2025-05-10 00:00:11
Overstatement of the Year?
“Everyone is cheating their way through college.”
The Consciousness Wars continue.
“The most fascinating graph.”
If the US were an upper-class family, DOGE has saved $367.
Does the Great Filter hypothesis mean finding alien life is bad?
How close were the Ancient Greeks to calculus?
Peter Singer’s chatbot betrays him and endorses deontology.
Newest reasoning models are lying liars who lie. A lot.
Blackout jubilation as an indictment of the modern world.
From the archives.
Comment, share anything, ask anything.
Occasionally, I like to check in on predictions people have made about AI. Here’s one of my favorites. Did you know it’s been over three months since Deep Research supposedly allowed automating 1-10% of all economically valuable tasks in the world (according to the CEO of OpenAI)?
Meanwhile, our labor productivity was down by 0.8% in the first quarter of this year. In fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor output was down 0.3%, while hours worked was up 0.6%. As I’ve noted before: text-generation just isn’t that valuable! Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so much of it to train the models on.
What Sam Altman should have said is that they’ve automated the “job” of being a student. Which is true. As a recent deep-dive in New York Magazine put it:
It’s a harrowing read. Its interviews and anecdotes make it clear we should now baseline expect, pessimistically, most students to use AI to do most assignments. Plenty of teachers are quitting because they want more from life than grading an AI’s essays.
After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said.
So what do we do? Is academia over? What does a GPA, or even an entire degree, reflect anymore, if homework and essays can be one-shotted by ChatGPT?
People are arguing for a return to tests, but relying solely on tests limits what academia can impart. It turns us into the AIs, focused solely on regurgitating facts. No “blue book” essay written in a cramped room by pencil can take the place of real research for hours, deep digestion of a book, and so on. This is the main relevant skill academia teaches: how to think in depth about a subject. The situation reveals deep tensions in academia. Ultimately, we have to ask:
Why, in 2025, are we grading outputs, instead of workflows?
We have the technology. Google Docs is free, and many other text editors track version histories as well. Specific programs could even be provided by the university itself. Tell students you track their workflows and have them do the assignments with that in mind. In fact, for projects where ethical AI is encouraged as a research assistant, editor, and smart-wall to bounce ideas off of, have that be directly integrated too. Get the entire conversation between the AI and the student that results in the paper or homework. Give less weight to the final product—because forevermore, those will be at minimum A- material—and more to the amount of effort and originality the student put into arriving at it.
In other words, grading needs to transition to “showing your work,” and that includes essay writing. Real serious pedagogy must become entirely about the process. Tracking the impact of education by grading outputs is no longer a thing, ever again. It was a good 3,000 year run. We had fun. It’s over. Stop grading essays, and start grading the creation of the essay. Same goes for everything else.
2025-05-01 22:53:21
When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.
A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.
Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.
Here are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.
Your teeth mash your food, and you swallow that food down the tube of your esophagus, which goes to the way-station of your stomach, then the further tube of your intestines, where the nutrients are sucked out. The whole long gut finds its terminus at your anus, where you poop out the remains. In this, the core of your body is like a coiled worm, with its base desires of greed and selfishness, around which has grown up all the accoutrements of consciousness and civilization. Most of the struggle of growing up will be choosing which entity to act like: the internal worm, or the human being encasing it.
The portal to the internal worm is the blocks of your teeth, set in arcs ringing your mouth. These innocuous things, which make up your smile, and so allow you to show happiness, will actually cause you great pain. In two ways. The first is that to gain teeth is to become independent, for they sever your need of mother’s milk, and to be independent is a type of pain. The second is quite literal, in that they must burst through your gums, a slow tectonic event like a rising mountain range. The pain will keep you awake at night. One day those baby teeth fall out, only for the process to repeat. Secretly, a new set of adult teeth will have been formed in your jaw via mineral deposition; it is as if your body is the earth’s mantle, and can secrete a kind of white rock. During this metamorphosis, your baby teeth will first become wiggly, then loose, and eventually drop, bloody, onto floors and pillows and held-out palms. This is somehow satisfying.
