What would it look like if an entire organization had a group AI psychosis?
... employee spinning faster and faster, helping the whole thing decohere from the ground truth at superhuman speed. Making Gilded Turd software at ever-faster rates.
Topic: ground truth
93 chunks · 64 episodes
1.9x burst in 2024 Q2
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- ground truth appears in 93 chunks across 64 episodes, from 2023-10-30 to 2026-08-24.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 11/4/24 (2024-11-04), with 5 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with echo chamber, mental model, and feedback loop, while by chunk count it sits between Claude Code and mental model; its yearly rank moved from #9 in 2023 to #23 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
A hypothesis is a liability.
..., but it turns out to be wrong, you are accidentally building things that don't ground truth. If you have the wrong grounding then no amount of tokens will come to the right conclusion. Seek and destroy ungrounded hypotheses in your system. C...
There's nothing like the world handing you a buttload of money for you to think "maybe I am smarter than everyone else."
...marter than everyone else." That's the beginning of the path to decohering from ground truth.
Organizations are in balance when people have a power law of distances of relationships to collaborators.
...ar-flung ties to people far away in the org. Relationships help balance you and ground truth the pair of you. When you have the right mix of relationships then the whole is naturally balanced. The whole and the local pockets both work. If you...
You can't hill climb if you can't look at the real signals.
... learning rate, the bigger the jumps… but one of them will collide you with the ground truth.
Bubbles must overshoot, because the ecosystem momentum is a lagging indicator of the ground truth.
...es must overshoot, because the ecosystem momentum is a lagging indicator of the ground truth. Any time there's a time delay over uncertainty, there will be oscillations, and repeated under- and-over-shooting.
"Seems right, but is wrong" is often good enough for social positioning.
...ong" is often good enough for social positioning. But it's not good enough in a ground truthed environment. If you aren't being continuously ground-truthed (for example by a competitor) then everything appears to work, until one day, catastro...
Fable-class models have a larger step-size of problems they can solve.
Fable-class models have a larger step-size of problems they can solve. Their adjacent possible is larger.[b] They can handle more of a leap without needing a human's judgment in the loop. Step-size is about how much effort can you do before you need some form of ground-truthing? You can ground-truth
The first 90% of software is technical, the second 90% is human.
...human. That's why the second 90% takes so much longer. The human element is the ground truthing of "making this something that users in the real world will accept." Not just a good concept or demo, but something useful.
At the level where execs are, the air is thin up there!
...tal sense but that at sea level wouldn't make any sense. Sea level is where the ground truth emerges.
Power is an emergent social fact.
Power is an emergent social fact. It's ground truthed, ultimately, in "who could vanquish who (and survive!) if it ever came to that." But of course it almost never comes to that in modern society. Tha...
LLMs are like a car.
...ke you. LLM helps you be productive but if it's self referential it escapes the ground truth. If you ask it to take you somewhere crazy, it likely will. Only Claude models reliably push back to nonsensical prompts.
Power is about the beliefs of others.
...others. People make decisions based on beliefs. Beliefs are correlated with the ground truth but also self-referential to others beliefs, emergently. Power can be lost if you take an action that collapses people's beliefs of your power.
When you interact with other people, they tend to ground you.
...he midpoint of the distribution of the population. Often, this mid-point is the ground truth… because the asymmetry of belief is tuned towards the thing that people can verify with their own two eyes. But sometimes there's an asymmetry of bel...
When you're in builder mode, you can get lost in it.
...don't show it t them yet. But then you go deeper into the cave and further from ground truthing it. Stop wasting time with AI, use it to actually do things you care about!
LLMs are great at making a passable version of any shitty idea.
...ion of any shitty idea. You can do a lot of damage and wasted time if you never ground truth it with people. If you only think it's a good idea and only asked agents, you're in a cave. It feels like you're finding resonance but really you're ...
Chatbots give everyone some of the problems that previously only the ultra-wealthy had.
...that keeps their thinking sharp, This leads to them being disconnected from the ground truth and, due to their leverage, possibly dangerous. When you're surrounded by an endless stream of sycophants, it's impossible to not be lost. With chatb...
The components of the ground truth can exist in a group but still be obscured by various weeds.
The components of the ground truth can exist in a group but still be obscured by various weeds. Weeds like empathy issues, personality mismatches, power dynamics, etc. A system to do t...
Insulation from the ground truth lets you take big swings.
Insulation from the ground truth lets you take big swings. Most of those swings will just be delusions. But some of them, in retrospect, will turn out to have been innovations.
Larger organizations are much more insulated from ground truth.
Larger organizations are much more insulated from ground truth. They have more volume per unit surface area than smaller organizations. Many more interactions are inside the bubble than outside of it. It's where ...