There are a lot of very lethal viruses in the world, and Ebola is not the most lethal or most easy transmittable, but the main thing which makes me worry about it is the steadiness of its exponential infection curve. … The main stunning feature of it is that the curve is moving straight forward (small downward bump in May-June may be explained by the efforts of existing medical services in Africa to curb the epidemic before services had been overwhelmed). This exponential growth must be stopped, or humanity will face a global catastrophe, and it may start a downward spiral towards extinction; moreover, some estimates suggest that pandemic doubling time is actually two weeks (because of underreporting of actual cases), so in five months, seven billion will be infected: total infection, by July 2015. … Such catastrophes may not mean total human extinction, as only around 70% of people infected currently die from Ebola (and even less because we don’t know, or share, asymptomatic cases), but still, this means the end of the world as we know it. This virus is the first step towards the road of full extinction … If the virus will mutate quickly, there will be many different strains of it, so it will ultimately create a multi-pandemic. … Some of the strains may became airborne, or have higher transmission rates, but the main risk from multi-pandemic is that it overcomes defenses provided by the natural variability of the human genome and immunity. (By the way, the human genome variability is very low because of the recent bottle neck in the history of our population. …) … We are almost clones from the view point of genetic variability typical for natural populations. […] The Human race is very unique – it has very large population but very small genetic diversity. It means that it is more susceptible to pandemics. […] Also, a large homogenous population is ideal for breeding different strains of infection. … If the genetic diversity of a pathogen is bigger than human diversity, than it could cause a near total extinction, and also, large and homogenous populations help breed such a diversity of pathogens feeding on the population. … [embedded link] … “The Ebola virus can survive for several days outside the body” [link] … “It is infectious as breathable 0.8 to 1.2-μm laboratory-generated droplets” … “Also many of the greatest plagues mankind has ever known were not airborne: e.g. smallpox.” …

… Another problem is the lack of adequate responses from global authorities; they are half a year behind the situation. You can’t react to exponential threats “proportionally”. You must be several steps ahead. […] Everything they do now should have been done half a year ago. […] Unlimited exponential growth is a mark of potential global catastrophe: self-improving AI; nuclear chain reactions; self-replicating grey goo from nanobots; all examples are especially dangerous in a naïve environment. A large human population without immunity to Ebola, or any other Marburg style viruses, is fuel for exponential viral growth. … Ebola is mostly transmittable only in hard cases when a person shits and bleeds uncontrollably, but it is also contagious from non-symptomatic people, so Ebola is not naturally selecting for mildness; it may do just the opposite. It may be selected for extreme and “fluid-like” dying. … Also Ebola seems to influence behavior zombie style, as late stage patients attack medical personal, run from quarantine or even bite someone — it happened in Nigeria and Liberia — the same can be said of rabies and toxoplasma. … Here we also should mention the meme aspect of the Ebola virus, which is the psychological stigma and fear associated with the disease. The fear has led to riots in Liberia, which additionally helped spread the virus. (See for example rumors that dead Ebola patients had resurrected [link]) … So Ebola is also mimetic [sic] hazard, and the fear of it prevents rational control of the epidemic: people flee it, destroy hospitals, or they live in denial of it.

If Ebola slaughters most of the human population, hundred of millions of people will still survive the pandemic itself (if it will not become multi-pandemic with many different strains of Ebola-like viruses). […] It will end technological civilization as we know it, and it probably start the self-sustainable process of destruction, which is the consequent failure of different institutions and technologies as well as wars and general disorder. It may be a long term degradation process, which has its own logic and its bottom may be very far from now.

Many more links at the original.

So to summarize this argument: Ebola really is a zombie plague, it could sweep the earth in under a year (with ~70% lethality), human evolutionary history adds peculiar biological vulnerabilities, its virulence might be far higher than commonly understood, and the catalytic global process thus unleashed has the potential to cascade forward all the way to full X-risk. There might be a way to mash down harder on the ‘scream’ button, but right now I’m not seeing how.

Seizing the opportunity for an Ebola fest (doubtless already behind the curve):

It could already be in Britain.

Turning it into a national security issue has made it more dangerous.

Libertarian responses from Stefan Molyneux and Ron Paul.

The mathematics of contagion elucidated by Gregory Cochran.

Racism is the real threat.

ADDED: Institutional Breakdown in a Time of Ebola. (Epic.)

ADDED: Quality Ebola commentary from SoBL, Dampier, and Thompson. Dreher on Castillo. Escalating concern at Nature and the NYT. Chris Brown and 8chan try to be helpful. Dialing it up another notch. Where next? Polls, preparations, protocols, politics … Blame the Bilderbergers.

Ezra Klein is on my unbelievably annoying people list, but he was only a kid when he got there, and this (interview) is really good work. Some additional recent articles, in escalating order of panic, plus some geopolitical complication.

Then there’s the weird stuff. We all know where that road leads …

ADDED: Ebola-Chan and teleological discipline.

