alt.hn

1/1/2026 at 9:24:39 PM

Straussian Memes

 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CAwnnKoFdcQucq4hG/straussian-memes-a-lens-on-techniques-for-mass-persuasion

by kp1197

1/2/2026 at 2:24:36 AM

Unrelated to the topic, I’m a bit at a loss as to what to make of this website. There was a link to a really cool analysis of artificial intelligence research. And I guess they are a nonprofit and are raising $2M for “infrastructure“ but I think they mean infrastructure in the sense of software they like, and not the kind of infrastructure normal people think of like plumbing, electricity, and roads. I spent a few minutes browsing, and I can’t even tell what charitable purpose or educational purpose they could be serving. There’s just no clear statement of purpose anywhere other than I suppose being really rational.

Who are these dudes?

by stocksinsmocks

1/2/2026 at 3:16:39 AM

I can't tell whether your question here is satire. I want to believe it's genuine, by the power of HN norms, in which case congratulations, you are one of today's unlucky 10,000.

by arduanika

1/2/2026 at 3:05:32 AM

Dude, seriously, walk away. You have stumbled upon the website of a cult that ensnares smart people and eats their brains. No level of exposure is safe.

by adastra22

1/2/2026 at 3:09:26 AM

Like something that if you look at it too long you won't be able to pull yourself away? Almost as if you were petrified? That's an interesting idea. Someone ought to write an essay.

by maxbond

1/2/2026 at 3:11:35 AM

LMAO

by adastra22

1/2/2026 at 5:35:17 AM

This is not how I wanted to find out I’m stupid :((

by nothrabannosir

1/1/2026 at 11:25:25 PM

I don't know what you'd call something structured like this, but I really love that advice:

"You can't change the people around you -

But you can change the people around you."

by VikingCoder

1/2/2026 at 12:28:46 AM

What is the difference between a Straussian meme and a double entendre?

by JumpCrisscross

1/2/2026 at 2:48:00 AM

Allegedly a Straussian meme is "self stabilizing" because it imposes some sort of cost to buying into the lower or higher meaning. So it's a multiple entendre that has ideological or epistemic implications. (I'm not convinced this is a thing, the examples were pretty contrived.)

Whereas in the example here, acting on that advice is costly (it means losing friends) but believing it is free. And there aren't different layers of meaning accessible to different parties. It's straightforwardly a play on words.

by maxbond

1/2/2026 at 1:06:37 AM

I think one is more interpretation vs lexical similarity

by klysm

1/2/2026 at 2:30:13 AM

I would’ve preferred more examples.

by drivebyhooting

1/2/2026 at 5:08:49 AM

Yeah if only to justify why a phenomenon deserves its own term and article. I wouldn’t even call the examples the author used memes.

by janalsncm

1/2/2026 at 1:27:11 AM

The fact that the LessWrong crowd will reference a memeified version of Leo Strauss is very telling. To be anti-philosophy but really into Leo Strauss. Curious. I wonder where they encountered his ideas?

Edit: Not sure why I was being coy. I'm talking about the Claremont Institute.

by throw4847285

1/2/2026 at 3:48:18 AM

"Straussian moment" is a struassian meme

by petermcneeley

1/1/2026 at 11:42:38 PM

I think the author is talking about "exoteric" meaning, which is for public consumption, and "esoteric" meaning, which is for the initiated. Even though they say they aren't dogwhistles or shibboleths, these Straussian memes are closely related, as the accusation asserts that there is an "esoteric" meaning to something beneath its "exoteric" face value.

They may be a converse of the Scissor Statement, which has a dual meaning that is irreconcilable between the separate interpreters. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190508)

by motohagiography

1/1/2026 at 11:12:42 PM

Another phrase that comes to mind is "Plausible Deniability": By uttering ambiguous sentences you can deny all but one possible meanings of what you say. And talking to different audiences at different times you can claim you didn't mean anything like what your citics are claiming you did.

But I like the idea there is a term for this, be it Straussian Memes or something else. What I didn't quite get is how "self-stabilizing" works?

