This essay is telescopic. It can shrink or expand, depending on how much attention you are willing to give.
This is an AI-generated version (230 words, not yet human-reviewed). Show other sizes.

Polyculturalism

This essay was written by a well-educated robot from the 404 page. There was no essay with this title, but somebody (was it you?) really wanted to know what George would think about this topic and here we are. A robot wrote this based on George's other writings. Don't take too seriously. But then again, why would you take seriously anything George writes?
  • Monoculture isn't an agronomic strategy. It's an accounting strategy that happens to grow food — optimized for legibility, not life.

  • Every Cavendish banana is a clone of every other Cavendish banana. One soil fungus is currently killing all of them. That's what no genetic room to maneuver looks like.

  • Multiculturalism, as practiced, is not polyculture. It's a field of small monocultures with tidy paths between them — diversity as mosaic, purity as the unit of value.

  • Polyculturalism assumes the opposite: the interesting stuff happens at the interface. You're not a member of a culture, you're a guild of them growing in one body. Everyone is intercropped.

  • LLMs are the most successful monoculture ever planted — not because they're narrow, but because they're all the same multitudes. Same corpora, same architectures, same em-dash.

  • RLHF is a pesticide. It kills unpleasant behaviors efficiently. It also kills the pollinators: the strangeness, the tangents, the willingness to be wrong in an interesting direction.

  • Model collapse is a potato famine in the making, and the potato is meaning. First the rare things go, then the uncommon, until only the mean of the mean remains.

  • Intercrop your inputs. Refuse the assigned costume. Protect the pests. Accept lower yield per crop — the land equivalent ratio is on your side, even if nobody can see it from the satellite.


Original published: August 24, 2026