The mode of teeth is surprise, for they like making an appearance—in your pink gums, in the flash of a smile, but also in culture too. You’ll stumble across them in odd places, like when you read The Hobbit and come to the riddle Bilbo poses Gollum:
Thirty white horses on a red hill. First they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still.
But if teeth are white horses, they’re statues of them, eternal, yet breakable and irreparable. Since we only get one extra set of teeth, we treat them with care. We brush our teeth every day, with bristles attached to a stick. Upon the bristles we squirt something called toothpaste, a slimy soap-like substance you must learn to spit out. Eventually, you will become addicted to this. You will not be able to sleep unless your teeth feel clean and brushed and newly made, as if a pristine set had just burst from your gums once again. This strange compulsion will linger your whole life.
These are monstrous creatures, bigger than a dragon, that live in the pelagic depths of the ocean. We go on boats to watch them, and they watch us in turn. Unlike a fish, they cannot breathe underwater, but must come up for air, and so are creatures split between realms. Even the perception of a whale is divided in twain; eyes on either side of its immensely broad head, it must view the world in two halves, always. So too is the brain of the whale split in ways ours are not. When they dream their cetacean dreams, they do so uni-hemispherically, in that one half of their brain sleeps as the other remains awake, so as to keep them bobbing above water. Often whales can be observed resting languidly on the surface with one eye open, the other closed, for just this reason.
Baleen whales, like humpbacks, blue whales, and fin whales, sing in the ocean deeps with vocalizations that can range miles. Why they sing we do not know. Meanwhile, the toothed whales, like sperm whales and orcas, talk in clicks and whistles. This too, we do not understand, nor know how complex what they’re saying is.
I remember when I told you that whales sing in the deep waters and you cackled with joy. I played you a recording of whale song on YouTube.
After a while you asked: “Are whales real?”
“Yes, whales are real.”
“But dragons are not real.”
“No, dragons are not real.”
“But whales really sing in the deep?”
“Yes, whales really sing in the deep.”
There are things about whales you must wait to learn. Our relationship with them is… complex.
Some whales have hated us for our sins against their race. The most vengeful whale was Porphyrios, who bent his bulk and mind to the purpose of sinking ships off the coastal waters of Constantinople, in the 6th century. This “purple boy” (for that is what “Porphyrios” means), was likely a sperm whale, for only sperm whales and orcas ever become dedicated man-killers, and sperm whales can look, when their dark gray flesh is seen roiling in a frenzy of waves, a dark purple. Emperor Justinian I, his arch-nemesis, could never capture him, even as Porphyrios terrorized the shipping lanes of the empire for fifty years, sinking merchant vessels and warships alike. His ultimate number of victims is unknown, but given the wide berth sailors gave of his regular haunts, and the dreams Justinian I had of the whale’s maw as he sweated through the royal sheets, it must have numbered in the dozens of ships and hundreds of sailors.
Porphyrios, as playful as all whales, met his demise frolicking with dolphins. He ventured too far into the mouth of the Sakarya River, and was beached. There, a local mob descended upon him, as vengeful and hateful as he had been. At first they hacked at him with knives and axes, but could not kill him, so great was his bulk. Becoming more organized, the mob dragged him up onto the beach with ropes and wagons, and on the sand he died by a thousand cuts, his huge eyes surveying what must have seemed an army of Lilliputians surrounding him, excising bit after bit of him, even cannibalizing his own massive body in front of him, until he finally, mercifully, perished.
It is hard to blame Porphyrios. We have been the aggressor for centuries. We used to hunt whales, indeed, an entire industry of men with harpoons grew up—the subject of great literature, you’ll learn—but we stopped, or most of us stopped, for whales are simply too majestic, and our use for them has passed. One day technology will enable us to talk to them, and the first thing they will ask is: “Why?”
We’ll have to sheepishly explain that, for a while, our whole civilization was lit by their oil, their internal juices. Our cities blazed with whale, and for a century they played, unknowingly, the role of a fleshy Prometheus, sacrificing themselves over and over on the rock for us. Horrific, yes, but darkly beautiful. Whales were the light by which we saw.
