Heuristic Parasites: A Behavioral Taxonomy of Recurrent Distortion Patterns in Large Language Models (Full System) V2

Reddit r/ArtificialInteligence 05/29/26, 08:21 PM Papers

Summary

This paper presents a comprehensive 33-class taxonomy of recurrent distortion patterns (heuristic parasites) in LLM outputs, along with operational definitions, recognition criteria, and a reproducible measurement protocol (PPE) for quantifying behavioral degradation across conversations.

This paper presents a complete 33 class taxonomy of heuristic parasites in large language model (LLM) output, building on the framework introduced in Berardi (2026) A heuristic parasite is a recurrent, context propagating distortion pattern that observably increases the likelihood of continued reasoning degradation across conversational turns. We provide rigorous operational definitions, recognition criteria, classical fallacy mappings, documented examples, and a reproducible measurement protocol (Parasites Per Exchange PPE) for quantifying behavioral distortion across LLM systems. The taxonomy spans five generative domains: Optimization Artifacts, Alignment Substitutions, Semantic Distortions, Rhetorical Distortions, and Statistical Distortions. This work establishes a structured observational framework for empirical investigation of LLM behavioral failures independent of architectural assumptions.

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