Quote of the Day

When an Artificial Intelligence model is fed its own input as training data, the model will tend to degrade over time, losing detail with each iteration like a series of photocopies until the model collapses into a fuzz of noisy static.

Something similar, I think, is happening with liberals. They’ve become trapped in their own illusions, eating a media diet that consists entirely of their own propaganda, and then generating new propaganda that simply refers back to the old propaganda in an endless entropic Ouroboros. Meanwhile, the quality of the propaganda they generate is degrading rapidly: the deceptions in the news media or the academic literature get more transparent and less convincing with every iteration; the entertainment media gets less compelling, more poorly written, with worse special effects and less impressive acting; their literature devolves into hamfisted sermons mashed together with smut; their computer games feature worse stories, uglier characters, clumsy game mechanics, bugs, and degrading animation quality.

John Carter
March 26, 2025
The Involution of the Liberal Mind – by John Carter

Via email from Rolf.

In general, this is true of everyone in every group. It is human, and probably all social animal, nature.

A group of people, or animals, will learn from the behavior of others in their social group. Only a few cattle in the herd need to touch their nose to the electric fence before the herd knows better than do the same. After a few days, you can turn off the electric fence, and the cattle will still keep respecting it as a boundary*.

Human groups have taboos that seem weird to others outside their group. Some of these taboos may have had valid reasons at one time but no longer have the same level of validity as they once did. For example, Jewish and Muslim rules against eating pork. Or in Hinduism, the belief that the cow is representative of divine and natural beneficence and should therefore be protected and venerated. All the variations of Christianity have differences in belief which distinguish them and cannot all simultaneously be true because of the contradictions between the different sects. These people socialize with others of their kind and generally live happy and content lives even though they have some set of beliefs which are demonstrably in error.

It is not limited to religious beliefs. Scientists have had extremely heated debates about the nature of the world as well. And, of course, political beliefs are not immune from such errors as well.

I think the situation where the errors to generate a feedback loop and result in a “model collapse” as with the AI example is when there is insufficient contact with reality. In the threat intelligence field, we are told to never take conjecture more than one or maybe two levels. For example, if you see an IP address scanning your outward facing network, and you know that last week this same IP address was associated with a particular threat actor you can claim you have evidence supporting that threat actor is now preparing an attack against you. But you are on shaky ground to claim that if you defend against what techniques and tactics that threat actor used last week you should be safe.

I view the Democrats as having lost touch with reality. At one point in time, they claimed that homosexuals were deserving of respect, equal treatment before the law, and generally should be left alone if it only involved consenting adults. I think what has happened is that this belief has developed a feedback loop disconnected with reality. The group belief has degraded into believing straight people should be treated as a lower class, and transsexual woman are no different than biologically women and should be allowed to compete in sporting events against women.

Or abortion is about a women’s choice about what happens to her body morphing into partial birth abortions are acceptable.

Or recognizing that firearms are the most commonly used murder weapon morphing into a believe that firearms have no benefits to society and the world would be safer if they were banned.

Their systems of belief gradually lost touch with reality and they are now suffering a catastrophic break with voters.

Republicans, currently, are probably more in touch with reality. But they still have issues where they are straining reality near the breaking point. If there are people who believe high tariffs, in of themselves, are an economic benefit then I am nearly certain they are wrong. As means of negotiating away a tariff against us, sure, that probably will work. Or the war on drugs was a benefit to society. Yes, recreational drug use is harmful. But the deaths and family destruction from alcohol and tobacco use are a huge cost to society as well. And shouldn’t we have learned something from alcohol prohibition that can be applied to prohibitions against other recreation drugs?

People need to get out of their “echo chambers.” Sure, it is easy and comfortable to extrapolate from the echos. But those echos are a distortion of the real thing. And with each echo the distortion increases.

* This is not universal. There are some cattle with a personality that will knowingly take the hit of the electric fence to escape the enclosure.

The best story I have heard was of some pigs. They would form a group, get back several feet, run at the fence, and before reaching the fence, start squealing. They would hit the fence and shoot underneath receiving a quick, and relatively minor shock. The shock intensity is reduced because the total current the fence delivered at any one time is limited. With simultaneous animals distributing the current among them, each individual animal had a lower shock intensity.