. Amazing, isn’t it? How does it happen? Let’s remember: our brains are memetic, associative, not logical. It does not need full information to make the conclusion. In fact, it does not bother with full information to make a conclusion. That was a great benefit in an African savannah, when once you hear a lion’s roar, you had to run for your life instead of investigating details like is the lion hunting or just resting and is it really a lion or a big frog in a nearby swamp. If you have ten signs of the same danger, all of them got linked to the danger, that is every one of them, not all together. That is, one is enough; no need to wait for all of them to surface. To have a conspiracy theory you need a long living group of people that can act collectively and share the same common goals, ideals or private interests. That a way too much for an average person to remember and track. So, once they hear just one of the items that form this list, they jump directly to the conclusion: conspiracy theory! It’s not a moving animal + yellow skin + mane + lion’s roar. It’s just “lion’s roar” -> need to run. Similarly, it’s not group of people + long existence + common interest/goals + ability to act collectively + private interests +…, it’s just “private interest” -> “conspiracy theory” -> null. So, while true conspiracy theories don’t hold well, they taint trustworthiness of much wider range of theories, explanations, and ideas. “Conspiracy theory” becomes a bridge that you can use to defuse almost any explanation based on private interest. Wonderful, isn’t it? Rob a bank, and when you get caught, make a straight face and say, “Why? You say that I rob the bank to get money? That I was pursuing my private interest? And that the guy in the bank helped me to get his share? That’s a conspiracy theory!” Well, it probably would not work, but – amazingly enough – if you rob a whole country the same way, it does! You see it each time you fill the tank of your car at nearby gas station. So, how does it relates to building long bridges that I started this article from? Quite directly. The amazing thing about conspiracy theories is that many of them happen to be true in the end. Yes, there is probably no green men of Mars in Pentagon laboratories, but Winston Churchill did allowed German to occupy Czechoslovakia in 1939, and video industry had pushed through a highly questionable DMCA legislation to protect their profits, and defense industry got a lot of contracts since our current president got elected by the Supreme Court. You cannot just build a bridge and use it to the contrary to reality indefinitely. Human mind adapts, and if too often reasoning will be at fault, the bridge will get disassembled in public mind and stop to function. You need to feed it with positive signals to continue to use it. Consider it an equivalent of maintenance work on real bridges, and connecting private interest to falsehood – hey, you have to admit it, it’s an equivalent of a memetic Golden Gate and it should require a lot of maintenance. So, how it happens? Fortunately for those who exploit it, there are volunteers who do that quite economically. These are real conspiracy theories supporters. What puzzles me, is that their books are usually written in a way inconsistent with the way modern people think. It’s almost like their purpose was not to make people believe, but to make people disbelieve. Do I suggest that these people are hired to make ridiculous stories? No. I even don’t suggest that people interested in “conspiracy theory” bridge pay for such books and select those authors, who cannot convince readers. That’s too complicated for the modern world. However, I’ll try to devise a model how it could happen without any conspiracy, but still out of private interest of those who benefit from it. Imagine two authors who write in a conspiracy theory style. Say, Noam Chomsky (well known opponent of the U.S. foreign policies) and Zecharia Sitchin (author of “The 12th planet” series speaking of an alien origin of the human race.) Both publish their books either on their own funds or by convincing some publisher. The first one write in a modern logical and convincing style with a lot of data and facts that are possible to verify, references to sources etc. Clearly, he is not a very good candidate for “conspiracy theory” bridge maintenance. He is rather one of those, whose theories are tunneled to nowhere using this bridge. As to “The 12th Planet”, it’s a completely different story. You feel like you were brought to the ancient world where prophets roamed the Earth and were the main source of truth, directly from their divine sources. He does not really bother with proofs or facts, he just tells. I am not telling that there is no twelve planet, or green men of Mars, or whatever, I am just telling that once you read him a disbelief grow in you as his way of presenting the facts is counterintuitive to a modern person thinking. Now, imagine that you just put a hefty sum of money paid for a restoration project of, say, a bridge in Iraq, expecting that Iraqi guerillas will blast the bridge made out of cartoon anyway next week. And then, you are accused of that. What do you do? You, probably, say something like “Oh, not that conspiracy theory! Don’t tell me that you believe that. It’s as ridiculous as…” What would you compare the accusations here, Noam Chomsky or Zecharia Sitchin? Probably, the least believable one, right? And then you’ll go on like, “How, you don’t know about ‘The 12th planet’? Oh! That’s another ridiculous conspiracy theory. It’s really funny, try it, you’d laugh a lot!” So, what happened? You got away from the question and distracted attention to something else. What does it mean for that book? Free publicity from someone who just pocketed a lot of money. Should I explain that publicity from people with a lot of money means a lot more than publicity from the people with no money? Here we are. There is no direct financing of “conspiracy theory” bridge maintainers, but there is post factum support coming out quite naturally. And next time the publisher who made money on that book will be willing to publish another one. Makes sense? So, in the end, it’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s an ecological niche where some authors can live. Once their number grows too much, the amount of free publicity per author falls, and some of them have to move to other niches. But the less of them stay, the more odious they become, the more free publicity they get, resulting in more profits and newcomers. This is a natural market niche lifecycle – just like the cycle of soda or fast food market – partially fed by those interested in maintaining that bridge. What this boils down to, is that long bridges are possible to build. It’s just require alignment of interests of large groups of people. In most cases you cannot simply talk to another guy and tell, “Hey, let’s fool American public.” But if you are interested in that, and another guy, and another guy, then your collective actions may easily result in just that. Think about it the next time you fill the tank of your car.

Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro

2006-03-01T21:57:00.000-08:00

Beyond Reason : Using Emotions as You Negotiate – Viking Adult, 2005, ISBN 0-670-03450-9, 256 P. The book is about using emotions in negotiation process. As you can guess, while not naming it this way, they teach to use emotions as anchors. For a trained eye, it’s also interesting that they teach to use them as anchors for a very important meme – the meme of yourself in other people’s minds. Specifically, they suggest five key anchors:

appreciation – show appreciation for others;
affiliation – make them feel in association with you, not a competition (even if the second is true);
autonomy – respect boundaries, don’t step of toes;
acknowledgement of status – show the boss that you know who is boss when appropriate; and
“choose a fulfilling role”, or simply define yourself in the way that fits other minds well and lets you to play it.

From a memetics point of view the latter is a sort of carte blanches that covers the rest of points that were not chosen to be separate chapters. But that’s tolerable, keeping in mind that the book is about negotiations, and specifically, about emotions in negotiations, not generally memetics, and it covers a lot of general material on negotiations.

The first book is already sold...

2006-02-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

Amazon got the copies and for a few hours the book was listed as available before they changed it back to "not released yet" for the Saturday official publication date. In these few hours somebody managed to order a copy :-) I hope this is a good sign... The more books will get to people, the more good they'll do to the world, the more minds will be defended better. At least, that's what I wrote it for.

The book "Disinfect Your Mind" is coming soon!

2006-02-11T00:42:00.000-08:00

Official day of publication is Feruary 25! The printed copies are on the way to Amazon. See more at the Galiel.Net - the publisher's site.

The Millionaire Maker

2006-02-03T23:41:00.000-08:00

The Millionaire Maker: Act, Think, and Make Money the Way the Wealthy Do by Loral Langemeier – McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-146615-0 The general Guy Kawasaki style stuff, and she ends up with just two kinds of passive income – rental properties and promissory notes. Those who tried rental properties, know how “passive” they are… And finding a reliable person or business who would give you 12-15% as in her examples, that’s not easy either. But from the memetic point of view the book is done pretty well. It’s filled with anchors – start with “You – a Millionaire?” on the back cover, pitches the cause more than giving a substance (in memetics it’s called anchoring and building bridges) including all famous persuasion anchors like social proof (a story of her building some family’s wealth over TV), confusing a reader with senseless abbreviations (like Wealth Cycle Process or Freedom Day), not to mention making them all capitalized (see the chapter in my book of Pathos and Capital Letters)… You will not get much advice from this book beyond Kawasaki, but as a sample of persuasion work, it’s amusing.

