Interintellect · 2026-07-28 · 12 MIN READ

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

Interintellect

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Read Tyler Cowen, Noah Smith, Agnes Callard, Erik Hoel, Rohit Krishnan, Anna Gát, Colin Gorrie, Kyla Scanlon, Olga Yakimenko, Shahid, Ruxandra Teslo, Mashal Waqar

Interintellect

and

Anna Gát

Jul 28, 2026

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.”

Noahpinion

What will more intelligence actually do for us?

“[I]ntelligence, that counterentropic conjoined twin of information, must become the most powerful force in the universe, the energy to which all other physical laws must eventually kneel…Intelligence was destiny, manifest.” — Ian McDonald, “Verthandi’s Ring…

3 months ago · 642 likes · 81 comments · Noah Smith

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.”

Derek Thompson

A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world…

4 months ago · 1420 likes · 24 comments · Derek Thompson

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

).”

The Intrinsic Perspective

Don't dethrone consciousness!

I. MY NEW BABY, THE POPE, AND THE MACHINE…

5 months ago · 246 likes · 63 comments · Erik Hoel

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?”

the ends don't justify the means

of course the people are reading!

This is the sixth in my series of short, quickly written, weekly philosophy essays…

3 months ago · 21 likes · 9 comments · Rebecca Lowe

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.”

The Free Press

Tyler Cowen: You’ll Learn to Love AI Writing

Substack is providing a new service, called Scan for AI (using Pangram), to estimate the prevalence of AI-generated writing in a Substack post. I suspect they are afraid of losing readers, since many people do not like reading the AI text, or at least they think they do not like it…

3 months ago · 48 likes · 83 comments · Tyler Cowen

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.”

Ruxandra's Substack

Intelligence is not the main bottleneck

Edit: It has been brought up to my attention that not everyone in SF believes this stuff (that AGI will solve everything). I think some people certainly do and the conversation that begins the article for example is verbatim. My post refers to a core scene that holds quite quite a bit of sway over the discourse and policies…

3 months ago · 498 likes · 98 comments · Ruxandra Teslo

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.”

Strange Loop Canon

LLM councils show groupthink

One way to get the best out of LLMs is to use model diversity. The models are not all the same so if you use their unique natures, you can get better responses. We saw it with the work on MarketBench. And we also saw this when Karpathy came up with LLM Council…

5 months ago · 47 likes · 17 comments · Rohit Krishnan

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.”

Dead Language Society

I’m writing a book!

Now that the ink has dried on the contract, I can at last share some news that I’ve been sitting on for a while: I’m writing a new book…

3 months ago · 265 likes · 58 comments · Colin Gorrie

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.”

FILM FILM FILM

On the decline of sumptuousness in cinema

The dream of the democratisation of film-making is coming true. Now that it’s feasible for an individual artist to create an entire film on their own, it’s worth reflecting on what we have lost…

4 months ago · 104 likes · 4 comments · Olga Yakimenko

FILM FILM FILM

On the decline of sumptuousness in cinema

FIRST a…

4 months ago · 63 likes · 5 comments · Olga Yakimenko

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.”

Anecdotal Value

Why Can't a Model Be More Like a Man?

The most prophetic figure in George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion (or the 1964 film My Fair Lady, if that’s the version you know) is not Eliza (after whom Joseph Weizenbaum named his proto-LLM) but Eliza’s dustman-turned-philosopher father, Alfred P. Doolittle…

4 months ago · 40 likes · 13 comments · Hollis Robbins

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.”

The Unlearning by Mashal Waqar

Everything reminds me of home

“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…

6 months ago · 9 likes · 6 comments · Mashal Waqar

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…”

shahid's riffs

Home is a Spirit

4 months ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · shahid h n

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.”

American Innocence by Anna Gát

My Jewish Culture

The reason why I have rarely been homesick in the past 15 years of my wanderings is that what I really long for is Jewish culture. Jewish culture, unlike my birth city or my old school friends, is everywhere where I happen to be — I rebuild it from some mysterious source code wherever there is a moment to sit down with a book or time to play with a thou…

4 months ago · 92 likes · 29 comments · Anna Gát

✧

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