Ok, a few reflections on the book: 1. qntm defines antimemes as self-erasing information, but this book has a different (but related) definition of the concept: antimemes are (a) high-impact and (b) low transmissibility. Roughly, they are "important secrets". 2. The low transmissibility can be because the ideas are dense/difficult to understand (e.g. Moldbug's blog posts), or taboo/socially forbidden, or transient in some way (e.g. daylight savings time annoys people once a year, then we all forget about it example). Thus, these ideas tend to thrive in group chats and small networks of dedicated/passionate people. Eventually, the burst onto the public consciousness, sometimes in disruptive ways. 3. Original ideas are inherently antimemetic: they're very hard to transmit at first because you don't have the right language to talk about them, and they're easy to forget. This is why so few people have them at all. The most important ideas start as antimemes. 4. Generative small groups are the optimal environment for new ideas to arise and be developed. 5. Nadia defines "supermemes" as high impact / *high* transmissibility. Supermemes often present as apocalyptic in some way -- if you don't listen to this, you might literally die. Hence climate change, AI risk, war/nationalism as all cited as example supermemes. The book is very suspicious of supermemes: they suck up everyone's attention and time and result in very little constructive action; they are parasites. 5(a). "Memes" are low impact / high transmissibility. Think cat videos or brief flash-in-the-pan cultural moments that get forgotten quickly. 6. The book points out that there's often a clear "patient zero" for important ideas in the discourse: e.g. Nick C. with the jhanas, Venkatesh Rao popularizing Scott's "Seeing Like a State", and various other 'patient zeros' for now-important ideas are discussed. Ideas that survive often have Champions who talk about them persistently for many years. 7. There's a fun discussion of memetic/information warfare, and how preference cascades can be best understood. A great way to spread antimemes is to form private groups around them but not make the existence of those groups public, and have individual members of the group sometimes promote the ideas in a way that looks uncorrelated. Makes it seem that the support for the idea is more widespread than it might be initially. Eventually you reach a tipping point where it becomes socially ok to express that idea. 8. The Hayekian case for capitalism is an antimeme. Whereas communism is a supermeme: the ideas are very intuitive to everyone, unlike with capitalism where you need a lot of logic to understand how it works and why things end up being better over time. This explains why economists are so resigned to being perennially misunderstood: economic ideas are just quite hard to understand! Luckily, capitalism (a) works (b) can hook into people's greed, and so it survives, even though comparatively few people understand why. 9. It's a fun exercise to identify ideas that are 'on the cusp' / in the dark forest right now, but aren't quite fully acceptable to say out loud yet. I can think of quite a few. 10. Part of the implicit challenge of the book is "what good ideas will you be the champion of?" and "stop thinking so much about dumb culture war stuff and form more small groups to develop and propagandize the actual good ideas!". So even though the book laments the death of the open web, I also read it as pro group chat. 11. Some meta points: it's refreshing to read something that's written like a blog post, but in book form; almost all non-fiction is written in the same journalistic voice nowadays, but this one just gets to the point and packs an impressive number of insights per page. It's also great to read a book that cites the current intellectual scene, more or less as it's happening (most of the citations are URLs to blog posts). 12. Going beyond the book: many words and stories function as containers for ideas that are too complex to be put into legible language. The story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac in the Bible (Genesis 22) for example, is not merely a carrier for the idea "you should obey God unquestioningly". The story is more than that, but it's hard to say how except by meditating on it a lot and making it a part of yourself. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, one of my favorite books, is about this: the narrator, a non-believer, tries to explain the Abraham story several different ways and through various conceptual lenses (universal ethics, etc.), and concludes that it's fundamentally inexplicable in plain language. Thus the need for 'faith'. I view this as saying that the idea underlying this is real, but too high-dimensional to be flattened into any kind of explanation; it must instead be felt viscerally. Many of the most important ideas are like this.