The slow creep of epistemic apocalypse. - Haversine
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The slow creep of epistemic apocalypse.<br>A feedback cycle of information drifting from a measurable reality.
Haversine<br>May 17, 2026
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I will skip the typical “LLMs hallucinate and they aren’t objective and reflect the biases of their training data” and assume any reader understands this by now. We have been inundated with a firehose of slop from these schizophrenic stochastic parrots for years, so I am ringing the alarm around a much less visible problem that I see brewing in the bowels of peer review, research labs, and universities.<br>What we’re experiencing is an erosion of our ability to know things about the world and each other. In reading the previous paragraph you get an innate sense of my command over language, which reflects my ability to architect my thoughts and put them to text, which reflects intelligence more broadly. This skill was developed by reading, writing, speaking, arguing and thinking for approximately 28 years, but if someone borders on illiterate they can get a machine to vomit out writing with grammar that supersedes my own. It will have no human voice, no ego, no intention, no rhythm or style, but it also won’t hint that the prompter has a favorite flavor of crayon.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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This is the nature of epistemic rot.<br>When you read something online with a date after 2023 are you reading an article by an expert who was too exhausted to write out the exact steps and is copy/pasting notes from documentation into an LLM or are you reading slop from a barely literate scammer trying to infect systems with ransomware? While misinformation used to be persistent in the background for anyone attempting “serious work”, what we have now is far more miserable. Written communication has become this game of minesweeper where you can’t even be sure what’s at stake if you’re wrong, but we can already see a rot permeating academic systems due to incompetence and misaligned incentives.<br>Science was already in trouble, now it’s in crisis.
My work on understanding how people learn, what intelligence is, and what mechanisms enable it. This research is how I arrived at our first case study of academic slop.<br>The Attack of the Sloptopus
This headline was incompatible with my understanding of the octopus and the evolution of octopus intelligence, so I couldn’t help but take a peek at the paper. Link Here<br>These scientists claim they found a fossil of a beak so large that it must be an ancient species of octopus, and use “one-shot” AI models to make the connection to other species. I have not checked their supplemental material to confirm this, nor do I intend to.<br>The first thing that should wrinkle your nose if you read anything about “new” claims of anything biological is the desire the authors have to publish evidence (or the lack of it). For a paper written about the size of a fossilized beak there are almost no measurements, no models, no comparisons, and very few images. This was what first tipped me off that this was not a normal paper and I started to look more closely (at a field I had never worked in, nor studied) and then saw more obvious factual errors.<br>Most glaring is in their size comparison chart:
The largest invertebrate is not Architeutus; it’s Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the Colossal squid. This has been settled science amongst marine biology since the 1930’s and should be a very basic fact to anyone that studies squid for a living. It might be basic trivia to a biology student, because giant evil looking squid in the depths of the ocean cannot help but capture our imaginations, hence the headlines everywhere the month this was published.<br>I could tear into the lack of measurements, the absurd speculations that mathematical models around beak biomass projections of in-group squid species cannot be extrapolated onto octopi, and how octopi and squid are not remotely consistent in biomass projections from beak sizes, but here is where they cross into my domain:<br>Asymmetric loss of the jaw edges suggests lateralized behavior (Figs. 2H and 3K), which has been linked to a highly developed brain and cognition (42). This, in turn, suggests that the earliest octopuses already possessed advanced intelligence. Laterality is known in modern octopuses, whose high intelligence matches that of vertebrates (42, 43). The exceptionally large jaws of adult N. jeletzkyi and N. haggarti (Fig. 1) suggest a strong bite force because cephalopod jaw muscles enlarge as the jaw size increases (26).
This may look like an incredibly well cited and intelligent line of deductive reasoning to a layperson about how preference for one side of a beak implies neurological preferences of an evolved brain, but the entire paragraph is utterly incoherent. Octopi barely have anything that qualifies as a “brain”, let alone one capable of lateralization. Their brain is...