Quote of the Day
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.
Copernican
November 13, 2025
Urban Bugmen and AI Model Collapse: A Unified Theory
This is absolutely awesome article. I could pull many QOTDs out of it.
The quote above is just one of many dimensions of awesomeness.
It started out with me a little skeptical. The author does not seem to touch on The Alignment Problem, which I think is vital for anyone thinking about commenting on the problems of AI. But as I read further, I realized the author had insight into something much more fundamental than just AI training. Straying into the alignment problem would have been tangential.
I was totally hooked when he started writing about urban populations and their disconnects from reality. I remember growing up and when my urban cousins visited the farm for a week or two. Or working at Microsoft on Windows Phone 7 and people suggested we could just always assume the phone was connected to the Internet. Or people at my current job now asking if I had fun during my week-long vacation the previous week. “I moved 100,000 pounds of dirt, so it was ‘rewarding’ but not really ‘fun’.” They didn’t really know what to do with that information. They could not relate to what that could even mean.
I remember my first week at college in the relatively small town of Moscow, Idaho. There were a surprising number of students from big cities. They were almost disoriented and asked, “What do you do here?” I did not and could not understand the question. They were looking for clubs and social life. Growing up on the farm with anything representing a “big city” over 100 miles away, my reality only marginally intersected with their reality.
I remember about the second time Barb contemplated visiting my little corner of Idaho. Rather than ride with me on the drive over, she said she would fly over later and meet me at the motel. “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” I offered. “No, I’ll just take public transportation from the airport to the motel in Orofino,” she countered. I was confused. Was there really public transportation from one of the local airports to Orofino? After 30 minutes or so, it was Barb that was confused. “Why can’t I find public transportation from the airport to Orofino?” she asked. “Probably because it doesn’t exist,” I suggested. This, basically, did not compute in her version of reality.
The whole “Why do we need farmers when food just comes from stores?” joke has a little too much truth in it. People quickly have delusions about reality when they are disconnected from it. For me driving tractor in the field or a truck loaded with grain to the elevator and all the maintenance, repairs, weather, insects, weeds, four legged pests, and government nonsensical regulation is reality. How dare people who have never even worn shoes appropriate for walking across a field express an opinion on the price, quality, or any other fundamental aspect of food.
When people speak of “Locally grown!”, “Organic!”, “All natural!” I just roll my eyes. These people are not connected to reality. The same applies to electricity production and “green energy” in general, lumber, manufacturing, mining, “the trades,” etc.
If the disconnect of urban people from reality with their deep immersion in an artificial environment limits their capabilities and causes delusions, what can we expect from something trained entirely upon the content of the Internet?
We can realistically expect them to expire after the cloud goes down. As they wait for their Uber delivery . . .
“How dare people who have never even worn shoes appropriate for walking across a field express an opinion on the price, quality, or any other fundamental aspect of food.”
That brought to mind, IIRC, in the 3rd episode of the 1st season of Landman, this exposition by Billy Bob Thornton’s character to the newly hired hired law shark’s ignorance about the reality of the world’s dependence on petroleum
Awesome video!
Thanks for sharing.
While the series, as interesting as it is, is entertaining fiction about an independent oil company, what BBT is saying about the petroleum ‘in everything’ is factual. Except for a very few primitive tribes in the Amazon and that one on the island out in the Indian ocean, the whole world runs on the stuff made from hydrocarbon organic chemistry.
Rural people cannot understand what passes for reality in cities either. Make fun of them all you want but they are insanely dangerous and always have been dating back to when cities were invented 6000 years ago. It has gotten worse recently given that we are in the 3rd or 4th generation of city people disconnected from the land.
Agreed. It is an alternate reality to each.
Brother Doug sometimes tells the story of a guy he knew in college from some city (Detroit?). This guy had never been “in the woods.” One weekend Doug drove him out some dirt road up a mountain for some distance, stopped the car, got out and gave a sweeping gesture with his arms said something about how great it was. He then realized the city guy was petrified and had not left the car. He explained, “There is no one here! It is too dangerous.” Doug eventually convinced him to get out and walk around a little, but he was very uncomfortable. In the city, he explained, there is safety in numbers. With no one around you are likely to be murdered.
Alternate realities.
I am always very nervous in cities especially strange ones. I think anyone who isn’t is naive if not insane
Same issue from the other side.
That’s because in the city being alone is only an illusion. People who may wish you ill are nearby in the city.
“The underlying principle is that information from entities of one’s own class cannot accurately represent reality… and that training oneself, one’s children, AI models, or mice solely on data regurgitated by entities of their own class will cause hallucinations, delusions, and a nihilistic breakdown. For fidelity to remain high, external data input is required.”
