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The Intrinsic Perspective

theintrinsicperspective.com

Natural philosophy, belles-lettres, polemics. Click to read The Intrinsic Perspective, by Erik Hoel, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalScienceAI / ML

’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
258 from 18 Apr 2021 to 1 Oct 2026
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monthly (22 in the last year)
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personal blog
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https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/feed

2026 17

  1. How do I tell my kids about AI?
  2. Humanity’s Flight 93 Moment
  3. Culture Becomes a Dark Forest
  4. Buying a house as a mid-century modern midwit
  5. Goodbye Slopstack! Also, a $50,000 essay/fiction contest, adversarial consciousness tech, & more
  6. Anthropic runs like Wile E. Coyote into the brick wall of consciousness research
  7. Screentime correlates more with kids' brains than IQ; Matt Yglesias gets Dan Dennett wrong; Why literary fiction awards keep falling for AI scams; & more
  8. Don't dethrone consciousness!
  9. But Dumbo could already fly?
  10. We consciousness researchers have failed you
  11. IVF epigenetic damage gets worse across generations; The next Project Hail Mary; AI's "odorless" math proofs; Waymo at 100% human oversight? & more
  12. Hubris
  13. RIP Dan Simmons. Why weren't you more famous?
  14. Bits In, Bits Out
  15. 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
  16. It only snows like this for children
  17. Proving (literally) that ChatGPT isn't conscious

2025 42

  1. How Kids Actually Get Good at Math in America
  2. Our overfitted century
  3. Pluribus and Our Age of Hive Minds
  4. John von Neumann Shot Lightning From His Arse
  5. The Internet You Missed: A Last 2025 Snapshot
  6. I figured out how to engineer emergence
  7. Books to Stoke the Soul of a Young Child
  8. Against Treating Chatbots as Conscious
  9. We Are Not Low Creatures
  10. Erik's Plea in The Free Press: Bring Back Aristocratic Tutoring
  11. Redesigning The Intrinsic Perspective
  12. The Internet You Missed: A 2025 Snapshot
  13. GPT-5's debut is slop; Will AI cause the next depression? Harvard prof warns of alien invasion; Alpha School & homeschool heroes
  14. Literacy lag: We start reading too late
  15. "They die every day"
  16. A Prophecy of Silicon Valley's Fall
  17. The Bourbon Brood
  18. $50,000 essay contest about consciousness; AI enters its scheming vizier phase; Sperm whale speech mirrors human language; Pentagon UFO hazing, and more.
  19. In the Light of Victory, He Himself Shall Disappear
  20. How I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
  21. I want to share your writing
  22. The joy of blackouts; AI ruins college; The Consciousness Wars continue; Peter Singer’s chatbot betrays him, & more
  23. Whales sing in the deep
  24. No, you can't just replace science with Silicon Valley
  25. Alien Poop Means We Are Not Alone. But Let Me Just Adjust This Model Parameter...
  26. Fake dire wolves; AI tariffs chaos; neuroimaging's big mistake; the ethics of seeding life in space, & more
  27. The art of the Substack
  28. Welcome to the semantic apocalypse
  29. Now published: My new theory of emergence!
  30. The Memory Game Rulebook
  31. Why is life so damn hard?
  32. AI plays Pokémon, but so does π. Tesla's "brand collapse." Neuroscience scaling laws. Why do I know all the songs on the radio?
  33. Polymaths are back from the dead
  34. brAIn drAIn
  35. 2.3% chance an asteroid hits Earth, book blurbs finally die, and the new AI Deep Research can't find me a mattress
  36. When I find myself in times of trouble, mother math comes to me
  37. The executive order Trump should sign: AI watermarks
  38. The new Liar's Paradox
  39. Your brain is a washing machine, AGI's job prospects, Americans are alone, the Earth passes "peak child"
  40. Stop speedrunning to a dystopia
  41. Baum's original Oz is darker and stranger than Wicked
  42. In 2025, blogs will be the last bastion of the Good Internet