ADDED: Even Chris Matthews is getting agitated. Still, USG is remaining calm. Thanks to Manticore for getting this started:

@ad_bestias Good Luck Obama-Chan! #thankyouObamachan

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) October 1, 2014

This was my gateway into the horror-tracts of Ebola-Chan. It was immediately obvious that something of great significance was happening.
Upsetting (for those still nursing shreds of humane moral intuition): certainly, and deliberately.
Meaningful: beyond question, and massively.

The ebola trendline is currently exponential. Richard Fernandez places the phenomenon in its proper intellectual context. Whatever else the outbreak may be — a human (and economic) catastrophe for West Africa, a threat to the West — it is also a revelation (or ‘apocalypse’ in the strict sense). It’s a Khan Academy demonstration for slow and reluctant learners. Such things lend themselves to spontaneous religious interpretation.

It wasn’t supposed to look like this:

The (rough) coincidence with the death of 4chan is — in itself — a topic of abysmal fascination. I’m kicking that can for the moment. There’s much on this precursor discussion thread of relevance.

For now, some preliminary indications as to why this might be thought to matter (immensely), in revisable order of gravity:

(1) Readers of John Michael Greer are prepared for socio-economic decline to be accompanied by an eruption of religious abnormality. For anybody with a taste for irony (a crucial epistemological disposition, in the opinion of this blog), there is much nourishment to be found in the Ebola-Chan phenomenon. Most prominently, despite — and more probably because of — the shocking racism propelling it, Ebola-Chan opens a cross-cultural plane of communication completely absent from the ‘responsible’ Western responses to the plague. It makes sense of ebola in a way that is far closer to the sensibility of its target populations than the lofty medico-globalist pronouncements of legitimated authorities. Ebola-Chan packages the outbreak for a folk-religious response — of exactly the kind it is being met with in the villages it (or ‘she’?) ravages.

(2) Ebola-Chan is a demoness of communication, not only across cultures (West Africa, America, Japan …) but also between cultural and biological patterns of virulence. The ‘meme’ — as a more-or-less exact analog of the gene — is unleashed on 4chan in sympathy with the virus. It connects with the biological contagion, in various ways, through relations of copying (transcription), prolongation, and promotion. Ebola-Chan is a crossing.

(3) As memotechnics, Ebola-Chan condenses an accumulated stock of practical heuristics. Its genre is, most immediately, that of the chain-letter — conveying a message pre-adapted to spreading. Copy me, or be punished (stricken). It’s darkly humorous, cruel, ironical, and self-reflective, but at the level of memotechnics none of this undermines anything. If “I love you Ebola-Chan” spreads as a joke — it still spreads. The Nigerian email scam industry attests to the inter-cultural consistency of this memotechnic plane.

(4) Ebola-Chan is already operating as a factor in Fourth-Generation Warfare. It complicates the pacification efforts of the ‘international community’ in unpredictable ways. Once again, certain peculiar cultural formations are waiting to connect with it. At this stage it is difficult to reach even the preliminary stage of a lucid analysis, but clearly the memotechnic militarization of a medical emergency is an obstacle to the smooth evolution of established management procedures. The WHO is not ideologically equipped to publicize its intervention within the context of an occult religious race war.

(5) To what extent is Ebola-Chan an avatar of globalized Helter Skelter? Surely not to no extent at all?

(6) As 4chan is pushed ever deeper into the shadows, it seems reasonable to assume that its practical alliance with memotechnic chaos will also deepen. In this respect, Ebola-Chan is the Yin to the Cathedral’s Yang — a complement, fed by subterranean conservation laws. Much prophetic density accompanies such an analysis. If it is an end, it is no less the beginning of an end.

Badly cropped but horribly beautiful.

ADDED: Ebola-chan, ebola-chan, Ebola-Chan, ebola-chan, Ebola-Chan is Love~ …

ADDED: Ebola-Chan on Facebook.

ADDED: WaPo takes a look. “But even if the mods do remove [Ebola-chan threads], Ebola-Chan may have done her damage. Much like the disease itself, now that she’s out there, there’s no controlling her.”

ADDED: Rituals to Nurgle: Ebola Is Coming (Styxhexenhammer666).

MONROVIA, Liberia – Liberian officials fear Ebola could soon spread through the capital’s largest slum after residents raided a quarantine center for suspected patients and took items including blood-stained sheets and mattresses.

“All between the houses you could see people fleeing with items looted from the patients,” the official said, adding that he now feared “the whole of West Point will be infected.”

(Incredibly, it gets worse.)

ADDED: Bryce sent this along.

Outside in has no settled position on this (yet), and hadn’t expected to need one. A tentative proposal though: The League of Shadows is so radically neoreactionary it doesn’t relate to the Left as a political option, but solely as a mindless pathogen — as germ warfare to be guided against a decaying social order. That militant leftist activism will produce nothing but ruin is an assumption held so firmly it doesn’t require explicit acknowledgement — and the movie audience has to tacitly identify with this analysis for Bane’s strategy to make any sense. The Left is a disease, and therefore a potential bioweapon.

