Silicon Valley’s Very Online Ideologues are in Model Collapse

Basically a restatement of echo chambers, using the language of AI.

"Like an AI trained on its own output, they’re growing increasingly divorced from reality, and are reinforcing their own worst habits of thought".

A good definition of model collapse: "the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cascade of bad thinking."

Something similar's happening "with the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology... talking themselves into believing nonsense ... because they’re talking among themselves... convinced [that] those outside their bubble aren’t worth listening to... any criticisms ... are just confirmation of their ideology".

This used to be called "echo chambers". The author instead refers to the “Quillette Effect... Because we believe our own ideas are correct ... we think people who share our ideas are correct, as well", so when they tell us something new to us, we tend to believe them because we already share other beliefs. Trust + tribalism, basically: "an ideological community tricking itself into believing it has learned about ideas outside of its tribe, when in fact it’s just flattering and reinforcing ideas internal to its tribe."

For the very rich, most "of the people you interact with are either of your immediate social class" - ie, "likely to share your ideological priors" - "or are dependent upon you financially... likely to reflect your ideas back to you... your ongoing training inputs will reflect your own ideological outputs."

Then there's social media, where the "feed tricks us into thinking our ideological community is much more representative of the broader conversation" - this affects everyone, of course, but "so much of the online right is concentrated on Twitter... the “training data” of very online ideologues ... is just restatements of very online right-wing perspectives".

Together that creates "an insular intellectual community , talking increasingly only to itself, and increasingly cut off from the kinds of conversations that would correct its excesses".