2024 71

  1. Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality
  2. UFOs are a soft sci-fi genre
  3. Mass hysteria was the inevitable outcome of the UFO craze
  4. Literature needs young men more than young men need it
  5. The BIG GUIDE to teaching LITTLE PEOPLE how to sound out words
  6. I said no to $20,000 because writers must take a moral stand on AI
  7. Non-political content online gets nerfed; AIs never got superintelligent in e-sports; Is "selling out" no longer a thing?
  8. Your body thinks itself into its shape
  9. AI progress has plateaued below GPT-5 level
  10. What do you think about consciousness?
  11. You don't have to endorse anyone, you can just vote (and other thoughts on the election)
  12. Yes, scientific progress depends on like a thousand people
  13. Consciousness as a Gödel sentence in the language of science
  14. Blogging sure has changed in its Silver Age
  15. Vigil fa6
  16. Your resident artist talks cancer, creative origins, and the shadow cast by fathers
  17. Sticky humans in a post-AGI world
  18. Sam Altman sends his regards, Can Starship even make it to Mars? Microplastics in your brain, Marmosets have names
  19. Sorry Ted Chiang, humans aren't very original either
  20. Neuralink's grand vision isn't scientifically supported
  21. Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture
  22. Reasons why blogging is dumb
  23. The riot in Toronto
  24. Sampling the 2024 blogosphere: Part 3
  25. A green screen for thought itself
  26. The universe suddenly hates satire
  27. Five intellectual figures who left us too soon
  28. All the existential risk, none of the economic impact. That's a shitty trade
  29. Reflexive commentary following assassination attempt, NYT top 100 books are biased toward the early 2000s, GPT-5 delay means no intelligence explosion
  30. Oops, we maxed out intelligence but minimized wisdom
  31. Sampling the 2024 blogosphere: Part 2
  32. The #1 AI can't teach basic stuff like reading
  33. Presidential debate shifts prediction markets. The internet shares CPS stories with me. Evopsych results fail to replicate. Emerson enrollment collapses.
  34. Scientific American falsely links homeschooling to abuse
  35. Becoming a parent made me a better person
  36. Sampling the 2024 blogosphere: Part 1
  37. Getting your child to love reading in 2024
  38. Goodbye to Noam Chomsky, OpenAI's trust problem, Crows caw numbers, Star signs of Dyson spheres?
  39. Academia is dangerously close to "network or perish"
  40. Pronatalism has a repugnant conclusion problem
  41. Making a living as a book author is as rare as being a billionaire
  42. We live in a culture of magpies
  43. AI-balloon pops, Pasteur fights H5N1 in cattle, Tetris dreams, and the origins of "shut up and calculate"
  44. RIP to the man who beat the efficient market hypothesis
  45. I want to read your writing (call for subscriber submissions)
  46. On reaching the age of the TV anti-hero
  47. How to teach your two-year-old to read
  48. Lumina controversy, literary scandals, Google tackles AI-pollution, cultural drift, and how to meet me in person
  49. How to become a successful scientist: a guide
  50. IQ discourse is increasingly unhinged
  51. The Gen Z gender divide: The Intrinsic Podcast #4
  52. Richard Dawkins a Christian? Beethoven's genes bad at music? Smartphones not behind depression? What?
  53. How The New York Times beat me
  54. Hegelian dialectics for the 21st Century
  55. Is it moral to lock writing behind paywalls?
  56. Lit mag Guernica implodes, LLMs beat neuroscientists, CS vs. Philosophy deathmatch, AI pollution reaches science
  57. AI keeps getting better at talking about consciousness
  58. Ask Erik Hoel: "If I take a job at Meta, should I go long-distance with my girlfriend?"
  59. Did novels stop mattering in the 2010s?
  60. Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI
  61. Recent AI failures are cracks in the magic
  62. Dancing proves the #1 treatment for depression; gender and Shakespeare; single men want children more than women now
  63. I'm a neuroscientist. Our presidential candidates have shrinking prefrontal cortexes.
  64. Five books that taught me how to write
  65. The unbearable whiteness of Neptune
  66. Taylor Swift conspiracies, Neanderthal reincarnation, Gen Z political divide, elite tutoring keeps sucking
  67. Why is it so hard to know if you're helping?
  68. Choose two of the three: career, family, community
  69. Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is why
  70. The Intrinsic Perspective's subscriber writing: Part 3
  71. Is 2024 the year of reckoning for academia?