To try to work something like that outside a movie, it would really be necessary to be the functional equivalent of the League of Shadows (manipulating mainstream politics dexterously, from above, or beyond). It’s probably agreed that NRx isn’t there yet … unless what we see hides something else.

ADDED: In the Twitter chat, it has pointed out that my understanding of the background story is profoundly confused (especially regarding Bane’s troubled relationship with the League of Shadows). Hopefully, by the time people have finished with me in the ensuing comments thread, I’ll have been properly schooled. This (suggested by @CineRobert) might help.

Laliberte asks: “is there a difference between Prometheus’ fire and Pandora’s box?” Given everything said about the Promethean, and the very considerable ideological-theoretical work that it does, is it not strange that the Pandoran is scarcely recognized as a term, or a concept, at all? To talk about fire is mere shallow bedazzlement, in comparison to any serious examination of boxes. Boxes not only have a shape, but also an inside and an outside, which means — at least implicitly — a transcendental structure. They model worlds, and suggest ways out of them.

Pandora’s box, of course, is significant above all for its content, which is released, or gets out. Promethean flame, which is stolen, is contrasted with Pandoran plague, which escapes. Laliberte seizes the opportunity to discuss memes (and the ‘hypermeme’). An infectious being is set loose, in the shape of a Neoreactionary Basilisk. (On twitter, Michael Anissimov deplores the irresponsibility of this outbreak.)

Pandora (Πανδώρα — the all-gifted, and perhaps omni-munificent), is a figure from the deepest recesses of Classical Antiquity, whose first detectable echoes are found in the Hesiodic texts of the 7th century BC. Her myth functions — at least superficially — as a theodicy, comparable in many ways to the story of the Biblical Eve. She releases evil into history through curiosity, and thus knots together a dreadful intelligence, of a kind that anticipates Roko’s Basilisk and the menace of Unfriendly AI. The AI Box Experiment is so Pandoran it stings.

Among the horrors of the Basilisk, is that to talk about it being inside — and how to keep it there — is already the way that it gets out. Hence the extraordinary panic it generates, among those who begin to get it (in the epidemiological sense, among others). Even to think about it is to succumb.

At Less Wrong, hushed tones attest to the resilient veneration of Pandora. She is dangerous (and anything dangerous, given only intelligence, can be a weapon).

ADDED: Direct access to the Creepypasta Wiki.

Roko’s basilisk is notable for being completely banned from discussion on LessWrong, where any mention of it is deleted. Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of LessWrong, considers the basilisk to not work, but will not explain why because he does not consider open discussion of the notion of acausal trade with possible superintelligences to be provably safe.

Silly over-extrapolations of local memes, jargon and concepts are posted to LessWrong quite a lot; almost all are just downvoted and ignored. But for this one, Yudkowsky reacted to it hugely, then doubled-down on his reaction. Thanks to the Streisand effect, discussion of the basilisk and the details of the affair soon spread outside of LessWrong. Indeed, it’s now discussed outside LessWrong frequently, almost anywhere that LessWrong is discussed at all. The entire affair constitutes a worked example of spectacular failure at community management and at controlling purportedly dangerous information.

Some people familiar with the LessWrong memeplex have suffered serious psychological distress after contemplating basilisk-like ideas — even when they’re fairly sure intellectually that it’s a silly problem. The notion is taken sufficiently seriously by some LessWrong posters that they try to work out how to erase evidence of themselves so a future AI can’t reconstruct a copy of them to torture.

“… You mean, retrochronic AI infiltration is actually driving people out of their minds, right now?” Oh yes. At Less Wrong, commentator ‘rev’ cries out for help:

Are there any mechanisms on this site for dealing with mental health issues triggered by posts/topics (specifically, the forbidden Roko post)? I would really appreciate any interested posters getting in touch by PM for a talk. I don’t really know who to turn to. … 

Wandering through the psych ward, past rows of neurologically-shattered Turing Cops, broken deep in their minds by something unspeakable that came at them out of the near future … I’m totally hooked. Alrenous has been remarkably successful at weaning me off this statistical ontology junk, but  one hit of concentrated EDT and it all rolls back in, like the tide of fate.

Nightmares become precision engineered machine-parts. Thus are we led a little deeper in, along the path of shadows …

ADDED: (Yudkowsky) “… potential information hazards shouldn’t be posted without being wrapped up in warning envelopes that require a deliberate action to look through. Likewise, they shouldn’t be referred-to if the reference is likely to cause some innocently curious bystander to look up the material without having seen any proper warning labels. Basically, the same obvious precautions you’d use if Lovecraft’s Necronomicon was online and could be found using simple Google keywords – you wouldn’t post anything which would cause anyone to enter those Google keywords, unless they’d been warned about the potential consequences.”

ADDED: The Forbidden Lore (preserved screenshot)

(‘Pliability’ is my middle name.)