Interintellect Hosts Wrote: Consciousness, Jewishness, Sumptuousness -- Consensus, Language, Literacy, Nostalgia -- and more!
Read Tyler Cowen, Noah Smith, Agnes Callard, Erik Hoel, Rohit Krishnan, Anna Gát, Colin Gorrie, Kyla Scanlon, Olga Yakimenko, Shahid, Ruxandra Teslo, Mashal Waqar
When not hosting or visiting Interintellect salons online and offline, some of our favorite thinkers in the world also write extraordinary essays. This is our series celebrating their latest work.
Agnes Callard explains the world. Colin Gorrie is writing a new book on the history of English. Tyler Cowen thinks you will grow fond of AI writing. Kyla Scanlon saves GenZ again. Rohit Krishnan finds conformity among the LLMs. Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains what curiosity does to your brain. Rebecca Lowe reconsiders the reading crisis. Erik Hoel muses about consciousness… I reflect on my Central European Jewish heritage in the middle of Montana’s high desert of all places.
At Interintellect, we believe that all good writing is conversation, and that human lives are built one conversation at a time.
We hope you will enjoy our selection!
Anna
What will more intelligence actually do for us? — by Noah Smith
“Even if we can keep on collecting infinite data, the cost of extracting additional information from that data might explode to infinity. This is the idea of chaos. Even in a deterministic universe where the present states of all particles are enough to perfectly determine the future, our ability to predict the future can be inherently limited; the tiniest infinitesimal error in our measurement of the present explodes into a huge error when we attempt to extrapolate even a small distance into the future.
So although we don’t know yet, it’s possible that humans were already hitting the point of diminishing returns with regards to individual cognitive capacity, and that superintelligent machines will never be as far beyond us as we are beyond dogs.”
A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird — by Derek Thompson with Agnes Callard
“What goes along with the identity logic of the uni-context is a specific form of ethics that dictates how we talk about identity, and it covers who’s powerful and who needs protecting, namely the ethics of inclusion. Our fundamental concern in relation to identity is that there are identities that might be excluded. Depending on where you are politically, you have your sights on different identity categories, but everybody’s worried about that. That’s a fundamental form of ethics of the uni-context, because the one thing the uni-context has to be is a space for everybody. It’s got to be inclusive in a way that earlier societies almost everywhere were not. That word, inclusion, wasn’t a thing people talked about. It comes along with the uni-context, and the way that ethics gets focused is through identity categories.
And then, there’s virtue. Think about Aristotle, because he’s my prime example of a virtue ethicist. By its nature, virtue is a concept that privileges the good side rather than the bad. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics tells you what it is to be courageous and wise and just and generous. There are corresponding discussions of how you might go wrong. But those are predicated on first understanding the positive value of certain kinds of behavior. So virtue ethics naturally has a positivity bias that is precisely the opposite of the bias we have now.”
The Housing Crisis Is Also a Retirement Crisis — by kyla scanlon
“Young people are reading the room here. They are scrambling for a claim on the boom any way they can: founding companies, buying high-fee slivers of OpenAI, betting on Polymarket — all to try to win the lottery because they see nothing below them.”
Don’t dethrone consciousness! — by Erik Hoel
“So I am here to say that you don’t have to dismiss AI capabilities (or compare them to a Word document, like Chiang did) to reject their consciousness. Indeed, it is perhaps the most interesting move—maybe one day an inevitable one—to accept their intelligent capabilities while still rejecting their consciousness. It implicitly shifts us from man, the wise (Homo sapiens) to man, the experiencer (Homo experiens).”
of course the people are reading! — by Rebecca Lowe
“Okay, perhaps the kids are looking at very different things on their screens from the adults. But my bet is that most — or at least, much — of the time that the kids are looking at their screens, they are reading words, too. I mean, don’t even video games include lots of words? And isn’t there a whole thing about the kids messaging their friends while playing video games?”
