(2025-11-22) Rival Voices You Cant Judge Memes

Rival Voices: You Can’t Judge Memes. The ‘Existential Hope’ arm of the Foresight Institute is presently running a Meme Contest with a $10,000 prize. A panel of judges will evaluate entries based on things like their “virality potential.”

The memes they’re judging have already failed to go viral. If they hadn’t, you would have heard about them.

their hearts are in the right place—they want to steer culture toward better futures. It’s just the mechanism that’s wrong

we need to look at how memes behave. Let’s do that by studying the biggest meme of the century.

It’s 2025. AI is unavoidable. Bear with me.
John McCarthy coined ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in 1956 for a workshop at Dartmouth—purely as memetic judo. He later admitted he chose the new label to avoid the older field of cybernetics and its dominant figure, Norbert Wiener.

Fast forward to the 2010s. Back then, the biggest problem the AI meme faced was making people not dismiss it as “The Terminator.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about against this extensively: he wanted people to take AI seriously—as civilization-ending risk, not as science fiction.
The irony is that he ended up inspiring the current builders, instead of deterring them.

But here’s where it gets really good: Eliezer wrote the post screenshotted above in 2007. In it, he argued against “The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence”.

In 2023, then President Joe Biden pushed a sweeping executive order on AI safety motivated by… him having watched Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, where the villain is a runaway AI called “the Entity.”
Could Eliezer have predicted this? Could the judges?

If this trajectory seems exceptional, just look at our past decade

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he pushed for early covid vaccine procurement as aggressively as he did because he’d watched the 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion

A comedian whose campaign was literally launched through a TV show where he played the president became the actual president of Ukraine.

Note the pattern: unlikely origin → memetic fitness → real consequences. And note what’s absent: predictability.

Which brings me to the meme contest.

The central mistake being made is thinking you can evaluate memes in isolation. But memes aren’t static artifacts—they’re organisms whose fitness depends on their environment.

I’ve recently learned Earth’s weather is unpredictable beyond a few days because weather events constantly collide with one another, creating cascading effects. Earth’s memetic landscape is like its weather

If judges can’t foresee the cascading effects of ideas colliding, what exactly are they evaluating?

Fitness is revealed only at deployment, never at design.