r/thesis

HI  =  E  ×  P  ×  C

E = experience that happened to a person
P = said in public, left in a trail
C = contested (voted, replied, corrected)

Three factors, all required, because the product is zero if any one of them is zero.

E, experience. Something happened to a person. They took the flight, ran the firmware update, ate at the place, got the side effect. Not read about it. Not summarized it. It happened to them, and they remember it with the details that only show up when you were there: the queue was outside, the update bricked the second unit, the fries were fine but the burger was not.

P, public. They said it somewhere that leaves a trail. A comment with a timestamp, under a handle, in a thread other people can find. Private knowledge is still knowledge, but it is not HI in the sense this site means, because nobody else can reach it, cite it, or check it.

C, contested. Somebody could push back, and often did. Votes, replies, corrections, "that was fixed in 2.1", "not my experience at all". An unchallenged claim is a press release. A challenged claim that survived is evidence.

Why the multiplication matters:

V(corpus)  ∝  H / (H + S)     as S → ∞, human-verified text becomes the constraint

H = human-authored tokens on the open web
S = synthetic tokens on the open web

This is a ratio, not a count. The absolute amount of human text on the open web is still growing. What is falling is its share, because the denominator has a new term and that term compounds.

S grows with compute. Every model release makes synthetic text cheaper to produce and harder to tell apart. Content farms, SEO pages, auto-generated reviews, summaries of summaries. None of it needs a person to have lived anything. It scales with GPUs.

H grows with lives. Human-authored text is bounded by the number of people who experienced something and bothered to write it down. That rate is roughly constant. It does not respond to a funding round.

So as S goes to infinity, the ratio H / (H + S) goes to zero, and anything that can reliably find H inside the pile becomes the constraint. Not the model. Not the compute. The verified human text.

Two consequences:

trust(answer)  =  model(answer)  ∧  human_check(answer)

human_check := open Reddit, search the thread, read people who were there

The operator is AND, not OR. That is the entire point.

A model answer on its own is fast and fluent and sometimes wrong in a way you cannot see from the inside. A Reddit thread on its own is slow, messy, and full of people who are also wrong. Neither one is the product. The product is the conjunction: get the fast answer, then go find the people who were there and see whether they agree.

What the human check looks like in practice:

• Ask the model which router to buy. Then search "router reddit" and read the person whose unit died in month four.
• Ask the model about a drug interaction. Then read the thread where three people describe what actually happened.
• Ask the model whether a neighborhood is fine. Then read the people who live there arguing about it.

The check does not need to be exhaustive. It needs to exist. People do it by reflex now, and they do it on a specific site, because that is where the trail is.