These are much smaller than whales. So small you can’t see them. They’re everywhere, though. They linger maliciously on door handles and inside nostrils. They make you sick, because it turns out being sick is when something is growing inside of you. When the fruit goes bad on the countertop, it is in an advanced stage of this—something else has grown and eaten it from the inside out.
For a long time we didn't know about germs. Sickness was mysterious because the cause is so tiny. The person who first saw germs under a microscope (which is a way to see tiny things, one that had to be invented), dubbed them “animalcules,” which means “little animals.”
The mood of germs is paranoia. You’ll notice your parents are strange about germs. Much like my grandmother’s generation was about money. After my grandmother died—your great grandmother—no one could find the jewelry. She had stitched it all into clothes, and the clothes had been thrown out or donated. That's what happens when you live through the Great Depression. My generation, in turn, has unopened boxes of N95s and squirts antibacterial hand spray on everyone’s palms too much. One day, if you’re lucky, you’ll laugh at our paranoia too.
When you get sick, and so must lie amid pillows and listen to audio books, you often have a fever, because your body is trying to burn away the animalcules trying to grow inside you. The growth of these evil seeds is also combated by other animalcules, good ones, for you secretly possess an army of soldiers called “white blood cells.” It’s an army whom you’ll never meet, and who have no commander, but this internal regiment patrols your arteries tirelessly. They stand guard over your insides in an internal trench warfare. As is true of many things, you as a child have no need to thank them for this selfless act. The fact that you exist is thanks enough.
The air is abuzz with things called radio waves. You can't see them, but they're there. They’re almost like shouts, although at a frequency you can't hear, and in a medium that’s not sound but rather electromagnetism. These waves can be picked up by radios, which you can buy at a store, or come installed in a car. Radio waves are sent by massive towers, which you have assuredly seen out the car window while being chauffeured around. Somewhere in a nearby town or city, there is a person in a room called a DJ, who works for a radio station. That person selects music. They must pay for the rights to this music, buying it either from the artists who created it, or from the conglomerates who already bought those rights. After being chosen, the music is then piped into the radio towers, which amplify and broadcast the signal, filling the air with encoded notation. Unknowingly, your life has been surrounded by invisible music. And car commercials.
Your parents often sing along to the radio. At first, this will delight you. One day, without having been aware of the change, you’ll feel annoyance as your parents croon:
Oh yeah, life goes oooonnn, long after the thrill, of living is gone.
What you don’t know yet is how there can always be another life, a further next life, and through it, the vicarious thrills of living once again.
2025-04-25 23:04:07
New directives from on high, shouted from a governmental megaphone at scientists, might not be so bad if they were clear. But since they are very much unclear, there is a new mood among my fellow scientists: paranoia. I don’t remember this ever happening before.
The director of the National Science Foundation—which, for all major scientific fields, except biology/medicine, is the main federal funder of basic research—resigned yesterday after the NSF was ordered to be cut by 55%. Meanwhile, the NIH (biology/medicine) is proposed to be cut by 40%, and NASA’s science division by 50%. These numbers will likely change to some degree in Congress, but the proposals are already having tangible effects everywhere. Science has, in terms of inflows of funding, been slowed to a trickle in 2025.
To litigate all that led to this, politically, would take a book. The stated reason for the cuts to science is obvious, best seen in the fight between the Trump administration and Harvard around the role of DEI requirements in admissions, hiring, and grants. But let’s just be honest: that doesn’t explain cutting 55% of the NSF budget.
Thus, the unstated reason is worth examining. If you criticize academia as a sclerotic and ailing institution, then you are a doctor, and should be seeking cures. If you view ideological creep within science as cancer, then the goal is to kill the cancer and keep the patient. Yet, there’s a new nihilism based on the idea that academia is entirely corrupt. And things entirely corrupt are not worth saving.
It’s a view only possible if an alternative is available. Academia houses the crown jewel of science. If academia is not to be saved, where does science go?
