Notes and links - 2 August 2026

"Slop wins because it conforms to neat narrative arcs that fulfill our desires for cohesive stories: At crime scenes, children make the best witnesses because they simply report back what they saw rather than editorializing into a natural story arc. The adult brain is hardwired to eliminate cognitive dissonance by effectively hallucinating events that didn’t happen to make our memories fit into a tidy narrative.Does that sound like any of the AI tools you know? In many ways, a tragic flaw of LLMs is that they are even more allergic to cognitive dissonance than people are, hence the hallucination problem being such a tough one to squash completely. Moreover, any time there is even mild tension or paradoxical sentiment in an idea, models go out of their way to call it out ( “that’s the real sticking point”) and try to crush it when the more intellectually honest tactic would be to simply let the tensions be.Insufferable vernacular tics aside, this makes AI writing more “comfortable” to…