In the nick of time

 

- Cognitive collapse? What cognitive collapse, bruh?
Credit: Hzh 

Dude, this came in the nick of time. JMG on the cognitive collapse of elites, anti-elitist rebel subcultures and individuals. Disturbing but true! I will permit myself to quote some paragraphs here: 

>>>Much of the political strife in today’s industrial states, in fact, is driven by a conflict between two competing forms of cognitive collapse. In one corner of the boxing ring, we have the defending champion, cognitive collapse driven by mass media, in which everyone is bombarded by, and expected to believe, the same false statements promoted by authoritative voices, and so most people go crazy in the same way at more or less the same time. In the other corner we have cognitive collapse driven by social media, in which each little subculture generates its own private echo chamber and broadcasts its own unique set of false statements that members are expected to believe, and so different groups go crazy in different ways at different times.

>>>Yet there’s a third contender in the fight, though it seems to have been noticed by very few people as yet. Just as previous shifts in communications technologies have driven changes in modes of cognitive collapse, the shift being ballyhooed by tech moguls these days—the rise of LLMs—is beginning to generate a new form of cognitive collapse in which individuals create, inhabit, and suffer the consequences of their own private echo chambers.

>>>One of the many downsides of LLMs is that they make a breakdown in reality testing much easier to achieve on an individual basis. Since there is no genuine intelligence in “artificial intelligence,” just statistically likely sequences of words and the like being spat out stochastically in response to queries, it is very easy for a person and an LLM to form a feedback loop that spins rapidly off into cognitive collapse. Some cases of this have already made the media: people who took to treating some LLM as a conversation partner, and ended up talking both it and themselves into some bizarre set of beliefs completely disconnected from any reality accessible to the rest of us. As LLMs become more widespread, there’s every reason to expect that this sort of computer-mediated psychosis will become more widespread, too.

>>>This could spread very far and become extraordinarily destructive. What happens, for example, if most people in the industrial world start getting their news from personalized newsfeeds using LLMs, and these start drifting out of synch with the world, each in its own direction? We’ve already seen some of that, courtesy of social media—consider the giddy range of reactions to the Covid fiasco of 2019-2022, just for one example—but a shift from subculture-based echo chambers to individual echo chambers could slam the same process into overdrive.

Cognitive Collapse: A First Reconnaissance