Many on the modern left are fundamentally neurologically broken, and may not be fixable. By Copernican.
A bold and important insight into the left from the world of AI. Because, in some ways, we are all just LLMs (large language models — “in the beginning was the word”).
AI:
Model collapse is a serious limit to AI systems; a failure mode that occurs when AI is trained on AI-generated data. At this point, AI-generated content has infiltrated nearly every digital space (and many physical print spaces), extending even to scientific publications. As a result, AI is beginning to recycle AI-generated data. This is causing problems in the AI development industry.
In reviewing model collapse, the symptoms bear a striking resemblance to certain non-digital cultural failings. ...
It may be that, by happenstance in AI development, we have stumbled upon an underlying natural law, a fundamental principle. When applied to trained neural network systems, information-fidelity loss and collapse may be universal, not specific to digital systems.
This line of reasoning has serious sociological implications: decadence may be more than just a moral failing; it may be universally applicable. …
The way neural networks function is that they examine real-world data and then create an average of that data to output. The AI output data resembles real-world data (image generation is an excellent example), but valuable minority data is lost. If model 1 trains on 60% black cats and 40% orange cats, then the output for “cat” is likely to yield closer to 75% black cats and 25% orange cats. If model 2 trains on the output of model 1, and model 3 trains on the output of model 2… then by the time you get to the 5th iteration, there are no more orange cats… and the cats themselves quickly become malformed Chronenburg monstrosities
Training on AI-generated data causes models to hallucinate, become delusional, and deviate from reality to the point where they’re no longer useful: i.e., Model Collapse. …
The more “poisoned” the data is with artificial content, the more quickly an AI model collapses as minority data is forgotten or lost. The majority of data becomes corrupted, and long-tail statistical data distributions are either ignored or replaced with nonsense. …
Mice:
The Mouse Utopia, universe 25, experiment by John B. Calhoun placed eight mice in a habitat that should have comfortably housed around 6,000 mice. The mice promptly reproduced, and the population grew.
Following an adjustment period, the first pups were born 3½ months later, and the population doubled every 55 days afterward. Eventually this torrid growth slowed, but the population continued to climb [and peaked] during the 19th month.
That robust growth masked some serious problems, however. In the wild, infant mortality among mice is high, as most juveniles get eaten by predators or perish of disease or cold. In mouse utopia, juveniles rarely died. As a result, [there were far more youngsters than normal].
What John B. Calhoun anticipated, and what most other researchers at the time anticipated, was that the population would grow to the threshold (6,000 mice), exceed it, and then either starve or descend into in-fighting. That was not the result of the Universe 25 experiment.
The mouse population peaked at 2,200 mice after 19 months, just under two years. Then the population catastrophically collapsed due to infertility and a lack of mating. Nearly all of the mice died of either old age or internicine conflict, not conflict over food, water, or living space. …
The conclusion that many draw from the Mouse Utopia experiment is that higher-order animals have a sort of population limit. That is, when population density exceeds certain crucial thresholds, fertility begins to decline for unknown reasons. Some have proposed an evolutionary toggle that’s engaged when over-crowding becomes a risk. Some have proposed that the effects are due to a competition for status in an environment where status means nothing (mice do have their own hierarchies after all).
The reasoning behind the collapse of Universe 25 into in-fighting, the loss of hierarchy, is still up for debate; it did occur. The resultant infertility of an otherwise very healthy population, senseless violence, and withdrawal from society in general have been dubbed the “behavioral sink.” …
Humans:
Humans have displayed similar behaviors to those of the Universe 25 population at high densities. … It appears that between 60% and 80% urban, depending on the tolerance of the population, and fertility rates drop below replacement. …
As a very rough rule of thumb “within 20 years of reaching 60% urbanization” seems to hold true. With that in mind, the global human population is closing in on 60% urbanized, so one would reasonably expect the global fertility rate to fall below replacements well within our current lifespans. (The current global fertility rate is 2.2 children per woman and declining). …
Now join the dots:
Rather than seeing Mouse Utopia, the Human Demographic Implosion, and AI Model collapse as disconnected events, the same principles may be active in all of them. The fidelity of information decays when later generations are trained solely on information created by prior entities of their own class.
People use new data as training data to model the outside world, particularly when we are children. In the same way that AI models become delusional and hallucinate when too much AI-generated data is in the training dataset, humans also become delusional when too much human-generated data is in their training dataset.
This is why milennial midwits can’t understand reality unless you figure out a way to reference Harry Potter when trying to make a point.
What qualifies as “intake data” for humans is nebulous and consists of basically everything. Thus, analyzing the human experience from an external perspective is difficult. However, we can make some broad-stroke statements about human information intake. When a person watches the Olympics, they’re seeing real people interacting with real-world physics. When a person watches a cartoon, they’re seeing artificial people interacting with unrealistic and inaccurate physics. When a human climbs a tree, they’re absorbing real information about gravity, human fragility, and physical strength.
When a human plays a high-realism video game, they’re absorbing information artificially produced by other humans to simulate some aspects of the real physical world. When a human watches a cute anime girl driving tanks around, that human is absorbing wholly artificial information created by other humans.
Today, too many humans have been trained too much on unrealistic human-generated data. They are corrupted, permanently unable to discern reality properly.
