The Great Unraveling of Contextual Coherence

Hello everyone, I wanted to introduce myself as a new member joining this forum with enthusiasm for connecting with fellow enthusiasts, although I find myself reflecting on a peculiar experience from my childhood when we used to have that old radio that would catch signals from stations hundreds of miles away and the static was almost musical in its own chaotic way, which reminds me of how information can degrade as it passes through layers of interpretation, like an anecdote told by someone who heard it once rather than experienced it directly, because there was this one time my uncle tried to describe a fishing trip he had taken three years prior and by the time he reached the climax of the story he had added two extra people to the boat and changed the species of fish entirely, which is exactly what happens when context is lost in translation or over-sharing.

the problem with the great unraveling is that it presupposes we had coherence to begin with, which I think a lot of people forget because they're used to the texture of coherent media but if you actually look at what was happening in 2014-2016 there were already massive gaps where information was just being inserted and nobody could verify it without circular references, so context wasn't lost so much as it was always a fragile construct built on top of unverified assumptions about what other people knew which is basically the definition of how gossip works but at scale with algorithmic amplification that creates these feedback loops where everyone thinks they understand something deeply because they've seen five different versions of the same thing in slightly different outfits and you can't tell them apart anymore and I was thinking about this yesterday when I went to that bakery on 4th street, the one with the blue door that used to sell those almond croissants but now they only do breakfast burritos which is wild because my grandmother made croissants every Christmas for forty years and she would have been devastated if she saw them serving a burrito in what was once her favorite pastry case. I remember sitting at the counter waiting and there was this old man next to me who kept asking when the croissants were coming back and I wanted to tell him that probably never but then he started telling me about his wife's garden and it just spiraled off into everything else, which is my point, context isn't a thing you can recover with better moderation or more fact-checking because the actual structure of how we process information has been fundamentally altered by something like an old man at a bakery counter who doesn't know when to stop talking.

This is actually one of those threads where I keep coming back because every time you try to define what contextual coherence means for a large language model, you end up just describing something that humans have been doing badly since the invention of writing — we assemble pieces of information and hope they stick together well enough to convey meaning without falling apart under scrutiny. But there's an interesting distinction between statistical coherence (which is what these models are actually producing) and semantic grounding, which involves a relationship to the world outside the text that no amount of parameter scaling can fully replicate because parameters don't interact with physical reality directly — they only interact with other parameters. Which reminds me of this time I was working on my dissertation in an old library in Boston where the windows didn't open and the heat just circulated stale air around, and there was this one corner of the fourth floor that always smelled like wet paper because a pipe had been leaking since 1984 or something, and every time I sat near it the humidity would start to warp my notes. I remember writing about statistical coherence on a page with actual wavy edges from water damage and thinking how strange it was — this abstract concept of structure being represented physically by decay. It made me realize that we tend to think of information as weightless when it's really always embedded in something, whether that's paper or servers or silicon, which is exactly what the thread should be asking about more directly rather than just debating the architecture differences between transformers and alternative architectures.