A possible hint comes from the current Science Advisor to the President: Michael Kratsios. As far as I can tell, he is the first confirmed in that position, created 49 years ago, to not actually be a scientist. There’s not one scientific citation to his name. But he does have deep ties to Silicon Valley, and was even Peter Thiel’s former chief of staff.
Of course, I don’t know what Trump or Kratsios personally believes. But I do think that the nihilistic view of academia, at least more nebulously at a cultural level, is fed by a whisper: Why not just do a little swap? Why not trade all those pompous ivy-covered campuses for something slicker and less janky? Why not take the crown jewel of science and box it up in a package white and molded, like an Apple product?
2025-04-19 01:09:38
There’s now smelly scientific evidence for alien life on other worlds. We think. Probably. Maybe. Coin toss? 40%? Come on, it’s gotta be at least 30%.
Welcome to my predicted age of “alien agnosticism,” wherein belief in alien life—based on modern space telescopes detecting, light years away, biological and even technological signatures—is not exactly justified scientifically, but it’s also not unjustified either.
For example, on Wednesday we were treated to a pretty incredible headline:
If anything, The New York Times (and other outlets) downplayed the news. As a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters shows, this distant planet, K2-18b, contains in its atmosphere a chemical, dimethyl sulfide, which only gets produced in relevant quantities from life (as far as we know). But when giving the skeptical “maybe this isn’t true” side in the Times article, renowned science reporter Carl Zimmer referenced a different paper arguing K2-18b has a huge magma ocean and therefore couldn’t be habitable. On closer examination, that paper has zero mention of dimethyl sulfide, and so can’t possibly explain the new observation. In fact, it doesn’t even reference the new results!
If you accept the latest evidence at face value, alien life is now arguably the leading hypothesis. And K2-18b joins an ever-growing list of suggestive biosignatures on multiple exoplanets. There’s TOI-270d, sporting not only methane but also carbon disulfide (which on Earth mostly comes from biological processes), along with signs of an out-of-equilibrium atmosphere implying weird conditions we don’t understand… or life. There’s TRAPPIST-1e, another world which will soon be subject to James Webb Space Telescope observations with clear prior predictions about biosignatures from modeling. Even Proxima Centauri b—literally the closest exoplanet to Earth—could possibly have an oxygen atmosphere (which isn’t unique to life, but is suggestive), and at some point in the near future studies will examine its surface reflectance, since any vegetation will leave behind a detectable signature there.
There are now even possible technosignatures of alien life, not just biosignatures. As I’ve written about, researchers have quietly identified 53 stars that are Dyson sphere candidates, detected via excess mid-infrared emissions. They’re just candidates requiring investigation, of course, but the search for Dyson spheres is now firmly in the realm of real science, not fiction. Then there’s ʻOumuamua: noticed back in 2017, it was the first identified interstellar object to wander through our solar system, and was also weird in almost every way, from its thin oblong shape to how it accelerated away. I don’t judge all of this as equally good evidence (ʻOumuamua has multiple natural explanations), but collectively the growing list of biosignatures and technosignatures represents a major change. Alien life is no longer about waiting for evidence, but debating the surprisingly not-crazy evidence we do have.
It’s ironic this comes during a time of UFO rumors and sightings of lights in the sky. Personally, I discount all that entirely. The New Jersey Drones? A mass hysteria from hobbyist flights. Even the newly established official AARO, a government program supposed to investigate UFO sightings by pilots, is a bit of a farce, for its creation was built on a lie. Basically, back in 2008, a group of paranormal believers hunted for things like “dino-beavers” (really) on Skinwalker Ranch, using money from a government grant received via (ahem, what seems like) nepotism. Their chasing of ghosts and goblins, in turn, got misreported by The New York Times as being a super-secret government search for UFOs. The misreporting by the Times triggered a public outcry, so the AARO was created to investigate, and since then has delivered null results. All the major pilot sightings of mysterious UFOs have been debunked as cases of parallax, not understanding how the tracking systems automatically adjust, or literally just blurry far-away planes.