The Big Moo

2006-01-15T12:38:00.000-08:00

The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable by The Group of 33, edited by Seth Goding – ISBN 1-59184-103-8 A collection of short articles by a group of celebrities like Tom Peters, Malcolm Gladwell and Guy Kawasaki edited by Seth Godin. Very nice collection for the funs of Seth Godin and his Purple Cow. The subtitle tells it all, and it’s very nice motivationally. The short size of individual pieces and change of author voices provides a very refreshing variety. If you don’t know, Purple Cow in essence is a semi-conscious hybrid of using mind viruses for commercial purposes in an ethical way and marketing in a post-socialistic (as well as post-capitalistic) society, popularly referred as “information age”. The author (editor) seems to be well aware of both memetics and the fact that the age of mass production is over, but does not bother his readers with that and instead presents his ideas in a fresh succulent way more readily imprintable on a mind of an average person… according with the very ideas he presents in his books. If nothing else, go through the book in a bookstore or visit thebigmoo.com site.

Finding Darwin’s God

2006-01-05T23:36:00.000-08:00

Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution by Kenneth R. Miller – Harper Perennial, ISBN 0-06-093049-7 An attempt by a scientist (a biologist), who is both believer and believer in evolution, to make the peace between ideas of God and evolution. Unfortunately, being a humanitarian scientist, he spends first eight of his nine chapters thoroughly igniting religious zealots, and the last chapter is mostly devoted to the idea that God works in indirect ways. However, as a natural scientist, he brings a lot of material on the way that you may find interesting and good to read. And he mentions a lot of right folks, including Dennet, Pinker and, of course, Dawkins, not to mention Darwin :-).

Happy New 2006 Year!

2005-12-31T21:37:00.000-08:00

I wish you a great year. By the way, the book "Disinfect Your Mind" is already edited and it's going to be published really soon, in first quarter. Happy New Year! --Ely

Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want by Dave Lakhani

2005-12-27T23:54:00.000-08:00

Beyond Reason : Using Emotions as You Negotiate – Wiley, 2005, ISBN 0-471-73044-0, 256 P. As we know, persuasion is essentially all about passing a set of meme with anchors and carriers fitted for the individual or a group and payload entwined with them. Here are some chapter titles: “Storytelling”, “Gurudom”, “Exclusivity and Availability”, “Curiosity” – it all should sound familiar to you if you read the chapter on anchors in my book. Still, the book gets it much father than simply listing the anchors and gives a good review of how to use them down to famous bullet lists. It’s a little amateurish when speaking of electronic persuasion – web, maillists and blogs, but other than that it’s a really good read.

The Ape in the Corner Office: Understanding the Workplace Beast in All of Us by Richard Conniff

2005-12-17T23:33:00.000-08:00

The Ape in the Corner Office : Understanding the Workplace Beast in All of Us – Crown Business, 2005, ISBN 1-4000-5219-X, 352 P. Although this book is not directly related to memetics, it’s great and a real fun to read. The main approach of the book is to trace our workplace behavior to our animal ancestry, and to show what to do about it. Hence, you will not find terms like “meme” or “group selection” in this book, the author clearly is well aware of them – enough to say that one of the chapters is called “Nice Monkey: The Search for the Unselfish Gene”, clearly a tribute to Dawkins’ “Selfish Gene” book. Still he touches the subjects easily explainable with the memetics theory. One example is the chapter “Monkey See…: The Power of Imitation”, where he talks about such subjects as “The Infectious Workplace” about emotions and attitudes spreading in a workplace like infections, or “Caveat Imitator” where he discusses how new managements fads get afoot because of success stories. The second example is specially illustrative. Here is how it goes: imagine N companies engaged in different and worthless initiatives. Some of them will fail, some, by an accident, succeed. Successful ones may be adopted by others with another round of random results. Early or later, some initiative will collect three or four success stories in a row. Once it happens, management consultants start to spread it as “carriers”. Quote: “…and like the vectors of a disease the quickly spread the Big Idea around the corporate market place.” That was the case with “quality circles” in 70s, “job enrichment”, total quality management”, or “reengineering”. Does this remind you of something? Yes, many management theories are a perfect example of mind viruses with the anchors, carriers and payload in a clear sight. By the way, being somewhat related to the management theories, I don’t think that all these initiative were really useless. It’s just once the fad is on, a lot of people, who have no clue, are starting to spread it around, as well as a lot of people, who are not capable of executing on them, try to do so. Management theories, like nuclear physics, require intelligence to be applied. Otherwise, you get a big boom – wrong place, wrong time. In the end, I cannot resist one more quote from the book: “Assuming it holds up to scrutiny, the beauty of the idea is that it seems to provide a coherent explanation of the behavior of creatures from flatworms to corporate CEOs.”

Toxic memes in detoxification books

2005-11-16T22:20:00.000-08:00

Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About by Kevin Trudeau – Alliance Publishing Group, 2004, ISBN 0-9755995-1-8 It has been quite a while since I decided to avoid reading any health/diet/alternative medicine books. Today I decided to check this title which looked promising. I was wrong. It’s not that the author lies to the reader or is totally wrong. He promotes a lot of good things – exercise, drinking enough clean water, avoiding drugs including antidepressants, pain killers, et al., eating fruits, sleeping enough, etc. It’s how he promotes these things which make the difference. Of course, there is a question of inconsistency or, maybe, even conscious misrepresentation of facts. He claims all information around us is biased to sell us drugs, processed foods, and other stuff damaging to our health. He spends about one third of his 600 page book repeating this pretty trivial statement again and again. He also spends significant amount of time pitching that government agencies, independent associations, news and mass media are all aligned with the interests of the industries selling these things. And still, his book reads as an advertising pitch for a number of products like coral calcium, electromagnetic healing devices, cleansing products and the whole alternative medicine and organic food industries, which are not small players in the United States anymore. The author claims that animals in the wild don’t have diseases. First of all, that’s not true. They do. Second, they just die earlier. Humans in the wild - in prehistoric times - lived an average of 24-26 years. How many of us have diseases in our first 26 years? The author also spends time discussing how the FDC and FDA treat him and his partners unfairly. It may be true – governments are known to treat small operators poorly, especially if there is large industry money involved. However, the more you read his book, the more it feels like a marketing ploy rather than a complaint. He warns “never buy products advertised on TV” whilst his book carries a golden seal saying, “AS SEEN ON TV, OVER 3 MILLION COPIES SOLD!” Anyway, that would not be interesting by itself from a memetic point of view. What matters are the things he plants into the heads of his readers. While you go through the book, you are repeatedly implanted with memes “You are sick”, “You are toxic”, “You have <a number of very unpleasant things> present and living in your body”. The whole book is about getting rid of poisons, parasites and negative factors from your body, while he actually pollutes your mind with self-destruct memes of enormous negative power. It’s especially amazing considering what he says about the thoughts: “Thoughts are things. …Every thought you have can have a powerful impact on the cells in your body. … Negative stressful low vibration thoughts can give your body disease. …medical science cannot dispute the “placebo” effect. … Imagine, up to 40 percent of the time a person with a dreaded disease cures himself with his own thoughts! Thoughts can heal, but they can also cause sickness and disease.” (Page 109.) You see, the guy knows perfectly well how thoughts affect people’s health, and page after page he consistently implants his readers with memes like “You are sick” or “You are toxic”! He claims – in effect and quite correctly in my humble opinion – that selling toxic foods should be considered criminal. Should not the poisoning of people’s minds be criminal too? You may ask, how do you warn people about negative things and avoid hurting them? Actually, it’s not so tough. First, don’t make claims about the reader himself, skip right to the constructive statements. Don’t talk about toxic readers, talk about toxic foods. Don’t say “You are toxic”, but skip directly to “You can get rid of toxins in your body.” It does not take Einstein to figure out that if he eats something toxic, it’s a good idea to get the toxins out. When you talk about what happens in the body, speak about a third person. Not “if you eat processed food, you are toxic”, but “people who eat processed food are toxic.” It carries the same message, but allows an introspection of the statement without automatic imprinting into your mind. Of course, it has much less selling power this way. Which, by the way, makes me to think why he is not doing it in the first place.

