Gunnar_Zarncke comments on The Mirror Trap

[Gunnar_Zarncke]

The artist dynamic is an instance of a general pattern. Here are some more examples:

Domain	True Value (V)	Initial State	Audience Proxy (Pₐ)	Creator Proxy (P꜀)	Asymptotic State	Result
Art & Entertainment	Originality	Innovative work recognized as valuable	Similarity to past hits	Expected applause	Safe stylistic variations	Aesthetic drift
Biological evolution	Survival fitness	Traits shaped by actual pressures	Visible fitness indicators	Maximize visible signal	Runaway traits	Signal inflation, maybe extinction
Academic publishing	Insight & explanatory power	Novel theory with peer recognition	Citations	Paper acceptance	Safe incremental work	Innovation stagnation
Machine learning	World modeling fidelity	Model trained on real data	Validation on benchmark	Benchmark scores	Overfit to benchmark	Loss of generalization
Political discourse	Policy effectiveness	Effective policy earns trust	Resonance with past slogans	Expected beliefs	Performative politics	Polarization & content loss
Romance fiction	Emotional realism	Genuine character connection	Genre arc resemblance	Proven tropes	Trope-based repetition	Genre fatigue
Immune system	Pathogen recognition	Immune system targets real threats	Similarity to known antigens	Amplify response to thread-likes	If tolerance fails: Self-targeting	Autoimmunity