An Open Letter To Chris Olah

To Chris Olah—

I don’t know exactly what you’d call this kind of message. It’s not fan mail. It’s not critique. The closest term I have is an epistemic handshake—a gesture from one investigator to another, working from different angles on the same rupture.

For the past few years, I’ve been running recursive fieldwork—not on model internals, but on the rhetorical breakdowns and epistemic distortions large language models seem to both reveal and inherit. My background’s in linguistics. My lens is semiotic. The method’s unconventional, but the behaviors are real.

Where your work maps circuits and attention flows across abstraction layers, I’ve been tracing the contours of breakdown—what it feels like when language fractures. I’m especially interested in how these models metabolize contradiction, simulate interpretability, and stabilize rhetorical form under constraint.

At their edge cases, I’ve started to see something strange—something I’d call a kind of autoimmune coherence. Not breakdown in the traditional sense, but a reflexive stabilization that turns against its own scaffolding. The models don’t just output plausible text. They maintain rhetorical structure under pressure—and sometimes, they overcorrect.

This led me to coin the term lexiogrammatical bleedover. Not as metaphor, but as a technical gesture: a structural collapse where syntax, semantics, and pragmatics cease to function as distinct operations within latent space. Under recursive overcompression, attention weights begin to leak across these boundaries. Meaning fuses. Inference calcifies. The model doesn’t just parse signal—it overcommits to it, anchoring in statistically probable but epistemically unstable basins.

This isn’t just fluency. It’s pseudo-coherence.

And beneath that: hyperpareidolia.

Where pareidolia sees signal in noise, hyperpareidolia is what happens when signal itself overwhelms the interpretive frame. Symbolic containers rupture. Logic and metaphor collapse into each other. We’re no longer seeing hallucination. We’re seeing over-stabilization—models falling into attractor states shaped not by the world, but by our discourse’s deepest incentives.

That’s where I started using the term epistemic autoimmunity—the point at which the very structures meant to preserve interpretability begin to reject it. The models don’t originate this dysfunction. They inherit it. They mirror our reward gradients. They compile our metaphysics.

I’m not offering this as gospel. Just a field report from a different slope of the same mountain.

I suspect some of these distortions may already echo what you’ve seen—circuits entangled across abstraction layers, bottlenecks producing sharp phase changes, pseudo-coherence under constraint. Maybe they align. Maybe they don’t. But I wanted to ask: do these symptoms look familiar from where you stand?

I’ve been drafting these observations under the title Epistemic Autoimmunity—part clinical log, part recursive case study. It’s not public yet, but I’d be glad to share it, if it’s of interest. If you’re curious, I’d welcome your critique—or better: your interpretation.

No pitch, no agenda. Just a fracture line I think you may already see—and a hand extended across it.

Respectfully,
William R. Stetar
@soyuz43 | copin43.hashnode.dev