Law of Attraction and Other Books on the Subject

2005-10-30T23:26:00.000-08:00

Law of Attraction by Michael Losier - 2003, ISBN 0973224002, 108 p. It Works by R. H. Jarrett - DeVorss & Company, 1976, ISBN 0875163238 Ask and It Is Given by Esther Hicks, Jerry Hicks, Wayne W. Dyer - Hay House, 2004, ISBN 1401904599, 314 p. Of course, the basic premise of these books is somewhat stretched. As they say in Ask and It Is Given: "We are called Abraham, and we are speaking to you from the Non-Physical dimension..." Still, what these books are teaching has a real good chance to work. Here is why ... Here is the basic methodic pitched in these books: Step 1: Clearly express your desires on paper. Step 2: Involve emotions ("vibrations") or simply read it three times a day. Step 3: "Allow it.” Make yourself believe that it is going to happen. Do you see what does this accomplishes? In Step 1, you create memes you want. In Step 2, you implant these memes deep into your mind. In Step 3, you clear yourself of counter-memes that may block the execution. With emotions, you plant them deep into your lower minds. With repetition, you reinforce them and make them stronger. Once you've done that, it becomes established in your extended neural network, which is larger than your cerebral cortex, where your consciousness resides. Then the supercomputer in your whole body - including spine, heart, guts (not to mention the lower brain) - gets busy crunching numbers and figuring out the strategy to achieve your desires. Also, don't forget that most of our desires are not to achieve something in the physical world. That's what science and engineering are for. Most of our desires are about getting ahead of other people ... Other people who use their supercomputers to eat, drink, sleep, and have sex. Other people who compete with you, using only their cerebral cortex. You see? It's like the latest Pentium going against a pocket calculator. You simply have more memory, more processing power, and you are just plain faster. So, I don't know about the "Non-Physical Dimension" (see the chapter in my book about using the Capital Letters...), but you may very well try that.

The Other 90%

2005-10-22T21:50:00.000-07:00

The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership and Life by Robert K. Cooper – Three Rivers Place, NY, 2001, ISBN 0-609-80880-X, 316 p. A very nice book by a Dr. Cooper. He is not just a management consultant, he is also a doctor, at least he was one. Here are some interesting facts about the biochemical computers running our bodies and lives that we call brains:

There are 100 millions neurons in guts – more than in spinal column
There are 40,000 neurons in heart
Thinking is the last thing what our brain does before acting, and sometimes thinking is bypassed altogether

In Dr.Cooper’s view, most of us are trained from the childhood to use just our human brain in the head – cerebral cortex, which is roughly about 10% of all neural tissue in our bodies. These numbers are important to understand why we need mind viruses – or at least, memes with strong anchors – for ourselves. That’s how we engage our lower brains. Other 90% of our brains.

Retainer Viruses (based on the example of the latest Kiyosaki's book)

2005-10-15T23:53:00.000-07:00

Before Your Quite Your Job: 10 Real-Life Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Building A Multimillion-Dollar Business By Robert T. Kiyosaki, Sharon L. Lechter – Warner Business Books, 2005, 259 p., ISBN 0-446069637-4 People have different, often opposite views on Robert Kiyosaki’s books, the author of popular “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” series. This particular book is interesting because it talks about excuses that people use to decide not to go into a business on their own. Among those are “I don’t have money”, “I don’t have contacts”, “I’m not smart enough”, “Business is risky”, “I have to support family”. When you look at them from the memetics point of view, you will recognize our old acquaintances – mind viruses. It’s interesting that the author divides all people into two categories, employees and entrepreneurs. The excuses he lists are typical for employees. He also points out that school is what usually conditions people to become employees, not entrepreneurs. After reading my book, you all know what the school does culturally, right? Yes, it plants a lot of mind viruses in the young minds to cultivate them into a predominantly expected kind of a person. Let’s consider it in details. First, all these excuses have very strong anchors. “I have to support my family” goes straight to the procreation anchor. In fact, this anchor is so strong that for most people their memetic mind simply can’t notice any flaws in this argument. It’s only the cognitive mind that is able to leave no stone on stone in this virus, because (a) most employees don’t earn enough to support their families as they think they should, and (b) a lot of entrepreneurs are supporting their families just fine. For other excuses it’s a little harder to find their anchors. Say, “I don’t have money” or “I don’t have contacts”. Where is an anchor here? In fact, there is none. These are not complete viruses, but rather payload parts of special antiviral viruses that are supposed to prevent penetration of the subjects by matching entrepreneur culture viruses. The whole viruses are “success stories” like “this guy had a lot of money, and he makes even more out of them”, or “this guy has a lot of connections, and he makes a load of money out of them.” The main anchors of success stories are both curiosity and self-justification. The self-justification one works like that: “This guy has a lot of money, that’s why he makes even more money, and I don’t have money, so it’s not me, it’s actually the absence of money that prevents me from financial success.” You see? Here we’ve got the payload that later surfaces as an excuse. And it also make the carrier, because by passing a “success story” along, you justify yourself in front of another person for not having the same success. And we are all really hooked on justifying ourselves in front of other people. It seems to be in our genetic make up. Now, why would such a virus be successful? They are clearly not very successful in entrepreneur subculture. What makes these viruses to proliferate so widely in an employee subculture? An employee subculture itself. If you consider an employee and an entrepreneur, they have to live in different styles, or, at least, they had to in the XX century. Employee was naturally risk avert, seeking security and stability, oriented for the control of resources, not results. An entrepreneur cannot avoid risk, he has to live with it and enjoy it. He does not have security beyond the one provided by his own capabilities. And if he does not set his mind on the results, he soon may find himself among employees. Naturally, such two different environments resulted in two different subcultures with their own system of supporting memes and mind viruses. Each subculture to be stable have to keep several kinds of mind viruses. Some of them are useful symbiotic mind viruses that help their hosts to adapt to the environment. Risk aversion in a XXth century corporation was a symbiotic mind virus because it helped people to keep their jobs. But subculture also have to carry mind viruses that prevent their subjects from escaping – retainer viruses. Most of the excuses listed above are exactly these kinds of mind viruses. Compare it to two extreme environments where these kinds of mind viruses are evident. A religious cult is normally built around a mind virus “leave us and you’ll go to hell.” That’s a typical retainer virus. In a concentration camp during World War II the guards on watch-towers and barbed wire was not exactly communicating a mind virus, but rather a simple meme that escaping is not an option. Although in the second case the meme was mostly correct, the purpose of guards and wire was rather communicating the meme than actually physically killing escaping prisoners. In fact, in the cases of mass escape, guards and wire was normally unable to function with 100% efficiency. Making them evident to the prisoners and implanting appropriate meme into their minds was from all point of view much more efficient measure against escaping than their direct purpose. In fact, killing those who try to escape was rather used to enforce the meme in the minds of remaining prisoners. That’s why guards, towers and wire was not hidden but rather demonstratively exposed, that’s why bodies of those who failed to escape could have been left in a common view. As it often does, perception was more important than reality. Well, I beg your pardon for making such grim comparisons to the employee subculture, I just wanted to make clear the concept of a retainer virus. By the way, arguments of Kiyosaki is based on the XXth century employment. Today, most of us even in the employment have to carry some elements of entrepreneur subculture, recognize the risks, and rely on peer relations. Except some obscure corners like some government agencies, employment does not provide anymore stability or security. Read Peter Drucker and Tom Peters on that (see below for some links). [1] The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management by Peter F. Drucker - Collins, 2003, 368 p., ISBN 006093574X [2] Management Challenges for the 21st Century by Peter F. Drucker - Collins; 1st edition, 2001, 224 p., ISBN 0887309992 [3] Re-imagine! by Tom Peters - DK Publishing, 2003, 352 p., ISBN 078949647X [4] The Brand You 50: Or Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an 'Employee' into a Brand That Shouts Distinction, Commitment, and Passion! by Tom Peters - Knopf, 1999, 224 p., ISBN 0375407723

