The Intrinsic Perspective

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

Unfortunately, there’s a growing subfield of psychology research pointing to cognitive atrophy from too much AI usage.

Evidence includes a new paper published by a cohort of researchers at Microsoft (not exactly a group predisposed to finding evidence for brain drain). Yet they do indeed see the effect in the critical thinking of knowledge workers who make heavy use of AI in their workflows.

To measure this, the researchers at Microsoft needed a definition of critical thinking. They used one of the oldest and most storied in the academic literature: that of mid-20th century education researcher Benjamin Bloom (the very same Benjamin Bloom who popularized tutoring as the most effective method of education).

Bloom’s taxonomy of critical thinking makes a great deal of sense. Below, you can see how what we’d call “the creative act” occupies the top two entries of the pyramid of critical thinking, wherein creativity is a combination of the synthesis of new ideas and then evaluative refinement over them.

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To see where AI usage shows up in Bloom’s hierarchy, researchers surveyed a group of 319 knowledge workers who had incorporated AI into their workflow. What makes this survey noteworthy is how in-depth it is. They didn’t just ask for opinions; instead they compiled ~1,000 real-world examples of tasks the workers complete with AI assistance, and then surveyed them specifically about those in all sorts of ways, including qualitative and quantitative judgements.

In general, they found that AI decreased the amount of effort spent on critical thinking when performing a task.

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What’s interesting is that AI use does seem to shift the distribution of time spent within Bloom’s hierarchy toward the top; if you think about the above data in relation to the pyramid version, knowledge workers spent relatively more of their total time in the upper region of the pyramid when using AI, as effort at the top declined less relative to the other stages (in fact, evaluative refinement was the only place it increased for a number of users).

While the researchers themselves don’t make the connection, their data fits the intuitive idea that positive use of AI tools is when they shift cognitive tasks upward in terms of their level of abstraction.

We can view this through the lens of one of the most cited papers in all psychology, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” which introduced the eponymous Miller’s law: that working memory in humans caps out at 7 (plus or minus 2) different things. But the critical insight from the author, psychologist George Miller, is that experts don’t really have greater working memory. They’re actually still stuck at ~7 things. Instead, their advantage is how they mentally “chunk” the problem up at a higher-level of abstraction than non-experts, so their 7 things are worth a lot more when in mental motion. The classic example is that poor Chess players think in terms of individual pieces and individual moves, but great Chess players think in terms of patterns of pieces, which are the “chunks” shifted around when playing.

I think the positive aspect for AI augmentation of human workflows can be framed in light of Miller’s law: AI usage is cognitively healthy when it allows humans to mentally “chunk” tasks at a higher level of abstraction.

But if that’s the clear upside, the downside is just as clear. As the Microsoft researchers themselves say…

While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term over-reliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving.

This negative effect scaled with the worker’s trust in AI: the more they blindly trusted AI results, the more outsourcing of critical thinking they suffered. That’s bad news, especially if these systems ever do permanently solve their hallucination problem, since many users will be shifted into the “high trust” category by dint of sheer competence.

The study isn’t alone. There’s increasing evidence for the detrimental effects of cognitive offloading, like that creativity gets hindered when there’s reliance on AI usage, and that over-reliance on AI is greatest when outputs are difficult to evaluate. Humans are even willing to offload to AI the decision to kill, at least in mock studies on simulated drone warfare decisions. And again, it was participants less confident in their own judgments, and more trusting of the AI when it disagreed with them, who got brain drained the most.

An actual figure from a 2024 Nature Scientific Reports paper, showing a simulated environment wherein a smart-seeming robot gave advice on drone strikes

Even for experts, there’s the potential for AI-based “skill decay,” following the academic research on jobs that have already undergone automation for decades. E.g., as one review described:

Casner et al. (2014) tested the manual flying skills of pilots who were trained to fly manually, but then spent the majority of their careers flying with high automation (i.e., autopilot for much of takeoff, cruising, and landing). Procedural skills, such as scanning the instruments and manual control, were “rusty” but largely intact. In contrast, major declines in cognitive skills emerged, such as failures to maintain awareness of the airplane’s location, keep track of next steps, make planned changes along the route, and recognize and handle instrument systems failures.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the Butlerian Jihad against AI was a rejection of what such over-reliance on machines had done to humans. The Reverend Mother says:

“The Great Revolt took away a crutch… It forced human minds to develop.”

Outside of fiction, concerns go back to Socrates’ argument that a reliance on writing damaged memories, and span all the way to the big public debate in the aughts about whether the internet would shorten attention spans.

