Can postmodernism illuminate how LLMs work? A 12-principle mapping
composedofidiot · reddit · 2026-09-30
A Reddit user proposes mapping 12 surviving postmodernist principles onto LLM interpretation: skepticism of grand narratives, situated knowledge, socially constructed categories (with Goodhart-like gaps between compressed concepts and their original context), the knowledge-power relationship, discourse effects, context-dependent meaning, reflexivity, and more. The core claim: meaning and labels are inherently unstable, and short prompts strip away much of the historical/inferential context — a lens that may explain some LLM behaviors. Speculative but thought-provoking.
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