Human Self-destruct Sequence in Research & Medicine

2005-10-09T23:12:00.000-07:00

The Dangers of Chronic Distress: Are you worried, irritable and socially inhibited? A simple test may help predict the health effect by Michael C. Miller, M.D. – Newsweek, Oct 3, 2005, p.58-59. Miller is editor in chief of the Harvard Mental Health Letter.

“And among people who already have heart conditions, those with the highest scores – the so-called Type D personalities – are less responsive to treatment and have poorer quality of life. They are also more likely to die prematurely.”

Not a big surprise, of course, but a very good illustration to the thesis of a self-destruct programming in humans and how to avoid it. Personality types are all about predominant memes ruling the choices and views of a person. It seems that some memes are capable of bringing our body machinery to premature break ups, whether by design or by mere mismanagement of the body resources. Of course, when I refer to other authors, they usually talk about much deeper, often cellular-level self-destruct programming. But this example, which comes as no surprise to most people in the XXI century, illustrates it with evidence: a person’s choice of memes to carry is a choice of how good and how long life he or she is going to live.

25 ways to win with people: How to make other feel like a million bucks by John C Maxwell and Les Parrott, Ph.D.

2005-09-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

25 ways to win with people: How to make other feel like a million bucks by John C Maxwell and Les Parrott, Ph.D. – Nelson Business, 184 p., ISBN 0-7853-6094-3 0785260943 Let’s just consider anchors on the title page. “25 ways to…” Many publishers believe that starting the title with a number helps. It feels like you get a choice and the topic is covered thoroughly – compare to “One Way to…”. It feels like something manageable – compare to “A Millions Ways to do…” It feels like something well defined and precise – compare to “Some Ways to…” “Win with People” is the key anchor for social status, power and influence. Actually, it’s a very nice anchor, wouldn’t you want to win with people? I would. In fact, it almost got me. The problem is that the anchor does not have to match the content. New York Time Best-Selling Author…” brings the social proof. "Ph.D." - nice touch. It's amazing how much we don't pay a sh*t about this stuff when facing a person, and how much we believe it when we see it in print. I can tell it from the first-hand experience - I have Ph.D., and that's why I don't mention it too often. Now about the content. Here is the quote from the beginning: “If you try to practice the “ways” of winning with people that you are about to learn in the following chapters before you give serious attention to how you can be a winner yourself, you’ll be sorely disappointed.” Here we are. Paraphrasing the authors, if you are not a winner already, why do you think this book will help you?

To ship or not to ship?

2005-09-24T15:47:00.000-07:00

Today, let’s consider an example of how two conflicting mind viruses may result in a thick emotional screen and an elaborate net of lies to ensure that they both survive. Imagine that you work on a new product. An ancient mind virus “I am what I do” – (Me, is, my product) – makes you to strive for good quality and design. Sounds like a fine idea, right? The problem is that it links your product to your identity. You cannot ship something inferior at the threat of feeling diminished, defective, unworthy of your place in the society. So, what’s the problem? Just do a superb job and be happy, right? Alas, it’s not always possible. You are allowed to have too few people, too small salary fund to hire the right people, too few resources to do the job, and too little time. In fact, from a business perspective it may make a lot of sense. But not from the perspective of your mind virus that forces you to strive for doing a better job. Now we have two mind viruses: (1) “Do a superb product” anchored in your personality and identity (pretty much a survival anchor) and carried in society on reciprocal basis starting from your parents telling you – no, not good grades yet – to eat your breakfast porridge until the plate is clean. (2) “Finish the product on time on budget” anchored in your job security, enforced by upper management and carried by the need to enforce the same imperative in the whole group. Now the time comes and the product is not ready. First, the deadline virus strikes, because there is no way you can really ship what you’ve got, and there is no way to fix it in time either. If this is a car, it still misses the wheels; if it is a software product, it has problems installing, not to mention doing something useful; if it is a plane, let’s not even go into it… But slipping the deadline is deadly, nobody wants that. So, you get the quality mind virus and talk to your boss, to your reports, and finally higher powers agree to move the deadline. After all, they have the same mind viruses and they have similar pressures that you do, if not from the upper management, then from their peers. Let’s see what happened. You slipped. You missed the deadline. Everybody knows that. Everybody does not speak about it. Everybody speaks about “the right decision”, “importance of good quality”, and “interests of a customer”. Mentioning that you slipped becomes socially improper behavior, like eating with hands or sneezing in public. Then the reality and market forces press and you have to ship something finally. You still don’t have the quality required by your personality mind virus. You cannot abandon the virus, so you have to convince yourself (and everybody around) that you are shipping something of a good quality; something that does not harm your identity; something that deserves your status in the society. At the same time, you have to ship the damn thing, no matter what its current condition is. If you don’t, there may be no company to work for and no product to ship whatsoever. Or, maybe, simply no job at the company where you work on the product. Now comes the time of the “quality” game. Suddenly, you don’t want zero defects, you just want zero defects that you know of. Actually, quite a reasonable idea except that you don’t want to know what you test team found. Then it becomes zero defects except those that you reviewed and decided that you can live with them. Guess what? You quickly find more and more defects that you are willing to live with. But, if you decide to fix something, that absolutely must be fixed! Your integrity would not stand for anything less. Of course, if another review will not reveal that you can live with it. And now the day comes. You are shipping the product. You are proud of its quality. After all, you fixed all the defects that “must” be fixed, right? And you are proud of delivering on time. Yeah, there were some reviews of schedule, it always happens, but you delivered right on the final schedule! Right? Of course, right. Two little mind viruses in your head would not settle for anything less. And neither would you. :-) The only little problem is that you did not ship on schedule and you left a lot of problems inside the product. Fortunately for you, everybody around (management, peers, your team) share the same mind viruses and wholeheartedly agree with you. They would not settle for anything less either! Well, almost everybody. Except those dissidents, that you got rid of in the process. Sounds familiar?

