Meme Hunter

A while back I came across a little known psychiatric device typically referred to as "Hitler's Sweater". The classical name for this theoretical scenario is the contagion heuristic. The inability of a lot of people to pronounce either word correctly, let alone to spell them corrrectly or give definitions of etiher term is probably why people refer to it by it's shining example of Hitler's Sweater.

Heuristic is a fancy word for what people often call a rule of thumb, common sense, street smarts, or even intuition in some circumstances. The contagion heuristic is a model of magical thinking or irrational thought. Consider this...

You are cold. So I give you a sweater. You put it on, thank me, and I tell you that the sweater used to be Hitler's. Most people will have a negative reaction to the sweater. They may want to take it off. They might be mad at me for not telling them that it used to belong to Hitler. A lot of people would rather be cold than to wear Hitler's sweater. But what if it had also been worn by Mother Theresa in the interim? How long would Mother Theresa have to have worn the sweater to counter act the essence of Hitler people see lingering in the article of clothing?

Another meme I just ran across today and found amusing.

Meta-agnostic: a person who isn't sure whether-or-not they are agnostic.