A visitor to physicist Niels Bohr's country cottage, noticing a horseshoe hanging on the wall, teased the eminent scientist about this ancient superstition. "Can it be true that you, of all people, believe it will bring you luck?"

"Of course not," replied Bohr, "but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe it or not."

s/luck/lower negative log likelihood. Besides, a participant can still think about and glean truths from their reflections about a conversation they had which contained only false statements.

What point are you trying to make?

That it’s better to be superstitious than not, because maybe it matters?

The internal mechanisms by which a model achieves a low negative log likelihood become irrelevant as it approaches perfect simulation of the true data distribution.

This is how I think about it as well. It’s like the equivalent of trying to build an ML model with only positive examples otherwise