Consider my same notes on this in my interview with Joel J Miller 📖
We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask — by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
“Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would… In short, curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity — not just for the specific thing you want to know but also for everything around it.”
You’ll Learn to Love AI Writing — by Tyler Cowen
“Some people will rebel, give up reading in their frustration, and instead go for longer walks. But I will not join them, and neither will most.”
Intelligence is not the main bottleneck — by Ruxandra Teslo
“Walking around the world today one might notice that it is weirdly unchanged. LLMs can spawn agents and write complex applications, yet something as mundane as customer service still hasn’t been automated well. In fact, often it’s the automated chatbots that are the worst part of the experience. GDP is up, which is good, but it is not dramatically up. And entry-level jobs, despite repeated warnings of an apocalypse, seem largely intact, if not increasing.
To many, this is surprising. Just the other day I was at a conference where someone remarked that if he could have seen today’s AI capabilities a few years ago, he would have been astonished — and would have assumed the world by now would look far more transformed, with much higher GDP growth. It was offered as a fresh observation.”
LLM councils show groupthink — by Rohit Krishnan
“Humans have gone through thousands of types of “councils” until we reached interim solutions which give us decent results nowadays. And even then, we have to change the shape of the councils constantly, as we evolve, and society evolves.
To figure out how to get the best results from our work requires a lot more effort into designing the councils.”
I’m writing a book! The story of English before it was English — by Colin Gorrie
“If you follow the chain of transmission back 2000 years or so, English will slide imperceptibly into its ancestor: Proto-Germanic, a language once spoken on the shores of the Baltic and North Seas. This language gave birth to all the Germanic languages, so it can just as easily be called “really old German” or “really old Danish” as “really Old English”.
Go back even farther, and you’ll find a language spoken on the steppes of modern Ukraine and Russia, one that would give birth to most of the languages of Europe, and many of Asia: a language which is simultaneously “really really Old English” and “really really Old Spanish” and “really really Old Russian”. This is the common ancestor of them all: Proto-Indo-European.”
On the decline of sumptuousness in cinema: Part I and Part II — by Olga Yakimenko
“I contend that the 21st century has seen a dramatic loss of information on screen, making for a less luxurious and less satisfying experience for the viewer, and trace how this loss was manufactured, department by department.”
Why Can’t a Model Be More Like a Man? — by Hollis Robbins
“My point here is that Alfred P. Doolittle’s questionable ethics regarding his daughter are not unrelated to getting paid large sums of money for moral philosophy at the end of the play.”
Everything reminds me of home — by Mashal Waqar
““Everywhere reminds you of Saudi, Dubai, or Pakistan” is something my husband said to me a little while ago. I laughed at the time. He wasn’t wrong.
I was enjoying the waves in Miami Beach today, and the sound of the water waves crashing against my feet, seaweed and all, made me drown in nostalgia. I was taken back to Halfmoon Beach, in the Eastern Province, in Saudi. Every month, my parents would make plans with our family friends. We would sit by the water and enjoy a picnic or a late lunch.”
Home is a Spirit — by shahid h n
“In Singapore, my beloved country of birth, from the second I was born, demographically I was a minority within a minority within a minority. As a child, having to regularly explain parts of my existence - perhaps why I didn’t speak a certain language (“Oh, you’re Indian but you don’t speak Tamil??”), or why I had certain dietary restrictions (“You ‘eat halal’ ah? But you don’t look Malay”) - got really tiresome after a while.
And even with my family, which on paper was supposed to be the best fit for me, something didn’t sit right. There was always some dissonance…”
My Jewish Culture — by Anna Gát
“The great artistic institutions of America are Jewish culture. Claude and ChatGPT are Jewish culture. Long live your liberal Wissenschaft! The apotheosis of loquaciousness cannot be undone, it undoes all that is stiff and backward and heartless and lacking belonging. Your information theory forgets mutual information but not in Jewish culture. My most Jewish-culture friend is 100% Indian. It is fine, we’ll take him, nobody’s perfect.”
