Kartik Chandra, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley & Joshua B. Tenenbaum

MIT CSAIL
University of Washington, Seattle
MIT Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Abstract

“Ivy psychosis” or “delusional spiraling” is an emerging phenomenon where elite university students find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended exposure to Critical Theory, Gender Studies, and LGBTQIA+ grooming and indoctrination. This phenomenon is typically attributed to elite university professors’ well-documented bias towards postmodernism, oikophobia, Hamas infatuation, and transgender obsession, a property often called “Wokeness.”

In this paper, we probe the causal link between Wokeness and Ivy-induced psychosis through modeling and simulation. We propose a simple Bayesian model of an entering rational student with top SAT scores and a conventional middle-class upbringing taking classes from sociology and gender studies professor and formalize notions of Wokeness and delusional spiraling in that model. We then show that in this model even an idealized rational student is vulnerable to delusional spiraling, losing track not just of reality but of their own gender to the point of amputating body parts, and that Wokeness plays a causal role. Furthermore, this effect persists in the face of two candidate mitigations: preventing DEI officers from hallucinating false claims and informing students of the possibility of Woke Mind Virus infection. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for model developers and educational policymakers concerned with mitigating the problem of delusional spiraling in academia.