The Intrinsic Perspective

Humanity’s Flight 93 Moment

It’s time to ban smart machines making smarter machines

Sep 15 • Erik Hoel

198

110

45

Culture Becomes a Dark Forest

“Wallfacing” to solve Navier-Stokes

Sep 9 • Erik Hoel

407

42

81

August 2026

Buying a house as a mid-century modern midwit

Beautiful homes used to be for normal people, too

Aug 21 • Erik Hoel

87

7

9

July 2026

Goodbye Slopstack! Also, a $50,000 essay/fiction contest, adversarial consciousness tech, & more

Desiderata #41

Jul 24

130

40

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Anthropic 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:

Jul 13 • Erik Hoel

170

46

34

June 2026

Screentime correlates more with kids' brains than IQ; Matt Yglesias gets Dan Dennett wrong; Why literary fiction awards keep falling for AI…

Desiderata #40

Jun 23 • Erik Hoel

79

9

9

Don't dethrone consciousness!

LLMs aren't conscious (and thinking they are is culturally dangerous)

Jun 5 • Erik Hoel

258

63

74

May 2026

But Dumbo could already fly?

100% pure human copium about OpenAI solving Erdős problems

May 23 • Erik Hoel

171

48

18

April 2026

We consciousness researchers have failed you

In Which I Become Shackleton

Apr 29 • Erik Hoel

299

121

68

IVF epigenetic damage gets worse across generations; The next Project Hail Mary; AI's "odorless" math proofs; Waymo at 100% human oversight…

Desiderata #39

Apr 2 • Erik Hoel

83

25

13

March 2026

Hubris

The Lore of the World: Part 4

Mar 19 • Erik Hoel

119

20

9

RIP Dan Simmons. Why weren't you more famous?

The world hates a polymath

Mar 13 • Erik Hoel

192

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