Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture

"Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire, 1765 A man in his late forties discovers a new passion. After decades of working as a mid level manager for a restaurant chain, he starts spending his evenings deep in study, filling notebooks with diagrams, reading everything he can get his hands on. Within a few weeks he's convinced he's on the verge of a grand unified theory that reconciles quantum mechanics and general relativity.