@mnin @Andrei Cociuba Your comments have taken this thread in a real interesting direction which resonates quite deeply with me. I grew up in an extremely privileged position, and being insulated from overt violence made it very easy to swallow the idea that violence is necessarily evil and that Western democracies are doing a good job mostly suppressing it. Obviously that's not an outlook that survives the real world for very long, and based on my own experiences over the past few years I entirely buy the idea that memes can help steer one's political philosophy. Personally I found myself at the edge of and nearly venturing down the NRx/alt-right rabbit hole, primed by a culture which valued, among other things, memes and free speech absolutism as a core value. Ultimately I was unable to handle the gender/race essentialism permeating that space and was forced to reevaluate the rest of my worldview which had led me to that point.

As of now I'm trying to break my conditioning, as it were, by reading more and longer-form works. But recently I've been feeling critical of that approach as well, as big-L Western Liberalism seems to overvalue knowledge by itself. Two questions I'm pondering, semi-connected.

1. The world is highly connected, perhaps to a far greater degree than a hundred years ago thanks to the Internet. What ought my threshold be to stop learning about who I'm connected to and actually act? What's the effective level of synthesis between awareness of my impact and action?
2. Violence is not inherently evil, and it also exists in far more forms and greater magnitude than I was once aware. Where in the world is bad violence being performed in my name, and how can I stop it? Would it be useful to break my instinctive distaste for violence and personally perform some kind of productive violence?

To bring it back to the original thread, I've found that memes tend to provide overly simple answers to those questions, especially on the right where said answers often depend on stereotypes. Competing memes also seem overly simple, though in a way I'm not really able to define. Yet I can't deny the impact all kinds of memes have had on my thinking. Propaganda is a good word for it.

i might have a simplistic view, but i value anything based on its usefulness regarding things i can actually do with it.

learning about many and various things is a great pastime for me, but if i were to just learn, i would never have actual time to act upon what i learn, so at that extreme i find it becoming useless.

so i think you should stop learning before it becomes learning for learning's sake. its nice to know about the existence of some root in papua new guinea being used to make penis-sheats, but as long as i can foresee no possible future for me going there or needing to wear one, i am not interested to learn how exactly it might be processed into such product. connected world or not.

@Andrei Cociuba That increasingly seems like closer to the "moral" way to do things, but.

1. Learning for learning's sake is something I instinctively like, and a habit which is hard to break.
2. I'm not a utilitarian so can't accept it totally.

The trivia/useful knowledge distinction is helpful though, thanks for the thoughts.

also, i meant that violence is not a "necessary" evil. its an evil that exists, wether necessary, wanted, or ignored, or superfluous, extra and a flunk of evolution, none of the views about its functions should ignore the fact that it is there nevertheless, in a purely descriptive way, there.

ignoring that it is there, on the other hand, might leave it unchecked, and by the time it makes itself irrevocably known to you, it might be hard to reign back in.

On the topic of learning for learnings sake, the problem of utilitarianism is that the utility functions are far to broad to be useful.

a piece of useless knowledge could very well be useful as trivia chit-chat in a context where it would help ot bond and create very useful relationships with people. there's no way to know a priori in what way something might be useful.

however, you could at least try to predict the utility of a topic somewhat, in order to inform your choice about the most productive things to learn about, comparatively.

some things in life are just "best guess" kinda things.