Goodbye Slopstack! Also, a $50,000 essay/fiction contest, adversarial consciousness tech, & more
Desiderata #41
TechCulture
The Intrinsic Perspective.
Erik Hoel on consciousness, AI, and the intersection of science and humanities.
Recent essays
30 of 31Anthropic runs like Wile E. Coyote into the brick wall of consciousness research
When the AI companies first began talking about existential risk, it was common to hear some version of:
Screentime correlates more with kids' brains than IQ; Matt Yglesias gets Dan Dennett wrong; Why literary fiction awards keep falling for AI scams; & more
Desiderata #40
Don't dethrone consciousness!
LLMs aren't conscious (and thinking they are is culturally dangerous)
But Dumbo could already fly?
100% pure human copium about OpenAI solving Erdős problems
We consciousness researchers have failed you
In Which I Become Shackleton
IVF epigenetic damage gets worse across generations; The next Project Hail Mary; AI's "odorless" math proofs; Waymo at 100% human oversight? & more
Desiderata #39
Hubris
The Lore of the World: Part 4
RIP Dan Simmons. Why weren't you more famous?
The world hates a polymath
Bits In, Bits Out
Six years of AI and the world got stupider
My New Org to Solve Consciousness (or Die Trying); A Rogue AI Community That Wasn't; David Foster Wallace Is Still Right; Cow Tools Are Real, & More
Desiderata #38: links and commentary
It only snows like this for children
The Lore of the World: Part 3
Proving (literally) that ChatGPT isn't conscious
There is nothing it is like to be a Large Language Model
How Kids Actually Get Good at Math in America
Teaching (Very) Early Math: Part 1 of.... yikes
Our overfitted century
Cultural stagnation is because we're stuck in-distribution
Pluribus and Our Age of Hive Minds
The tyranny of online life
John von Neumann Shot Lightning From His Arse
Pop-hereditarianism is built on selective credulity
The Internet You Missed: A Last 2025 Snapshot
TIP's community writing: Part 2 of 2
I figured out how to engineer emergence
What's come of my return to science
Books to Stoke the Soul of a Young Child
The dead genre of "read aloud" literature
Against Treating Chatbots as Conscious
Don't give AIs "exit rights" to conversations
We Are Not Low Creatures
Life on Mars aims us all upward
Erik's Plea in The Free Press: Bring Back Aristocratic Tutoring
Breaking the malaise around education.
Redesigning The Intrinsic Perspective
How to make Substacks look good
The Internet You Missed: A 2025 Snapshot
TIP's community writing: Part 1 of 2
GPT-5's debut is slop; Will AI cause the next depression? Harvard prof warns of alien invasion; Alpha School & homeschool heroes
Desiderata #37
Literacy lag: We start reading too late
Teaching (Very) Early Reading: Part 5
"They Die Every Day"
An information hazard
A Prophecy of Silicon Valley's Fall
2010 Valley > 2025 Valley
More Lore of the World
Field Notes for a Child's Codex: Part 2