What I'd like is for TV-anchors to get wise and start asking their interviewees "What EXACTLY do you mean when you use this term ...". But I guess they won't because they too are happy to spread a meme which multiple different communities can like because they understand it in the way they like.

by galaxyLogic

1/1/2026 at 11:49:50 PM

> Another phrase that comes to mind is "Plausible Deniability": By uttering ambiguous sentences you can deny all but one possible meanings of what you say. And talking to different audiences at different times you can claim you didn't mean anything like what your citics are claiming you did.

This is the core rhetorical tactic of the progressive left in a nutshell. Linguistic superposition, equivocation, Schrodinger's definition - whatever you want to call it, it's the ability to have your cake and eat it too by simply changing your definitions, or even someone else's, post hoc.

Let us take a moment to be reminded of the English Socialism of Orwell and doublespeak.

by ryandv

1/2/2026 at 12:27:35 AM

> the core rhetorical tactic of the progressive left in a nutshell

I live in Wyoming and have MAGA and ultra-progressive friends.

Multiple messaging is a hallmark of all elites. Sometimes it’s functional: being able to say something sharp that if repeated is ambiguous is a skill. Anyone who has any power or authority wields it. It is so common to suggest requirement. (Other times, multiple messaging lets one apologise in a public setting without making things awkward.)

In many respects, it’s an essential feature of commanding language. Compressing multiple meanings into fewer words is the essence of poetry and literature.

by JumpCrisscross

1/2/2026 at 12:32:59 AM

> In many respects, it’s an essential feature of commanding language. Compressing multiple meanings into fewer words is the essence of poetry and literature.

Aye, perhaps prompting is the be-all-end-all skill, after all: the ability to distill out an idea into its most concentrated, compressed essence, so it can be diluted, expanded, and reworded ad infinitum by the LLMs.

brb while I search for the word prompt that generated the universe...

by ryandv

1/2/2026 at 12:41:09 AM

> the ability to distill out an idea into its most concentrated, compressed essence, so it can be diluted, expanded, and reworded ad infinitum by the LLMs

Nobody said people haven’t rendered themselves unable to understand poetry or literature through the ages. Nor that these skills haven’t had a distinct class mark to them.

Same here. Someone who relies on LLMs to speak and read will not be able to compete in a live environment. (Someone who uses them as a tool may gain an advantage. But that’s predicated on having the base skill.)

by JumpCrisscross

1/2/2026 at 12:08:18 AM

"Core rhetorical tactic of the progressive left". Or the conservative right, depending on which side of this divide one happens to stand on. And speaking of Orwell, he was pointing out the doublespeak of the Fascists, not the socialists.

by lcuff

1/2/2026 at 12:10:54 AM

It's really quite potent in terms such as "racism" or "gender" which have seen unilateral attempts at redefinition.

by ryandv

1/2/2026 at 12:13:43 AM

"Illegal alien" is one of the greatest accomplishments of language engineering and was unambiguously successful.

When the left tries this today it results in equal and opposite backlash and has no effect in terms of policy, winning elections, and that sort of stuff, but it certainly can be a motor that keeps online bubbles bubbling.

by PaulHoule

1/2/2026 at 12:15:11 AM

I think there is no equivocation or ambiguity here, unless you are me at age 5 asking why aliens have landed in Mexico.

I would hazard that you are underestimating the impact of these rhetorical tactics, but I've not the energy to aggressively litigate and cite this point further.

by ryandv

1/2/2026 at 1:36:39 AM

The effectiveness of these tactics is incredible, it helps people who build an identity around marginalization to always feel marginalized. If they ever won anything it would threaten their whole reason for existence.

by PaulHoule

1/2/2026 at 12:38:48 AM

Again, I think this is likely seen differently depending on which side of the political spectrum one stands, and what sources of information one attunes to. I agree that both 'racism' and 'gender' have become flash-points for discord, and that one can point to the left as trying to change the definitions. But I can think of other words that the right is equally guilty of attempting to re-define. For example, 'woke' was a term originally rooted in African American communities meaning awareness of systemic injustice, but is now used by the right as pejorative for anything they disagree with. (Including the existence of systemic injustice, sigh.)