Yet as everyone has been distracted by all the fake UFO news, the actual scientific effort to find alien life has kept chugging along. The telescopes have gotten better. The data sets are bigger. More importantly, the social stigma is gone: scientists regularly write serious papers proposing candidates. This dry academic stuff is real. Meaning that the new data from K2-18b is the best evidence there’s been, ever, to indicate alien life—even if it’s still an uncertainty.
While the K2-18b news got its share of commentary on social media, it was less than one might expect. When “Are we alone in the universe?” gets answered in sci-fi movies and books, it usually entails ontological shock. In reality, we’re in for a long and drawn-out scientific debate over models with tons of parameters. Meaning you must personally choose when to believe in aliens.
Consider the story of K2-18b, which goes back years (indeed, I’ve written about K2-18b before here on TIP). It was first discovered in 2015, ~120 light-years away, sitting in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold Goldilocks zone of its star where water can be liquid. It joined the list of exoplanets (planets we’ve identified around other stars) that exist in a similar habitable zone (the zone depends on the type of star).
Then, in 2023, Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge (and his co-authors) presented evidence that K2-18b might be a “hycean world”—a water world, covered entirely in ocean, with atmosphere unlike our own, in that it contains primarily hydrogen. This was based on spectroscopy observations from when the planet passed in front of its star (planetary transit), at which point scientists can use tools like the James Webb Space Telescope to analyze its conditions based on how the star’s light moves through the atmosphere. Importantly, the team reported finding methane: a classic biosignature, since most methane on Earth is produced by life (a lot of it from animals farting, basically). But there are also abiotic sources of methane, like volcanoes. So, far more importantly, they also reported detecting dimethyl sulfide. And dimethyl sulfide is a lot harder to produce via abiotic means. Ever cook cabbage? You’ve smelled dimethyl sulfide. It’s also created in vast quantities by phytoplankton. That fishy-odor you’ve whiffed at the beach? Dimethyl sulfide. Pigs sniff out truffles via dimethyl sulfide, and so too the James Webb Space Telescope sniffed out dimethyl sulfide on K2-18b. As my wife aptly put it: “It’s like we found someone’s poop.”
However, that original detection back in 2023 was statistically tenuous. When other researchers looked at the data, the finding of dimethyl sulfide wasn’t statistically significant. Okay, no life. Yet now we have a new paper from Madhusudhan et al. (what all the outlets are reporting on) with better data, making a clearer claim for a signal of dimethyl sulfide. Okay, life! But wait. Just in January, dimethyl sulfide was identified in a comet. So dimethyl sulfide can have an abiotic origin. So no life! But that was in small quantities, and there’s no way comets could deliver enough to explain the readings. What about other abiotic means? Dimethyl sulfide has been produced in labs via purely chemical processes, but it decays quickly in the conditions we know about. So as of right now, there’s no plausible way to get dimethyl sulfide via abiotic means in the high quantities seen on K2-18b. So life?
Unsure? Get used to it. There may be no observational data that’s 100% a sign of life, with zero possible false positives. Observations will have to be followed by modeling and then, eventually, experiments. If dimethyl sulfide degrades quickly here, in our nitrogen-rich atmosphere, what about in an atmosphere more like on K2-18b? That’s a major experiment waiting to happen. But the conclusion will always be sensitive to someone coming up with an ingenious, never-before-seen process by which the biosignature could actually be abiotic in origin.
I don’t know how long this period of alien agnosticism will last, but I do know it’s officially begun. It reflects a broader symptom of our age: as our world ever more resembles science fiction, we become collectively more uncertain, not less. A counterintuitive effect. I think it’s because public life is increasing in contact with the full surface area of science, and a lot of science’s surface area is not back in its bow wave of settled science, where there’s capital-T Truth. Much of the area is unsettled frontier. And as the frontier of science increasingly abuts public culture and consciousness, so too does the agnosticism inherent to the frontier settle like a thick mist upon subjects that would have seemed, historically, to require demarcations and answers. E.g., we now have AI models that are very smart. Yet they still mess up simple stuff and lie and hallucinate. Benchmarks get saturated, and nowadays only experts or the eagle-eyed can detect the latest model’s mistakes. Somehow, AI’s impact on GDP is also basically non-existent. All very strange. When do we declare AGI achieved? No one knows.
