Interintellect Hosts Wrote: The Game of Life. The Wonder of Electricity. Love. Tenderness. Governance. AI.
A selection of recent essays by our salon hosts and community members.
The Interintellect ecosystem consists of four camps:
We have our event hosts
We have our event attendees
We have our community tier members (who come to our online events for free, join our online forum, attend offline too)
And we of course have our beloved team (and many of us also host and attend salons)
Partaking in the art of conversation is a life-changing experience for many people. After academic and professional sorting, political tribes, and generational divides, stepping into Interintellect feels like finally connecting your mind to others — it’s fun, fearless, stimulating, and you never leave an event without having learned new things and made new friends.
I am starting this new Substack series to celebrate the minds of Interintellect, most of whom write interestingly and beautifully to the great enjoyment of us all.
This is the first issue… Let’s dive in!
x Anna
Language and Play — by meenal
“Maybe the powder blue kid knew this, he did simultaneously manage to not care about an iota of knowledge, as well as have the will to garner it in every visible way, so he always has an answer. A man I would call capable of creating ornate decorative art. To redeem my own proclivities I’m forced to torture language till a difference erupts between me and him. He only cared about winning, check.”
The electrical grid is a marvel — by Grant Mulligan
“At a high level, the electric grid consists of three main processes — generation, transmission, and distribution — and electricity moves across them like it’s traveling along a one-way street. First, it is generated at a power plant using coal, natural gas, nuclear fission, or renewables. It then moves across high-voltage transmission lines to substations, where voltage is stepped down. From those, it travels across neighborhood-level distribution lines to homes and businesses.”
On Tenderness — by Ireene ✨
“Tenderness like a mother, the instinct that ran through all of it to protect the people I love from my own weight, to carry things in a way that did not burden them, to endure so that they could feel, at least sometimes, that things were alright. I did that. And I am only now beginning to ask myself whether I extended that same quality of care toward myself in those long moments of trying to put my brave self forward always.”
What does it mean to have a mind? — by Paul de Font-Reaulx
“The idea that we had anything like functional mental states was viewed with suspicion by behaviorists who saw it as unscientific to posit hidden causes in our heads beyond what we can observe, what Gilbert Ryle called a “ghost in the machine”. The redemption of causal psychology came, perhaps surprisingly, from computer science.”
How AIs See Our World — by Chenoe Hart
“As we continue to use AIs that see our world through such unfamiliar methods, we might find ourselves compelled to engage with a concept interface designers already rely on heavily: empathy.”
On measuring AI — by Nikil Ravi
“The interesting question then becomes whether a sufficiently capable system can invent its own metric- through a conjecture-proof loop, a self-play mechanism, or a way of generating better evals than we can.”
Love is the centering of the Other — by shahid h n
“And perhaps there lies the push and pull that defines a healthy relationship: wanting to better yourself for the Other, while accepting the Other for who they are.”
Did You See That Too? — Zsombor Koman
“We do not stand outside our practices, the speaking and writing and looking, using them as tools. We are inside them, organized by them, and when we stop to reflect we loop back through them and change them in turn. It runs both ways. The language I am given shapes what I can think; and in straining after something it holds no ready phrase for, I leave the language a little changed for whoever comes next. We are reorganized by the world, and we reorganize it back.”
thanks for doing this @Anna Gát and thanks to @Paul Franz for getting me to the first saloon!
This is so great.