Top all-time · #1292
Erik Hoel
Personal blog · theintrinsicperspective.comaiphilosophywriting
Erik Hoel writes The Intrinsic Perspective, a personal blog at theintrinsicperspective.com about ai, philosophy and writing. Since 2023, 57 different Hacker News readers have linked it 128 times, most often “Why We Stopped Making Einsteins”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Natural philosophy, belles-lettres, polemics. Click to read The Intrinsic Perspective, by Erik Hoel, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Why We Stopped Making Einsteins6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-07-18
- Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-03-27
- Ambitious theories of consciousness are not “scientific misinformation”3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-09-17
- LLMs aren't conscious (and thinking they are is culturally dangerous)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-06-05
- Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-30
- The End of (Online) History3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-03-26
- Anthropic runs like Wile E. Coyote into the brick wall of consciousness research3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-07-14
- Proving (literally) that ChatGPT isn't conscious3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-01-15
- Consciousness is a great mystery. Its definition isn't3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-31
- Consciousness as a Gödel sentence in the language of science2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-24
What Hacker News says?
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-1-ai-cant-teac...
Comment linking /p/the-1-ai-cant-teach-basic-stuff-like
on “I am starting an AI+Education company”Submitted Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI as a story · 133 points
HN discussionYou're downvoted but learning material has improved a lot since then. Spaced repetition + today's resources should remove a couple years from the 10. People can even practice programming on their phone with termux. Anyone can program anytime instead of having to wait to use the family computer for just an hour like back in the day. It's so easy to get mileage in. The complexity of frameworks has increased, but the f…
Comment linking /p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins
on “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)”Submitted All the existential risk, none of the economic impact as a story · 102 points
HN discussion> [0]: Yes, scientific progress depends on like a thousand people https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/yes-scientific-pro ... I agree with your overall message but it's those thousand people and the hundreds of thousands ( maybe millions ) of people who make the scientific progress possible. It takes a community and an infrastructure to turn a scientific discovery into scientific progress. Like it took thousand…
Comment linking /p/yes-scientific-pro
on “California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones”Submitted I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old as a story · 96 points
HN discussion> As in gifted and talented individuals who form a community, or all these folks from this ethnic background you think are talented? Because if it's the former then I'm surprised they've got a community going "A recent analysis in Nature caused a stir by pointing out that the vast majority of Nobel Prize winners belong to the same academic family. Of 736 researchers who have won the Big Recognition, 702 group togeth…
Comment linking /p/yes-scientific-progress-depends-on
on “California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones”Submitted Making a living by writing is as rare as being a billionaire as a story · 60 points
HN discussionIt means one thing to people who study consciousness. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/consciousness-is-a...
Comment linking /p/consciousness-is-a-great-mystery
on “Intercellular communication in the brain through a dendritic nanotubular network”Submitted Stop Speedrunning to a Dystopia as a story · 44 points
HN discussionBad article. The thesis may even be valuable, but it’s riddled with falsehoods trying to prove the point. It reads more as the usual person disliking the idea of IQ and trying to bash its foundation. Some actual facts are: 1. Einstein was a great student (as common sense would expect) [1]. Top in his class in ETHZ, and the supposed failed exam is because he tried to do the exam earlier than intended. He had great, a…
Comment linking /p/your-iq-isnt-160-no-ones-is
on “Slowness is a virtue”Submitted The internet's “town square” is dead as a story · 39 points
HN discussion> That would explain this at least: There are more pedestrian explanations. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/john-von-neumann-s...
Comment linking /p/john-von-neumann-shot-lightning-from
on “A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting”Submitted John von Neumann Shot Lightning from His Arse as a story · 37 points
HN discussionYou would like this article - https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/curious-george-and... The author orders some Curious George stickers and gets a surprising array of kind of scary "closely related" stickers with em.... a fuzzy interpreter. The plus c when you integrate. Those missing harmonics and back-channel data that get inaudibly cut out of MP3s. The goo between the prickles. We don't know how to say what…
Comment linking /p/curious-george-and-the-case-of-the
on “Lack of intent is what makes reading LLM-generated text exhausting”Submitted Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture as a story · 25 points
HN discussion> On the ruins of Bulgaria’s communist utopian cyber-economy, the most prolific and feared virus writer of all, named the Dark Avenger, emerged to wreak havoc on the world’s computers at the moment Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed the end of history. Was it really? Oh, yes, kind of: > “The [US] capitalists behaved like socialists while the [Soviet] socialists behaved like capitalists.” In other words, the United Stat…
Comment linking /p/the-end-of-online-history
on “The Bulgarian Computer's Global Reach: On Victor Petrov's "Balkan Cyberia"”Submitted You can't just replace science with Silicon Valley as a story · 22 points
HN discussionSentence two does not follow from sentence one. https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-mak...
Comment linking /p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins
on “Ask HN: Outstanding Programmers”Submitted In 2025, blogs will be the last bastion of the Good Internet as a story · 20 points
HN discussionYou might be interested in Erik Hoel's more formal version of this argument: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/proving-literally-...
Comment linking /p/proving-literally-that-chatgpt-isnt
on “No, Artificial Intelligence is not Conscious - Ted Chiang”Submitted I'm a neuroscientist. Our candidates have shrinking prefrontal cortexes as a story · 18 points
HN discussionThere's a famous post by Erik Hoel that calls the human version of this Aristocratic Tutoring [1] (Scott Alexander is unconvinced [2]). In the 1980s, a researcher called Benjamin Bloom claimed a z=2.0 (that is 2σ) advantage for a combination of mastery learning (don't move on the the next topic until you've mastered the current one) and 1-on-1 tutoring. Later replications show there is definitely something going on,…
Comment linking /p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins
on “New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]”Submitted How to teach your two-year-old to read as a story · 16 points
HN discussionErik Hoel has an excellent reaction to this letter on his substack here https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ambitious-theories... "...as a fledging science consciousness research should worry about hanging out too much dirty laundry. If too much is hung out, then petty infighting can destroy an already fragile field. My greatest fear is that we get another “consciousness winter” wherein just talking about cons…
Comment linking /p/ambitious-theories-of-consciousness
on “Consciousness theory slammed as ‘pseudoscience’ – sparking uproar”Submitted RIP to the man who beat the efficient market hypothesis as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI’m a big fan of this Substack post. The UFO craze was created by government nepotism and incompetent journalism https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-ufo-craze-was-... > To sum up the story as far as I understand its convoluted depths: diehard paranormal believers scored 22 million in Defense spending via what looks like nepotism from Harry Reid by submitting a grant to do bland general “aerospace research”…
Comment linking /p/the-ufo-craze-was-created-by-government
on “NASA clears the air: No evidence that UFOs are aliens”Submitted Culture Becomes a Dark Forest as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThere is a good review of the book you might like: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap
Comment linking /p/the-gossip-trap
on “Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?”Submitted Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse as a story · 9 points
HN discussion