Brains (or brain regions) undergo model collapse just like AI systems. They become unable to reference reality, they become delusional, and hallucinate things that make no sense. Hence, the “Why do we need farmers when food just comes from the store” level of disconnection observed in urban populations.
Urban bug-people:
In a heavily urban setting, humans train on “data sets” that are nearly wholly artificial. The less time spent outside, the less time spent interacting with the real physical world around them, the less accurate their model of reality becomes. Where exactly one draws the line between “real” and “artificial” data is subject to debate. A rocky slope up a hill may be 100% real, a grass playing field may be 70% real, and a concrete sidewalk may be around 40% real. At some point, however, the “salted” artificial data is sufficient to corrupt the real-world knowledge of individuals and cause model collapse.
Urban bug-people aren’t just delusional, they’re fundamentally broken. Similarly, “fixing” them may not be possible without radical retraining programs to teach them about the real world. “Go live in the woods for a year or two and try not to die” might be enough, but our society would hardly remain stable through such a remedy.
I am reminded of an anecdote from when I was a child. A cousin came to play with my siblings and I. My family had been raised going camping and hiking and wandering the wilds since before I can remember. Somewhere around age 3 or 4, our cousin came to visit and we went cruising up a hill hiking with our fathers in tow. Probably looking for sticks to whack each other with. This cousin, however, had grown up in a suburban hellhole where everything was artificial. As such, he found it nearly impossible to navigate a sloped hill. His experience with walking and running had only ever consisted of flat, soft, curated environments produced by other people. He had no experience, or ability, in navigating a dirt trail at a 20 degree incline. His neurological model of the world was trained on human-produced data, and could not function when confronted with reality.
The modern left is dominated by these people:
When it comes to navigating the real world, urban bug-people often behave as if they’re retarded. Socially (they’ve never been punched in the face), geospatially (they have no idea how to navigate by the sun or shadows), culturally (without some pop-fiction touchstone, culture doesn’t exist), etc. They’re entirely bound to a world of artificial ideas: human-produced data, and unable to accurately model from first principles anything outside their extremely limited sphere of artificial experience.
The bugman’s neurological model of reality is divorced from reality. They hallucinate truths that make no sense, and they delude themselves into provably false ideas, and violently attack anyone with a model of reality more accurate than their own.
They don’t understand violence, hunger, or (real) social organization because they’ve never encountered those things. And by the time they’re adults, their models of reality are too set to be easily changed. … I’d argue that they’ve been “corrupted” and are no longer capable of understanding reality even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Metaphor: the last lines are the urbanized, lefty bug-people
Civilization:
Humans have been referred to as a self-domesticated species. Well, some of our subspecies, anyway.
It appears that when we create our own environments, a significant percentage of the resultant data becomes “poisoned” by being human-created data. As a result, homo-sapiens that learn about the world solely (or predominantly) through media are not capable of modeling reality. … Those minds become optimized for synthetic realities. …
Information on topics like serious injuries, getting punched in the nose, how dangerous wild animals can be, and what it’s like to truly be hungry because you can’t find food. Their models default to synthetic human artifice instead of understanding real implications.
The result is delusions about the state of the world; ideas like “it can’t happen here,” or “if I go to school, I’ll get a nice job,” or “no one needs a gun,” are excellent examples. They model imaginary worlds created by other humans, resulting in a suicidal inability to interact with reality.
Psycho-social model collapse is most pronounced in the most artificial cultures: hyper-urban cultures. …
Humans do not function well without cultural traditions. Older cultural information seems necessary for future development. Cultural traditions are lower-fidelity information condensed for easy consumption. I’d argue that there’s a relatively broad range of human-generated data that humans can input before it starts to become a problem. There is, however, a maximum threshold.
Uh-oh:
When external data is input from uniform synthetic sources such as Leftist academic mantras or globalist urban culture completely disconnected from reality, there’s a loss in fidelity and function over time. The result is the collapse of one’s intellectual model of reality. Exactly where that line is, and how fine it is, remains up for debate. …
In a very real way, the urban bug-people completely diverge from reality. As Rohan Ghostwind would say:
“Like the Gen Z boss video, all those people at the [Demcoratic Socialist Convention] are nothing more than children playing at politics. These people barely qualify as the same species when compared to the people who fought in World War II.”
Almost a different species to the modern urban leftist
A lot of the LGBT aesthetic seems quite childish. There’s a lot of glitter, a lot of emojis, pastels, bright colors, lots of cartoons, etc.
This is a very real psychological breakdown: their neurological models of reality are broken, delusional, and unable to functionally interact with the real world. In the same way AI models hallucinate nonsense, urbanite bug-people become delusional about human nature and the natural world. …
You cannot train people on regurgitated data any better than AI. …
Industrial society is completely borked in its current state, but survivable. The populations that do well will be those that limit their artificial information intake, especially to the next generation. The kids need to be playing OUTSIDE. They need to be climbing trees and getting scrapes and bruises. Curated environments will drive them crazy, and you may not see the true effects until they reach adulthood. …
Without real data, the human mind ceases to function, and its disparate parts begin hallucinating information that doesn’t exist, and which will often be confidently and violently defended. The modern political Left is a product of delusional psychology that’s hell bent on enacting the worst possible policies because its adherents are fundamentally neurologically broken… and they may not be fixable.
Read it all. I think the author is onto something fundamental, which explains the decay that’s so prevalent on the modern left.