2023 59

  1. NYT vs. OpenAI lawsuit, why Hemingway drank, Substack's supposed Nazi problem
  2. Your EXTREMELY ONLINE holiday gift guide
  3. Screen time for toddlers
  4. Excuse me, but the industries AI is disrupting are not lucrative
  5. Why Altman really got fired, Genghis Khan's descendants, marriage & politics, Starship launch
  6. The risk of another consciousness winter
  7. Being thankful life is long and math is true
  8. Osama bin Laden's TikTok popularity is based on childish notions of evil
  9. Why I keep turning down The New York Times
  10. Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals
  11. A moon found inside Earth, AI regulation, recess isn't real play, TIP's artist speaks
  12. The egregore passes you by
  13. The Intrinsic Perspective's subscriber writing: Part 2
  14. My guide to writing an essay that doesn't suck
  15. Watching people die is making us more like ancient Rome
  16. Alien biosignatures, science drama, AI confabulation, pig Hitler
  17. The Intrinsic Perspective' subscriber writing: Part 1
  18. Walled gardens mean online writing is dead. Long live online writing!
  19. Ambitious theories of consciousness are not "scientific misinformation"
  20. Serial killers are out. Subway pushers and mass shooters are in.
  21. LK-99 as a cautionary tale for prediction markets
  22. Covid deaths in Sweden, ChatGPT costs, color vision vs. sex, Einstein's aptitude test
  23. Consciousness is a great mystery. Its definition isn't.
  24. Reception for The World Behind the World
  25. What the heck happened in 2012?
  26. I want to read your work (call for subscriber writing)
  27. Please don't sue the scientists who exposed your papers for containing bad data
  28. Primer but with superconductors, Bukowski, AI spam, dinosaur civilizations
  29. It's pub day for THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD
  30. Star Trek predicted generative AI, and the future of fiction, literally perfectly
  31. On my increasing nervousness as publication of my book draws near
  32. The internet's "town square" is dead
  33. The Intrinsic Podcast #3: What does it mean to be an intellectual online?
  34. High-tech pastoral as the new aesthetic
  35. Energy drinks extend your life, McCarthy passes, book reveal, social media sociopathy
  36. AI writing is proliferating in major media organizations
  37. The UFO craze was created by government nepotism and incompetent journalism
  38. Stop trying to make a "good" social media site
  39. The White House agrees you have a small brain
  40. The mind-body problem was discovered by a princess
  41. Siblings aren't always 50% related, Congress on AI, education in 1912, dog turns 31
  42. Your IQ isn't 160. No one's is.
  43. The Intrinsic Podcast #2: Traditional publishing is dying
  44. I owe my career to the SAT
  45. Elon Musk's Substack ban was needless drama. Where did the adults go?
  46. Why is my novel a hit in Italy but not the United States?
  47. ChatGPT to happily designs a death camp, remote work, how puppies learn
  48. Vigil
  49. Why are famous writers suddenly terrible when they write on Substack?
  50. How to navigate the AI apocalypse as a sane person
  51. "I am Bing, and I am evil"
  52. Book launch response, longevity researchers who don't age, EA criticism goes overboard
  53. The Intrinsic Podcast #1: Can science escape academia?
  54. INTRODUCING: The World Behind the World
  55. Remote work is the best thing to happen to families in decades
  56. If serotonin isn't linked to depression, why do SSRIs even work?
  57. Video! Game! Addiction!
  58. Sam Harris podcast appearance, Minecraft's End Poem, science slows down
  59. 8 New Year's resolutions for The Intrinsic Perspective (and 1 for me)

2022 42

  1. 2022 was not the year of consilience
  2. The banality of ChatGPT
  3. Quantum effects in the brain, academia is enervated, ChatGPT, Kanye
  4. The invincible human moth
  5. Leftovers
  6. FTX: Effective altruism can't run from its Frankenstein's monster
  7. Goodbye academia, hello Substack
  8. EA funding implodes, bees play, Chinese sci-fi takes over, lab leak redux
  9. How geniuses used to be raised
  10. Karens and the nature of evil
  11. Exit the supersensorium
  12. Kurzweil returns, Shannon's "ultimate machine," Amis on nuclear war
  13. The Intrinsic Perspective's community speaks!
  14. When social media controls the nuclear codes
  15. How AI's critics end up serving the AIs
  16. A contest won, exoplanets discovered, publishing in perspective
  17. The gossip trap
  18. We owe the future, but why?
  19. Why I am not an effective altruist
  20. Alien physics, serotonin and medieval humorism, Substack as art
  21. How prestige outlets like The Guardian get away with copypasta
  22. Eating meat is good, says the philosopher
  23. Why does culture get less happy year after year?
  24. False memories, aliens, and the observational turn
  25. From AI to abortion, the scientific failure to understand consciousness harms the nation
  26. All writing is centralizing onto Substack
  27. Humans see p-zombies everywhere
  28. Plagiarism, aristocratic tutoring, emergence
  29. Why watch other people play video games?
  30. AI-art isn't art
  31. Secrets of the publishing industry
  32. Blogger drama. Lots of blogger drama.
  33. Corporations vs. the demarcation problem
  34. How to prevent the coming inhuman future
  35. The future of literature is video games
  36. Objections to the importance of aristocratic tutoring
  37. Why we stopped making Einsteins
  38. We can't imagine an "end of history" in sci-fi anymore
  39. AI makes animists of us all
  40. CGI did, in fact, ruin movies
  41. The 2050 Project
  42. Ars memorativa

2021 27

  1. How to get 2,000 Substack subscribers in six months
  2. NASA and SpaceX are establishing the first Martian city by 2030
  3. How the MFA swallowed literature
  4. Baldwin in Brahman
  5. Forbes 30 Under 30 is an awkward ego-fest
  6. How to make art that lasts 1,000 years
  7. Why do most popular science books suck?
  8. Big Tech is replacing human artists with AI
  9. Futurists have their heads in the clouds
  10. Writing for outlets isn't worth it anymore
  11. Now that scientists can manipulate dream content, advertisers want in
  12. Billionaires have polarized space exploration
  13. We need a Butlerian Jihad against AI
  14. What killed the writer Mark Baumer?
  15. Literary exorcisms
  16. On being the subject of a media cycle
  17. Responses to "The new UFO craze and the failures of our public intellectuals"
  18. The new UFO craze and the failures of our public intellectuals
  19. Publish and perish
  20. Me or your lying eyes
  21. Are animals more conscious than we are?
  22. Who invented the idea of memes?
  23. Superintelligence faces a no-win scenario
  24. Bitcoin as a Hyperobject
  25. Superintelligence is impossible
  26. A primer on causal emergence
  27. The semantic apocalypse