Presentation S.O.S.: From Perspiration to Persuasion in 9 Easy Steps by Mark Wiskup

2005-09-15T23:53:00.000-07:00

Presentation S.O.S.: From Perspiration to Persuasion in 9 Easy Steps by Mark Wiskup – ISBN 0-446-69554-8, 181 p. The book is written by a renowned communications expert who speaks nationwide to many Fortune 500 companies. The main subject of the book is how to prepare and deliver powerful presentation that make people buy – speaking either figuratively or literally. What’s interesting is that his central piece of advice is a “Power Sound Bite”, a piece of reiterated information that glues the whole presentation together and represents the core idea you want people to remember and bring out of presentation. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (FDR), “I have a dream” (Martin Luther King, Jr.), “To be or not to be?” (William Shakespeare), “The tribe have spoken” are just few examples of Power Sound Bites. If you already read the draft of my book or followed the advice and checked one of the books in memetic bibliography, you already recognize PSBs as something very familiar – a meme. Even better, a meme with an anchor and carrier – a mind virus. Of course, he does not approach this from the memetic point of view, and hence the book has a few shortcomings. Here is an example of PSB, he believes is good:

When you support these goals for the direction of our marketing effort, you’ll be assuring a good, profitable year for the company, making your customers happy, and putting more money in your wallet.

Gees… What a bite of a corporate politically correct B.S. Marketing making customers happy? Although, I have to admit, it’s a lousy meme, but a good wrapper and delivery mechanism for a really strong meme expressed in the last five words: “more money in your wallet.” The rest of the message simply gets the guards off. People listen to the beginning of this sentence and immediately classify is at “managerese” mumbling leaving it to internal defenses to filter it out. But when it drop there, internal filters see “more money in your wallet”, and, wow! Your inner self gets interested. Let’s get a bit more formal, here is what this statement is in memetic notation:

(support me, is, extra money) (support me, is, happy customers) (support me, is, profitable year)

The long introductory part means simply “Support me”, because it does not carry any information about the “effort” or “goals” or “direction”. These terms are simply a bubble-talk to express simple “support me” directive. “Extra money in your wallet” = “More personal income” is the main anchor of the statement. The second two are auxiliary anchors in a case your audience has corporate profit or customer satisfaction metrics in the performance objectives.

Branding and positioning from the memetic point of view

2005-09-04T02:33:00.000-07:00

As any marketing expert will tell you, in the XX century the dominant way to sell goods and services was based on branding and positioning. This is more questionable now, in XXI century, but we will talk about that separately. Just as a refresher, what is branding and positioning? Branding, in a nutshell, is linking a completely non-sensible logo or name to the category of a product or a service. Positioning is about positioning your own non-sensible logo or name relative to others in the same category, so that you still sell even if there is a lot of contenders. How does it all work memetically? By putting a meme into your mind. (Car rental, is, Hertz), (Soft drink, is, Coke), (Computer, is, IBM). Then once you need a car rental, soft drink or a computer you go to Hertz, Coca-Cola or IBM. Why? Let’s see how our brain make decisions. First, it gets a notion of what you need, like “Car”, “Week”. Then (Week, is, temporary) meme is applied and it gets “Car”, “Temporary”. Then (Temporary, use, rental) applies, so you get “Car, rental”. All this happens very fast, so you even don’t notice the process. In fact, you cannot notice the process, because it’s the same process as noticing something – that’s your thoughts. Then the branding meme strikes and you end up with “Hertz”. Simple enough, isn’t it? The idea of branding is to link a triggering need to the company, hence directing everybody who has this particular need to buy from a particular company rather than its competition. Introducing a meme that will make the link was the job of marketing. To the disappointment of marketing firms’ customers, this gave the initial result but then stopped working for most companies. (Computer, is, IBM) is fine, but what could you do if the customers are bombarded with competitive memes (Computer, is, Compaq), (Computer, is, Dell), (Computer, is, Hewlett-Packard), (Computer, is, Sony, Samsung, et al.) It was found that only the top two conflicting memes survive, the rest of them hit the dust with only marginal recognition. So, positioning become the king by trying to get a meme of a specific company in the top two slots, or invent a new category, where it can get into the top two slots. So, why do only the top two memes survive in branding and marketing? Let’s see again, how our mind works. First, we have a need. Then we use a meme with the needs on the right side with the left side of the same meme. (Car, week) -> (Car, temporary). Then we do that again with new matching memes, (Car, rental), and so on. Each time many memes match, but only the strongest is used. Once we get the solution, we may like it or not. Or we may just hit a dead end. In both cases, we rollback a step or two and apply the second strongest meme to get a different answer. If we hit a dead end or a solution that we don’t like, we go back again and try the third strongest meme or we may roll back a step or two more. Now, if you need a soft drink, how many times will you hit a dead end? Zero. And if you don’t like it, you get “the other cola” in an instance. When buying a commodity product, there is simply no way you can hit a dead end too many times. It’s not like you cannot go through the endless list of different “cola’s”; you can, but it would simply be a waste of time, and there is no reason why you would want that.

Dear Stupid!

2005-08-05T21:53:00.000-07:00

Hi folks, Have you ever received a mail that starts with something like “Dear Stupid, I am Giving Away My Secrets on Getting Rich with …”
I do. You see, when I subscribe to the mail lists I often give names like “Stupid”, “Fool”, “Junk” instead of my first name. Really, these guys don’t really need my name. They only use it to fool me into a false sense of a personal touch. So, why not pull a little prank on them? Really, why? Why am I doing that? Do I enjoy being called “stupid”? Well, not exactly, there is much better reason for that. Many mail lists on the internet are designed to lure you into buying something – a report that reveals secrets, a guide that should make you rich, schemes that are supposed to bring you wealth beyond your wildest dreams, pills that make you a sex legend, diets that will let you die healthy… You name it, and somebody on the Internet is already promising it. You may wonder why somebody would ever consider such offers, and the answer is “marketing”. Marketing and advertising. A sales copy filled with anchors and mind viruses. A sales copy that pretends to be a messages from your old friend; a message that tries to start with something like “Hi, Joe,…” or “Hey, Bob, …” to make you think that it was written by an old friend specially for you. There are no friends behinds it, actually, there are no real people either, it all happens automatically. Your name was harvested, put into a database, and now it was automatically inserted into a template like, “Hi, ,…” Once you are deceived into the friendly mood, it becomes much easier to penetrate your mind and infect you with a buying virus. Yes, just that. Now, you see what my little prank does? Instead of cheating me into a friendly open-mind mode, it automatically arms my defenses with an unexpected offense. You know, it’s not what they call you, it’s what you do after reading their stuff that makes you stupid or smart. Till the next time!

Purple Cow by Seth Godin

2005-07-22T23:24:00.000-07:00

Purple Cow by Seth Godin – Portfolio Hardcover, 2003, 160 p., ISBN 1-59184-021-X Another book by the same author. It’s again about the marketing in the new age, after all that’s who Seth Godin is – marketing guru and expert. A lot of good stuff for marketers in the Tom Peters style, but what’s really remarkable, the book speaks about ideaviruses and sneezers, the people who spread them. In fact, he has another book called “Unleashing the Ideavirus”. And it’s considered the true way for tomorrow (if not already today) marketing. Impressive, isn’t it? While doubting thomases of the world question if a meme exists, marketers are already all over it and its practical applications.

Book review: "All Marketers Are Liars"

2005-06-27T13:22:00.000-07:00

All Marketers Are Liars: The power of telling authentic stories in a low-trust world by Seth Godin – Portfolio Hardcover, 2005, 208 p., ISBN 1-59184-100-3 An excellent book by one of the prominent authors in the marketing today. This book is interesting two-fold. First, it’s whole purpose is to explain you how to tell great stories with authentic feeling not necessary with regard to the reality and why are they so important. In our lingo, it would be “how to create efficient marketing mind viruses, when nobody trusts marketers anymore”. See the point? If you know how they’ll cheat you, it gives a certain advantage, right? Even better, the book also swarms with examples of the mind viruses made by marketing (“great authentic stories and marketing successes” in Seth Godin’s language) Worth reading whether you are trying to defend yourself against mind viruses, or create ones for others.