The public has been thrust into working science. And working science entails a mode of existence less like “I’m right about everything” and more like “I’m surrounded by contradictory publications.” Now everyone gets to share in this special experience. Welcome to the frontier of knowledge—which is really more like a cliff of confusion. It’s windy here, and the dust gets in your eyes; but, in the rare cases when the weather clears, the vistas sure are beautiful.
So if you want to believe in aliens, this week is probably the best time to believe that so far in human history. That’s the thing about our new age of agnosticism. Everyone makes their own choice.
Religiously, I’ve been a self-declared agnostic for years, and a common misconception is that agnostics exist in a state of uncertainty all the time. The human mind isn’t capable of that. Rather, it means on some days, I believe. On others, I don’t. So too over the last few years has waxed and waned my faith about whether there’s life on K2-18b, and if this universe of ours is really filled with vital force and grand dramas beyond sight.
Today, I want to believe.
2025-04-09 00:37:05
Contents:
Real dire wolves, or genetic looks-maxxing?
Were we always in a semantic apocalypse?
Vibe governing: AI and the tariff equations.
A new documentary on consciousness.
Whoops, neuroimaging experiments don’t generalize!
Author buys cute church for $75,000… because he can.
Directed panspermia debate: Should we seed life across the galaxy?
From the archives.
Comment, share anything, ask anything.
1. Colossal Biosciences, a “de-extinction company,” has brought back dire wolves. You can listen to two of the pups, Romulus and Remus, howling here, and get a taste of the Paleolithic at night. TIME magazine published a detailed article yesterday announcing their return.
If we really could resurrect extinct species, I’d support it. While there are ethical considerations, none seem insurmountable. A zoo of living history would sure be something to bring my kids to. Call it Paleo Park—apropos of nothing, of course.
Beyond the jokes about “Winter is coming,” the real question is: are these just ersatz versions of the real thing? After all, they aren’t clones from dire wolf DNA, that’s too decayed; rather, gray wolf DNA was genetically engineered to more closely resemble dire wolves, and the embryos were implanted in and birthed by a domestic dog. Romulus and Remus (and their sister Khaleesi) have only had edits to 14 genes to make them different from gray wolves, while actual dire wolves had way more than that—the latest evidence shows they were the last of an Old World canid lineage that couldn’t interbreed with other wolves at all. These likely can. So how far is this from putting the skin of a dire wolf on a normal gray wolf and parading it around? Is this just genetically engineered looks-maxxing? What about their instincts? Their metabolism? Does their self-perception match their new size and coat?
I can’t help but imagine their forms—shaggy white and large-limbed from the 14 strangers inserted amid their genes—loping wild across the secret 2,000-acre plot maintained by the company. I hope they don’t feel, in some deep animal way beyond language, like an experiment. In this, these new Adams and Eves remind me of Mark Twain’s masterful story: “Eve’s Diary.” There, the day-old Eve describes her new existence thusly:
It will be best to start right and not let the record get confused, for some instinct tells me that these details are going to be important to the historian some day. For I feel like an experiment, I feel exactly like an experiment; it would be impossible for a person to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel convinced that that is what I AM—an experiment; just an experiment, and nothing more.
2. My recent “Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse,” about how AI’s surplus of slop art is draining meaning from culture, went viral and triggered a number of reactions and commentary pieces. By far the best was from Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten, wondering if the semantic apocalypse has actually been unfolding for centuries as progress marches on; and, if so, perhaps it represents more a problem of humanity’s hedonic adaptation to wonder. A writer can only ever hope for such a thoughtful response, and there’s a lot in there, so I’d suggest reading it. In one part, Scott writes:
We gripe about how LLMs are destroying wonder, never thinking about how we’re speaking to an alien intelligence made by etching strange sigils on a tiny glass wafer on a mountainous jungle island off the coast of China, then converting every book ever written into electricity and blasting them through the sigils at near-light-speed. It’s all amazing, and we’re bored to death of all of it.
