LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
"Why You Don’t Believe in Xhosa Prophecies" by Jan_Kulveit
14 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What do crosses on mountains signify in cultural context?
Why You Don't Believe in Courser Prophesies by Jan Colvait Published on February 13, 2026 Based on a talk at the Post-AGI Workshop Also on Boundedly Rational Does anyone reading this believe in coarser cattle killing prophesies? My claim is that it's overdetermined that you don't. I want to explain why, and why cultural evolution running on AI substrate is an existential risk.
Chapter 2: Who were the Xhosa and what was their cattle-killing prophecy?
But first, a detour.
Heading. Crosses on mountains.
Chapter 3: How does the concept of virulence relate to cultural evolution?
There's an image here. Description. Summit cross on snowy mountain peak with mountain range backdrop.
Chapter 4: What are the conditions necessary for cultural evolution?
When I go climbing in the Alps, I sometimes notice large crosses on mountain tops. You climb something three kilometers high, and there's this cross. This is difficult to explain by human biology. We have preferences that come from biology. We like nice food, comfortable temperatures, but it's unclear why we would have a biological need for crosses on mountain tops.
Economic thinking doesn't typically aspire to explain this either. I think it's very hard to explain without some notion of culture. In our paper on gradual disempowerment, we discussed misaligned economies and misaligned states. People increasingly get why those are problems. but misaligned culture is somehow harder to grasp.
Chapter 5: Why did the Xhosa community believe in their cattle-killing prophecy?
I'll offer some speculation why later, but let me start with the basics. What makes Black Forest cake fit? The conditions for evolution are simple. Variation, differential fitness, transmission. Following Boyd and Richardson, or Dawkins, you can think about cultural variants, ideas, memes, as replicators. They mutate. They have differential fitness. They're heritable enough to be stable.
There's an image here.
Diagram illustrating cultural evolution through variation, differential fitness, and heritability conditions.
Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from the Xhosa's experience with cultural beliefs?
My go-to example is black forest cake. There are many variants. What makes some fitter than others? Some taste better. Some use local ingredients. Some are easier to transmit. Maybe now, in the Instagram era, cakes that photograph well spread better. The transmission landscape changes and different variants win. There's an image here in the text.
But there are constraints we don't usually notice because we've never seen alternatives.
Chapter 7: How does AI change the landscape of cultural transmission?
No cake recipes are millions of words long. Too hard to transmit. No cake recipes are written in quantum field theory formalism. No cake recipes result in the cook dying. We take this for granted. Ideas have always transmitted on human substrate. Human memory, human attention, human survival shape which variants can exist. What happens when the substrate starts to change?
As is in my view often the case with AI risks, the first examples come as bizarre and harmless. In May 2024, Google's AI started suggesting that if cheese slides off your pizza, you should add glue to the sauce.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of misaligned culture in today's society?
The recommendation came from an 11-year-old Reddit joke. A journalist tried it, wrote about it. This got into training data. Soon AIs were citing the journalist's article to recommend one-eighth cup of glue for pizza. There's an image here.
News article screenshot. The headline reads, Google AI said to put glue in pizza. So I made a pizza with glue and ate it.
The feedback loop. AI output. Right arrow. Human amplification. Right arrow. Training data. Right arrow. AI output. A recipe for pizza with 1 8th cup of glue is not something humans would converge on. Different substrate leads to different transmission characteristics, and these lead to different recipes. Funny and harmless for pizza.
Keep it in mind. Heading. The coarser.
Back to the question. In 1856, a young Corsa woman named Nonkewas had a vision. If the Corsa people killed all their cattle and destroyed their grain, their ancestors would rise from the grave, bring better cattle, and drive out the British colonizers. The community was dealing with a cattle disease epidemic, which made this more plausible. They adopted the belief.
They killed approximately 400,000 cattle. A year later, about 40,000 people had died from starvation. The survivors were forced to seek help from the colonizers they'd hoped to expel. The community disintegrated. From the perspective of cultural evolution, these memes destroyed their hosts. But notice. You're not a believer in coarser cattle-killing prophesies. As far as I can tell nobody is.
The memes didn't survive either. The belief died with the community that it destroyed. There's an image here.
Historical comic strip showing Xhosa cattle killing movement's origins, action, and tragic consequences.
Heading. Virulence. There's a concept in epidemiology called the virulence transmission trade-off. If a pathogen is too deadly, it doesn't spread well. Covid spread effectively partly because it killed millions but not everyone. Ebola spreads poorly because it kills too large a fraction of hosts too quickly. Culture has operated under an analogous constraint.
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