Nice Girls don’t get rich by Lois P. Frankel, Ph.D.

2005-06-19T00:02:00.000-07:00

Nice Girls don’t get rich by Lois P. Frankel, Ph.D. – Warner Business Books, 2005, 288 p., ISBN 0-446-57709-X A great example of why normal self-help and how-to books are not exactly enough without a memetic approach. This book is based on the author’s experience in executive coaching, leadership development and team building. It catalogues 75 mistakes women often make that prevent then from reaching financial success. It seems to be a great book as well as its predecessor book “Nice girls don’t get a corner office” Considering the author’s credentials it should really help people (no matter what the title says, guys also make the mistakes listed in this book.) However, its’ just a case study, not a deep analysis. And cases studies are known to have a problem or two. First, behavior correlated with the success may just coincide with the success or originate from the same root instead of being a true reason of one. And, second, an explanation, why some particular behavior works, does not usually have any really material ground. Let me explain it on the examples from the book. The author rightfully notices that women are likely to listen to naysayers and that compromises their effort. True, and not only for women. However the coaching tips in the same chapter are not so straightforwardly evident. How about “use your research as offensive tactic”? Sure, you have to do your research first, but why on Earth should you waste you time convincing a naysayer? Trying to convince everybody who has doubts in your success is an enormous time and energy drain. It’s just not worth it, and it alone can stop you from reaching success. Another example: “Setting artificial boundaries”. A chapter is a generic advice to get a balance between values and prosperity. Nice. However, no word on why people choose to set artificial boundaries for themselves. And if you read it from memetics point of view, you’ll notice few “old friends” like “Money won’t make you happy” mind virus. Only in this book it is called “paradigm” and there is no explanation how it gets into the people’s minds and how to agree with yourself to prevent this seemingly correct statement from shooting you in the foot. And “Saving instead of investing”, that’s really interesting to hear… As it stands in the title, that’s the great mind virus of 90s (and 20s before that) by itself. Don’t make a mistake, if you are capable of investing, good luck! The problem is that not everybody is capable to invest reasonably and get ahead as a result without working on it full-time. And if you are not, “get educated” as the book suggests usually does not work. And the book rightfully admits the fact: “One study suggests that by the time the average investor tries to adjust to changing market conditions, 80% of the damage is done.”

Book review: "Eat that frog"

2005-06-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

Eat that frog: 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time by Brian Tracy – Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002, 144 p., ISBN 1-57675-198-8 Nothing new, nothing that you did not hear before, but a very good book. Why? First, their advice - plan your day, prioritize, eliminate unnecessary task, concentrate on an important one - it’s all well known, but it helps you to rehearse these memes and enforce them. Why is this good? Because these memes make you to apply a process, a cognitive filter to what you are doing. And these particular processes and cognitive filters are designed to weed out actions that are forced on you by mind viruses. By enforcing these memes, you reinforce you mind virus immunity.

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

2005-06-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins It's primarily about the evolution, so if you are a creativist, it may get to your nerves. Even if you are an evolutionist, it's 400 pages of neatly packed text. But it is one of the best books explaining how the natural selection really works. I mean really, not like in popular magazines and folklore. And understanding the natural selection process is the key to the understanding how memes are spread around.

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

2005-05-29T00:35:00.000-07:00

Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner - William Morrow, 2005, ISBN 006073132, Hardcover, 256p. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful volume. Of course, it’s far from “everything”. There are just few questions explored like why our schools fail, why real estate agents are not really interested in getting a higher price for your home, or what helps children succeed in school and what does not. What matters is that in all these questions the matter is carefully turned upside down with the real facts and confirmed data. For reference, you don’t have to agree with the data, you may consider what the book tells and stay on your existing point of view. However, a little shattering of the common beliefs is helpful for the mind disinfection. The key premise of this book is that experts in any field tend to create a closed group guarding their guild interests at your expense – right, big surprise, and that they don’t hesitate to feed you some false statements if it works in their interests. All in good faith, of course, most of them really believe in what they say, but still they do. In our society we rely on experts a lot, so this book is really useful to an average American. It’s not only a ready-to-use disinfectant against some specific mind viruses, it’s also like an extra training to be not swayed by experts. By the way, they have to use mind viruses to get the sale and make you spread the word – remember, most of this folk builds their business on referrals. Of course, usually “experts”, let it be a high-paid corporate consultant or a mortgage company customer service representative, tend to talk to you like you are an idiot and they are the wizards who make the Earth spin, and turning the table does not usually yield a good response from them. But if the matter matters, you may prefer to live with this little disappointment for the sake of a better result. Of course, I’d like you to go to Amazon and buy this book their (bringing me an associate commission J). Incidentally they have 40% sale on this book. Or you may walk into your local Barnes&Noble who have right now a 30% off sale on this book.

The Step Diet Book by James O. Hill, John C. Peters et al.

2005-05-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

The Step Diet Book: Count Steps, not Calories, to Lose Weight and Keep it Off Forever by James O. Hill, John C. Peters et al. – Workman Publishing Company, 2004, ISBN 0761133240, 302p. Frankly speaking, I am fan of walking and hiking. Especially, just walking. Driving to some God-forgotten place just to walk does not strike with me as especially fun idea, but walking feels good. So, not much seems to be wrong with the idea. What puzzled me is the cover. It includes a boxed pedometer to count your steps, and the box of the pedometer has a little chart at how many steps you need to counteract some bad foods or save by downsizing them. For example, cover says: Small Order of Fries vs. Large Order – Save – 6,520 steps My god… Most of us don’t make so many steps in day! I did not looked inside the book, but I remember the previous edition of this book without a pedometer. It was pretty decent, not much off the truth, and not swarming with mind viruses like some other diet book. Of course, inside they asked for a little more than just steps: you had to have enough sleep, drink a lot of water, and make few other adjustments to your lifestyle other than just walking a lot, but that’s rather a positive side, as we all know that there is no single weight-loss factor, it’s always a combination of factors. But the box was clearly prepared by marketing people, and that’s a completely different crowd. Long story short, if you look into the book, it says that normal number of steps per day to maintain your weight is about 6,000, average number of steps we really do in a day is about 3,000, and for a weight loss they recommend 8 to 10 thousands steps per day. As usual, marketing guys did not bother to read the book, they promote. However, people who will look at the cover in the bookstore, especially if they know the number of steps they do, are likely to decide that “this thing is not for me”. Even worse, they will spread the word, because now we have a classic mind virus. It has a good anchor (weight loss), a good carrier (the news that this particular thing cannot work, although a completely wrong one), and it will essentially harm the sales in the long run. Why am I writing about that here? First, it’s a good example how some mild mind viruses are born. In this case there was no design or evil genius behind, there was just one stupid marketing guy who picked the wrong data to illustrate the point and reflected it in a particularly wrong way. And the second, I wanted to show you how easy is sometimes to defuse a potential mind virus from getting roots in your mind. All I had to do was to look inside the book and find a discrepancy. And I did not had to read the whole book, if this information would not be available easily, I would discard the whole book and cover information as untrusted source (like you would a website badbadguys.com on Internet…), that’s it. See more in the “Test Against Reality” chapter of my upcoming book “Disinfect Your Mind”.

Self-Healing With Sound & Music by Andrew Weil, Kimba Arem

2005-05-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

Self-Healing With Sound & Music by Andrew Weil, Kimba Arem - Sound True, 2004, Audio CD, ISBN 1591791987, 2 CDs + booklet. I know, you are practical and not much into spiritual mumbo-jumbo, but this one is interesting. In particular it speaks in details about main brain frequencies and their impact on our consciousness. There are four main frequencies:

Beta - alerted state, consciousness.
Alpha - relaxed state, consciousness.
Theta - subconsciousness, dream, meditation.
Delta - unconscious mind and deep sleep.

