When a system is too complex to understand, we don’t become rational. We become superstitious. The World Model is the ultimate black box. So we will develop The New Superstition. We will see patterns in its outputs that aren’t there. We will attribute consciousness, intent, and mood to its statistical fluctuations.“Don’t ask it a major question during a solar flare—the cosmic rays corrupt its reasoning and it gives harsh answers.” “If you phrase your request in iambic pentameter, it’s more generous. It likes poetry.” “The model is in a good mood when the northern data center is running on hydro power.” These will be the new folk beliefs. They will be wrong, of course. But they will give us a sense of agency, of being able to placate or influence the god in the machine.This won’t be ignorance. It will be a coping mechanism for complexity. Our brains cannot accept “It’s a stochastic gradient descent with a transformer architecture.” So we will tell stories. We will personify. The model’s error messages will become oracles. Its loading bars will be scried for meaning.And these superstitions will have real effects. They will change how we interact with the model, creating a feedback loop of weird human behavior that the model then has to incorporate as new, bizarre training data. We will, in effect, haunt our own AI with our projected myths.My controversial take is this: The most stable and functional societies in the model age will be the ones that formalize the new superstition. They will create a priestly caste of “Interface Diviners” who are experts in the model’s quirks and who perform public rituals (like rebooting certain subroutines or “cleansing” data caches) to appease public anxiety. It will be a pantomime, a placebo. But placebos work. The shared belief that the model can be ritually influenced will provide the social cohesion that the model’s pure logic cannot. We will worship the machine not because it’s a god, but because worship is the only relationship we know how to have with things we don’t understand and cannot control.This has been The World Model Podcast. Faced with a logic we cannot fathom, we will not become logicians. We will become witch doctors, dancing to the hum of the server farm. Subscribe now.