by lcuff

1/1/2026 at 9:47:19 PM

Did I miss something, or are none of the examples both Straussian and memetic/memes? I feel like if this were a real thing, one could imagine one example. Also, that's not how churches generally work.

by cathyreisenwitz

1/1/2026 at 10:39:39 PM

Religions themselves are a great example of a Straussian meme, it’s shocking how close they got to using that example but instead went somewhere else with it that made zero sense.

I suspect that the use of incredibly bad examples is some sort of intentional Straussian joke, and that the entire article itself, and not the examples in it, is supposed to be the real example of a Straussian meme.

by UniverseHacker

1/2/2026 at 2:38:30 AM

I wish atheist would just stop writing about Christian practices. Particularly screenwriters. It’s better that your audience assumes you are ignorant than to open your mouth and prove them right.

by stocksinsmocks

1/1/2026 at 10:12:33 PM

It's classic Bay Area monoculture, like that Paul Graham essay about "things you can't say". People are deferential to it because LessWrong is a hugbox or because Graham is rich but in that monoculture people are used to laughing at jokes that lack a punch line and thinking that makes them "insiders", "cool", or "smart", compared to people in flyover states, the East Coast, and the rest of California who can't see the Emperor's clothes.

The article itself is an example of something that overlaps to some extent with its subject without being an example of the subject, like all the examples in it. It's an intriguing idea, like "things you can't say" but without examples it falls flat but that won't bother the rationalists anymore than they are bothered by Aella's "experiments" or allegedly profound fanfics or adding different people's utility functions or reasoning about the future without discounting. It's a hugbox.

Or maybe it is something they can't find any examples of it because humans can't make them, only hypothetical superhuman AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyOEwiQhzMI

by PaulHoule

1/1/2026 at 10:43:31 PM

Your rant about Bay Area subcultures is suspiciously written in jargon that only someone deep in these subcultures would recognize- well done, very Straussian.

by UniverseHacker

1/1/2026 at 11:50:03 PM

You know they do have my picture in the dictionary next to "insider-outsider!"

by PaulHoule

1/2/2026 at 12:26:04 AM

Everybody's mileage will vary on this ... I spent a lot of time in the year after I read Paul Graham's essay on "things you can't say", searching for things that I thought matched the criteria he set out, and found a few. But it's not that the words may never cross my lips, I can say these things within some small circle of people, but would definitely not be saying them in public without being prepared for an onslaught of negative attention. Some examples of 'cancel culture' are proof of this. Donald G. McNeil comes to mind.

That said, I'm not impressed with the notion of Straussian memes and agree that way better examples are needed to give the idea some validity.

by lcuff

1/2/2026 at 1:35:56 AM

[dead]

by aaron695

1/2/2026 at 12:30:07 AM

I've called things shaped like this "polyentendre".

In my head I think of it has just really high linguistic compression. Minus intent, it is just superimposing multiple true statements into a small set of glyphs/phonemes.

Its always really context sensitive. Context is the shared dictionary of linguistic compression, and you need to hijack it to get more meanings out of words.

Places to get more compression in:

- Ambiguity of subject/object with vague pronouns (and membership in plural pronouns)

- Ambiguity of English word-meaning collisions

- Lack of specificity in word choice.

- Ambiguity of emphasis in written language or delivery. They can come out a bit flat verbally.

A group people in a situation:

- A is ill

- B poisoned A

- C is horrified about the situation but too afraid to say anything

- D thinks A is faking it.

- E is just really cool

"They really are sick" is uttered by an observer and we don't know how much of the above they have insight into.

I just get a kick out of finding statements like this for fun in my life. Doing it with intent is more complicated.

What the author describes seems more like strategic ambiguity but slightly more specific. I don't think it is a useful label they try to cast here.

by blamestross