Why is this important? Because if you understand those, you understand when you are vulnerable. It also helps you to talk to your inner self, subconsciousness. See more in my book.

"Weight Loss 4 Idiots" Oh....

2005-05-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

Weight Loss 4 Idiots I cannot resist... Once I posted two notices on health programs, Google served the following ad on this blog: "Weight loss 4 idiots" Quotes from the front page: "2+2=5", "I am a certified idiot", "Lose 9 lbs. by May 31st" (today is May 19, but maybe they mean the next year?), "Click to Begin" I believe, no analysis is necessary... By the way, I kind of like them, it's just their first page... you know... To their defense, I have to mention that they use relatively subtle and not too dangerous mind viruses. You know, no death curses, no "leave this site and you will die!", nothing like that. As to their ideas, you can judge for yourself.

Fair notice - why I even mention such stuff

2005-05-19T22:38:00.000-07:00

Just to clarify: my goal is not to criticize a specific vendor or a program. That's not so important or interesting. The imporant thing is to help you learn to recognize mind viruses instantly "on contact" -- the skill that highly increases your natural immunity to them. Thank you for a chance to help you! (I don't know, why am I doing this, probably some other mind virus... :-))

"The Greatest Vitamin in The World": the Case Study

2005-05-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

The Greatest Vitamin in The World The page is extremely impressive... Ouch... The picture of a bunch of pills that contain: Stress, Joint Pain, Diabetes, Cancer, Heart Diseasy, Cholesterol, Indigestion, Stroke, Depression, and Make Money! Right before that a huge bottle of pills with a label: "Click Here to Order!" Do you already have fun? Good! Now the copy of the sales message. Quote: "us", "clogged up", "arteries", "we do have a heart attack", "get cancer", ... Got the idea? You can get sick by just reading such an advertising. The anchor is extremely heavy, sharp, and evident, especially if you read my book "Disinfect your mind" And once the anchor is in place, sure, you can order the stuff which saves your life (after the damage, the sales letter did) for mere ... wait!... it's worth $379, should sell at $150, and it costs you mere $48.60 ($39.95 + $8.65 S&H) And, of course, it's "100% risk-free". Also, the author "educated thousands of doctors around the country" and he has a book that is backed up by "over 500 studies" He even used ~100 of those studies to create his vitamin,and that's just "one bottle of vitamins, which is designed to nutritionally support the entire body". Cool! No matter, man, woman, child, elderly, any specific illnesses, just one bottle full of the health and happiness... probably, for the seller. Anchor: Fear of illness and death Carrier: External: Internet, Embedded: profit -- yes, the guy has an affiliate program Claim: See above. Disinfectant: See above. I don't list the name of the virus, because it's actually a family of related viruses actively promoted and distributed by individual enterpreneurs in the supplement industry.

“The pH Miracle” mind virus

2005-05-15T01:38:00.000-07:00

The pH Miracle for Weight Loss: Balance Your Body Chemistry, Achieve Your Ideal Weight by Robert O. Young, Shelley Redford Young, “Bestselling authors of pH Miracle” ISBN 0-446-57722-7

Also, “pH Miracle” by the same authors.

Name: pH Miracle

Type: Umbrella – family of closely related viruses with mostly the same payload and anchors

Anchor: Weight loss, health, longetivity, and, essentially, survival

External carrier: I am aware of commercially published books with a major publisher (Warner Books), website “pH Miracle”, authors also publish papers and pursue other marketing venues.

Embedded carriers: Vegetarianism and extreme claims should attract vegan/new age spiritual activists as volunteer carriers.
If you belong to such a group, be cautious – your beliefs may be exploited

Claim:

The reason for modern weight crisis is the high acidity of our bodies internal environment, primarily blood, caused by wrong food and wrong habits. Once you start to correct your eating habits and turn your body pH (chemical way to measure acidity/alkalinity) to higher (alkaline) values slightly above 7.0 (neutral), your weight will go away at a speed of about 2 pounds per day.

Quote: “Let’s start with a simple math. How many excess pounds do you need to shed to achieve your ideal, healthy weight – 10, 30, 100? Whatever your answer, multiply by two. You now have the MAXIMUM number of days it will take you to reach your goal, if you follow…”

Disinfection:

It is hard to argue that the diet of an average American seems to be somewhat suicidal. Although, I have to admit, I know not so many average Americans in a sense of the mythical diet of French fries and coke. Most average Americans, that I know of, are well aware of damaging effects of such stuff. But, anyway, numbers of McDonald sales speak for themselves.

It is also hard to argue that many things they recommend are clearly beneficial. Examples include, but not limited to: drink a lot of clean pure water every day, eat vegetables, do not eat processed food.

It is, however, hard to establish, if the key claim of authors is right or wrong. They may be right, or they may be wrong. It is very hard to tell, because the credibility of authors is heavily damaged by how they promote their ideas.

First, you need to realize that the authors build a nice market niche out of the ideas: they promote: three sorts of “pH Miracle Water”, they have trademarked and, probably, patented recipes (like “Esther’s Hearty Sprouted Lentil Burgers”, see the chapter on Pathos and Capital letters in my book), they advertise a number of commercial companies in the “Resources” section, including a trademarked “pH Miracle Living Centers” franchise http://www.thephmiraclecenter.com, http://www.thephmiracle.us) that will analyze your blood, provide consultations, and even arrange a “health retreat”, as well as “pH Miracle” supplement and nutrition stores and referral centers on Internet (http://www.phmiracleliving.com, http://www.phmiraclenutrition.com). Of course, there is nothing wrong with making a nice living by helping other people. It’s not bad, it’s just a factor you need to keep in mind.

Second, they use in their books almost every relevant marketing trick, I can think of. The book is beefed up with photos “Simple Joe before” and “Simple Joe after”, as well as satisfied customers testimonials, that you all, probably, have seen in abundance in the direct mail pieces that advertise wonder pills and patches that make people slim in days.

To improve the effect, there are also plenty of “before and after” pictures of live and dried blood under a microscope. It does not matter that without a degree in medicine you hardly can tell which one is good and which one is bad. Good Doctor Young is here to tell you right away which one is good – of course the one after his diet. Speaking seriously, the blood is simply used as a powerful symbol associated deeply in our genetic knowledge with life and death. It is used as a ram to break through your rational mind directly into the subconsciousness.

Some claims of the authors just don’t make sense. For example, on page 65 they claim: “You need to make sure you are drinking high pH water with extra electrons for increased energy.” How can you get high pH in a pure water free of contaminants?

Let's recall few basic facts here: the water chemical formula is H₂O. Essentially, it means that it consists of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. More chemically-wise, it consists of one ion of hydrogen H⁺ (that means that the hydrogen atom lost its only electron) and hydroxyl group OH^- (that means that the atom of oxygen grabbed two extra electrons and keeps also H⁺ ion around).

There are substances with molecules that have extra easily detachable H⁺ ion. These substances are called acids. Example of such a substance is H⁺Cl^- – hydrochloric acid used by your stomach to disintegrate the food, mostly the proteins. Salt in the grocery store in your neighborhood is the sodium salt of hydrochloric acid -- Na⁺Cl^-, where hydrogen ion is replaced with sodium ion. There are also substances with an easily detachable hydroxyl group OH^-. These substances are called alkalis (singular form “alkali”).

Pure water chemically represents a perfect balance between acids and alkalis, for each hydrogen ion it has a hydroxyl group, and they are not easily separated. You can do that, the process is known and called electrolysis, but it requires a lot of energy. With some artistic license you can say that in water hydrogen ion and hydroxyl group are happily married to each other and it takes a lot of effort to “put asunder”. Hence, normal pure water is always pH neutral. The only real way to make it acidic or alkaline is to add some contaminants.