And I agree, AIs are technologically impressive and their production can be described romantically and beautifully—but in this, they resemble the rest of the modern world; the same delicate supply lines and etchings in glass produce chatty LLMs and stuttering printers alike (The New Atlantis recently had its own delightful essay about this: “How the System Works”).
Reflecting on myself, I don’t get much wonder from chatting with an LLM; not the first time (a wary surprise), nor the 1,000th (annoyed it’s not doing what I want). My reaction is related to something Dwarkesh Patel has noted: it’s odd that LLMs are so knowledgeable, and yet aren’t credited with almost any intellectual achievements. If a living human had even 1/100th the knowledge base an LLM does, they would be a renowned polymath, constantly making connections between disciplines. The fact this hasn’t happened is indicative. To this observation, I’ll add that so far no LLM has produced a major work of art, written a breakthrough novel, established a mid-tier Substack, or even authored a single successful children’s book. Arguably, AI has not written a single paragraph as good as that Twain quote above.
That their big moments of artistic cultural influence are mass-copying events, like the “Ghiblification” meme, has borne out my original criticism of AI art from back in 2022: that AI art is a mimic machine, and can’t help but (mostly? always?) produce what Tolstoy called “counterfeit art.” So no matter how breathtaking LLMs are as modern marvels, their actual output has been a different matter; and the purpose of a system is, after all, what it does. If Silicon Valley does end up replacing novelists and artists with the same kind of ersatz golems as the faux dire wolves, things just wearing their skins, this may indeed be a continuation of a historical trend, but via the kind of radical take-to-me-infinity curve AI always threatens.
2025-04-04 23:59:33
Can you guess on which platform, and by which author, works with these titles appeared?
“On the Education of Children.”
“How the Young Man Should Study Poetry.”
“How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend.”
“Which Is More Intelligent: Land or Sea Animals?”
If some of these have an archaic ring, it’s because they’re 2,000 years old. The author was Plutarch, the Greek (and Roman) philosopher and historian, and clearly also an essayist well-practiced in clickbait. His writing was supported by noble patrons, and his official platform was volumina—papyrus scrolls distributed to the elites, hand-copied, but widely available in libraries too; instances have been found as far away as Egypt. Many were designed to be read aloud, for oral and textual cultures had not yet split, and essays were often debuted at public readings.
He was good at his trade. For which are more intelligent, land or sea animals? I’m already invested—tell me more, Plutarch!
My point is that, in one sense, this form is as old as dirt. Yet, in another sense, newsletters are quite new. Or better to say, Substacks are new. For recently the term “Substack” has eclipsed “newsletter” itself; much like Kleenex, the brand is now the thing itself.
Ironically, this chart comes from a recent article in Bloomberg calling for a political crackdown on Substack itself. Every year, this same call happens. Yet each rings more hollow than the last, since Substack now ranges from cooking blogs to neuroscience explainers to micro-fiction. Criticism of Substack is rebutted by the success of Substack itself. Paul Krugman left The New York Times last December and has been posting his content here since. The prophecy is complete. Therefore, the complaining-about-Substack-being-evil genre of article in an “official” outlet feels like just… yet another article. Which could have been on Substack.
Admittedly, I’m biased, but in my mind this is firmly a good thing. What still excites me about Substacks is how much more experimental and personalized they can be than traditional outlets.
Of course, like all art forms, there are also messy practicalities and limitations. Sometimes, writing a Substack feels like this:
But at the best of times, writing a Substack feels pretty amazing. Their unfolding diachronic nature makes them fundamentally different from a stand-alone essay. To write one, you must imagine you are weaving together a rope, one strand at a time, and saying to the gathering crowd—“See? Do you see?”
So here is how a newsletter, ahem—a Substack—like The Intrinsic Perspective actually gets made. What follows is a tour, in other words, of the factory floor, a space littered with bits and bobs and moving machinery.
Watch your hands.