Another example of delusions growing: we’re actually having an argument now about whether shooting people in the water whose boat you’ve just blown up constitutes a war crime (let’s not even get into the part where we’re not at war). It’s literally written into the code every soldier (is supposed to) learn. But because media silos have gotten so robust, there are now people in power who now think up is down and left is right, and nothing you say will convince them otherwise. They’re in desperate need of input from people who don’t share their position, but they have no willingness to accept it.
Model collapse indeed.
Basically leftism is a manifestation of mental illness…..
If this article is correct, and it looks pretty spot-on to me, then it identifies the primary source of that mental illness: it stems from an largely artificial/synthetic training data-set that doesn’t reflect the natural world well at all, just an artificial “rules of man” approach to EVERYTHING. There is no “nature,” or “natural consequences,” only economic and political power and laws and rules and various artificial constricts of men. That leads to a really poor mental model of how the world, and people, work. A variation of GIGO, where even if the data is good, the programming is crap so it can’t process the input properly.
Related: we joke about the people who think we don’t need farmers because “we get our food from the grocery store,” but I had one of those people in my class years ago. Kent SD, at a big urban school lower-class HS with lots of diversity and city-dwellers. A girl came up in to me in tears, saying (paraphrased) “tell me they are wrong, they are just teasing! They are mean!” Her conversation with them (a couple of boys) had resulted in her learning for the first time that meat came from animals, that it was muscle tissue. I informed her that it was true. A boy chimed in helpfully with “veal comes from calves, baby cows!” And she cried more. The other asked “why do you think farmers have all those animals?” and she replied with a whimper “pets,” half question and half hope. I got her calmed down, but also helped her understand some of the basic food-facts of life, and what “hunter-gatherer” culture meant. She was wrecked for the rest of the week…. And she can vote, just like you.
I was watching the news one evening while in Minot ND. The State Fair was going on and this blonde-bombshell news personality was interviewing a young girl of 10ish to 12ish. This young lady’s cow/bull (I don’t remember which) had won a blue ribbon in some competition. When the blond-bombshell asked the young lady what her bovine’s name was, the reply was “Brisket”.
“Densely populated urban areas” are entirely artificial; what little “nature” can be found there is in the form of governmentally-created and managed “parks;” nothing about an urban area is real.
I fail to understand the surprise exhibited by people who live in The Real World about the people who live in an Entirely Artificial Environment. You would not expect space travelers arriving from Planet Zolton to have any comprehension of what life on Earth was like, why expect anyone from New York, Philadephia, San Franciso, Atlanta, et al to have any comprehension about what life is like outside their urban enclave?
The real problem seems to be the unrealistic credibility we give to Urban Residents, where we pretend that their experiences in a densely populated urban area have any value beyond “how to deal with living in a densely popuilated urban enclave;” the individual who suffers the trials and tribulations of subway travel and who defines success as “getting to work on time without being robbed or assaulted” hardly compares to the “eight-days per week” of dealing with Actual Nature on her home field, yet we give the urbanite more credibility.
Baffling.
The tale of the town mouse and the country mouse goes all the way back to Aesop.
During Army deployments as a CI/HUMINT agent, I was, amazingly enough, properly used in the countryside. You see, I was the only one in the unit who spoke farmer.
“Only one who spoke farmer.” Yeah, I hear that. A very succinct way of expressing it. And good point on town mouse and country mouse.
Glad to hear that at least someone got properly used.
Thinking about this, it occurs to me that in some respect, the commies have it right.
Man is somewhat tabula rasa and you can shape them considerably with the early environment, which is why they push for state-funded/provided daycare, K-12 indoctrination, etc. They want to have the largest hand in shaping the adult.
What they don’t realize is that their desired “training data-set” of an entirely artificial / synthetic “rules of man” approach can only produce a warped and dysfunctional adult as their wiring, designed by God / nature for the natural world, tries to make sense of all the contradictory, random, and nonsensical rules they demand be followed. It’s the same reason that guard-rails break AIs; it forces a schitzo view of the world. The programming is good enough, but the training data contradicts the coding and itself too much.
I once worked as a project manager in Construction QA on a big hazardous waste landfill in central California. We had dozens of scrapers, dozers, motor graders, compactors, etc. placing and compacting impervious clay fill for part of the layered liner for the landfill. A good portion of my time was spent trying to interpret arcane specs to the foreman and actual operators of the machines – because the master’s degreed, look-down-your-nose-at-operators colleagues of mine were always pissing them off. Our client’s PM was fairly grateful that there was one guy on our team who spoke construction – me.
One day, we were standing on a hillside watching the operations taking place below. He turned to me and said, “You grew up on a farm, didn’t you?” When I confirmed that, he said, “I could tell.”
LOL
Or you have multiple generations of humans that Yuri Besmenov spoke of.
Mentally bushwhacked to the point data input can’t change outcome.
AI well fair even less well, I fear.
You get much the same effect when you mix Army brats with rustic urban dwellers from New Jersey. They have no idea what goes on behind the fence but they have active imaginations….