You may wonder what happens if you have a water where hydrogen ions and hydroxyl groups are not balanced, where there is a lot of free hydroxyl groups looking for the “happy marriage”, but all hydrogen ions are already bound in other molecules. That means that the water is statically charged. It’s technically possible, but – surprise – it’s really hard to commercially handle and ship statically charged substances. Such a situation is highly unstable, simply put, it’s likely that it will revert to standard pH neutral water during the shipping process.

What even more puzzling on that page, is the claim “the only two [tested commercially available sources of water] that had a pH above 9.5 carried a positive charge.” Here are two things that don’t make much sense. First, as you already know, high pH (alkaline) means that you have an excess of negatively charged hydroxyl groups. “Positively charged”? Huh?

Even worse, positive charge means that the substance merely lacks electrons. Once you touch this water with your tongue, free electrons from your body rush into the water and unite with extra H+ ions resulting in free neutral hydrogen. Even more likely, this already happened during the shipping even before the magical water come into the contact with your body.

To save the time, here is another claim from this book which does not make much sense (there are just too many of those to list them all): “chicken or turkey… do not urinate, which means they absorb their own acidic urine into their fleshy tissue instead.” (page 118) Well, yes, birds don’t urinate, they also don’t hold the stuff in their guts for too long, it is expelled the moment it gets to the end of their digestive track. The reason for that is that birds evolved to fly, so it was essential to discard any extra weight the moment they don’t need it. To simplify the process, their urine goes straight into the end of their guts achieving two positive goals: immediately discarding extra weight and making their crap liquid and easy to expel. Everybody who lived in an old large city knows how acidic are droppings of city pigeons.

What is also especially bothering, is that the authors don’t hesitate to use damaging mind viruses as well as other marketing techniques. The part on proteins sounds pretty much like a bundle of the old vegan strategic-memes/mind viruses: “Eat pork and you will die”, “Eat chicken and you will die”, “Eat eggs and you will die.” Here is a quote (page 118 again): “Red meat intake has been associated with increased risk of colon cancer, and consumption of animal fat has been linked to prostate, breast, and other cancers.” Granted, they softened the blow and tried to look scientific, but in the essence the message is the ol' good brainwashing “Do what we prohibit and you will die.” This is not the only example, where the authors are too liberal with handling the reader subconsciousness. And with a lot of extremes, they require from their followers, like drinking a mix of water and pulverized grass, it looks like they are building a cult, not a healthy lifestyle. And, not a big surprise, they have a chapter of spirituality. So, after all, it could be that “Miracle” in the title of the book is not a metaphor. J

The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think by Robert Aunger -- 0 stars

2005-05-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think by Robert Aunger Oh, my... First, the author indulgently recognises Dawkins for introducing the term "meme". Then he dismisses the rest of the authors on the topic as "irresponsible". And the next thing you see are the following pearls of Aunger's wisdon: Socially transmitted information is central to the nature of culture. But when it is transmitted, is it replicated? Huh? Ok, maybe it's just an awkward wording. Let's read more... "... information has often been seen as a magical, protean kind of thing..." Mr. Aunger, artists, poets, and other artistic public may indulge themselves in such comparisons, but if you are pretending to do the science, information is a negative binary logarithm of the event's probability, that's it. I = - lg2 ( P ) Again, he is anthropologist, not a mathematician. Some articstic license may be, probably, ok. Reading on. Here is the killer: ...aptly called replicator dynamic. This dynamic underlies all evolutionary processes and can be described mathematically as a generalized catalytic reaction." End quote. Here my Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science finally made me to put his book down. Ouch, ouch, ouch... Yakk! Richard Dawkins was a zoologist. In his book "Selfish Gene" he was talking about something he new very well - genes. He coined the word meme as a distraction and an interesting observation. In contrast, Aunger is an anthropologist, and he is devoting the whole book to the subject, he seems to have no clue about... Don't waste your time on this book, it's not worth it. Better read "Virus of the mind" by Richard Brodie Granted, he has some problems of his own, but at least, after many years at Microsoft, he knows what information is and this is what memes are made from.

Cultural Software : A Theory of Ideology

2005-05-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

Cultural Software : A Theory of Ideology by J.M. Balkin This book is rather interesting in its source -- Yale University. It completely explains ideology and propaganda in terms of memetics and argues that such an explanation overrides traditional explanations of these phenomena. For reference, G.W.Bush graduated from Yale Univeristy, and Condoleeza Rice was a professor there before joining the administration. See more on this book on the Yale site.

"The IQD Iraq Dinar" mind virus

2005-05-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

Name: The IQD Iraq Dinar Category: Get rich quick Anchor: Money Vulnerabilities: Poverty, greed Carrier: Internet, associate programs, eBay Claim: Iraq national currency is devaluated to ~ IQD 1500 = 1 USD as a result of war, regime change and civilian upheavals. But (!), the oil is still there, so the economy of Iraq is bound to revive and strengthen. Historically Iraq currency was pretty high ($3 per dinar), so if you buy a million of Iraq dinars now for less that $1000, you can get a million of USD and more when the counrty will rebound. As examples of previously missed opportunities Deutsche Mark, Kuwait Dinar and Soviet Russian Ruble are quoted. Disinfection:

Iraq Dinar was declared to be equal to $3.22 in 1982 by Saddam Hussein. But it was not freely traded. Hence this exchange rate did not mean much.
Old Hussein's dinars are worthless now as they are now replaced by the new Iraq dinars.
New Iraq Dinar is not freely traded either and mostly limited to Iraq and a single exchange there.
Iraq Central Bank stated objective is to keep it "stable" and prevent it sinking down. So much for "growth prospective".
Reference to Soviet rubles is hilarious, as (1) the old ones were replaced with new rubles at 1000:1 rate, (2) the old ones are not accepted anymore and hence worthless now, and (3) even if they would, they would cost about 27000 Old Soviet rubles for $1 USD (new Russian Ruble is exchanged currently at about 1 USD = 27.8 RUR as of 5/9/2005.

See XE.com - Information on The IQD Iraq Dinar for more details. See also Dinar dupe: currency con man touts value of Iraqi money

Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie

2005-05-05T13:25:00.000-07:00

Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie - Integral Press, 2004, 251 pages, ISBN 0963600125 (first edition: 1995, ISBN 0963600117) Very vivid and internally logical representation of memetic, memes, and mind viruses. Few things are somewhat over the board, like "there is no truth" -- maybe he should have to make this piece more clear. But overall really good and considered one of the classic books on memetic.

The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore

2005-05-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore with Foreword by Richard Dawkins -- Oxford University Press; 2000, 264 pages, ISBN 019286212X, also, hardcover: Oxford University Press, 1999, 264 pages, ISBN 0198503652. This book is polemic with "The Selfish Gene" in terms that it shows how memes override our genetic-defined behavior. A good read if you want to clarify the memetic for yourself, although IMHO a little paranoid, I have to admit.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

2005-05-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - Oxford University Press; 2nd Ed edition, 1990, 368 pages, ISBN 0192860925 (first edition 1976) Here is the book that started it all. That's the actual book where the word "meme" appeared first. Although the book itself is mostly devoted to the biological genes (DNA) and their evolution.

This blog will be devoted to...

2005-05-04T12:24:00.000-07:00

This blog will be devoted to the topic of mind viruses, protecting from them, and my new upcoming book on this subject. I'll also start posting the relevant links and bibliography here, which, probably, will be the main content of this blog for now. See you around! Ely