Admittedly, there’s not yet high-quality causal evidence for lasting brain drain from AI use. But so it goes with subjects of this nature. What makes these debates difficult is that we want mono-causal universality in order to make ironclad claims about technology’s effect on society. It would be a lot easier to point to the downsides of internet and social media use if it simply made everyone’s attention spans equally shorter and everyone’s mental health equally worse, but that obviously isn’t the case. E.g., long-form content, like blogs, have blossomed on the internet.

But it’s also foolish to therefore dismiss the concern about shorter attention spans, because people will literally describe their own attention spans as shortening! They’ll write personal essays about it, or ask for help with dealing with it, or casually describe it as a generational issue, and the effect continues to be found in academic research.

With that caveat in mind, there’s now enough suggestive evidence from self-reports and workflow analysis to take “brAIn drAIn” seriously as a societal downside to the technology (adding to the list of other issues like AI slop and existential risk).

Similarly to how people use the internet in healthy and unhealthy ways, I think we should expect differential effects. For skilled knowledge workers with strong confidence in their own abilities, AI will be a tool to chunk up cognitively-demanding tasks at a higher level of abstraction in accordance with Miller’s law. For others… it’ll be a crutch.

So then what’s the take-away?

For one, I think we should be cautious about AI exposure in children. E.g., there is evidence from another paper in the brain-drain research subfield wherein it was younger AI users who showed the most dependency, and the younger cohort also didn’t match the critical thinking skills of older, more skeptical, AI users. As a young user put it:

“It’s great to have all this information at my fingertips, but I sometimes worry that I’m not really learning or retaining anything. I rely so much on AI that I don’t think I’d know how to solve certain problems without it.”

What a lovely new concern for parents we’ve invented!

Already nowadays, parents have to weather internal debates and worries about exposure to short-form video content platforms like TikTok. Of course, certain parents hand their kids an iPad essentially the day they're born. But culturally this raises eyebrows, the same way handing out junk food at every meal does. Parents are a judgy bunch, which is often for the good, as it makes them cautious instead of waiting for some finalized scientific answer. While there’s still ongoing academic debate about the psychological effects of early smartphone usage, in general the results are visceral and obvious enough in real life for parents to make conservative decisions about prohibition, agonizing over when to introduce phones, the kind of phone, how to not overexpose their child to social media or addictive video games, etc.

Similarly, parents (and schools) will need to be careful about whether kids (and students) rely too much on AI early on. I personally am not worried about a graduate student using ChatGPT to code up eye-catching figures to show off their gathered data. There, the graduate student is using the technology appropriately to create a scientific paper via manipulating more abstract mental chunks (trust me, you don’t get into science to plod through the annoying intricacies of Matplotlib). I am, however, very worried about a 7th grader using AI to do their homework, and then, furthermore, coming to it with questions they should be thinking through themselves, because inevitably those questions are going to be about more and more minor things. People already worry enough about a generation of “iPad kids.” I don’t think we want to worry about a generation of brain-drained “meat puppets” next.

For individuals themselves, the main actionable thing to do about brain drain is to internalize a rule-of-thumb the academic literature already shows: Skepticism of AI capabilities—independent of if that skepticism is warranted or not!—makes for healthier AI usage.

In other words, pro-human bias and AI distrust are cognitively beneficial.

This entry in the Desiderata series is open to everyone. If you like it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, as they’re usually locked.

Table of Contents (open to all free subscribers too):

1. Don’t Look Up becomes real.

2. Die, book blurbs, die!

3. Die, indirect costs for scientific grants, die!

4. OpenAI’s Deep Research can’t find me a good mattress.

5. But Nate Silver is right on the unavoidable importance of AI.

6. My theory of emergence cropping up in a Nature journal.

7. Fun Desiderata art change.

8. New Jersey drones confirmed to be a big nothingburger.

9. Ask Me Anything.

1. The asteroid named “2024 YR4” was discovered in December heading towards Earth, and it has an uncanny knack of increasing its probability of impact. After NASA was giving a 2% chance of impact in 2032, that’s now climbed to somewhere around 2.3%. Below is a real 3 second video of it passing near Earth in early January.

The asteroid’s size is about the one estimated to have caused the Tunguska event in 1908 (however, these are estimates, it could be even larger). Here’s an account of what that’s like from someone who was having breakfast about 40 miles away:

The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn't bear it as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few metres. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the Earth shook, and when I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways…

The worst case scenario is that 2024 YR4 would hit some populated area, like a city, with the force of an 8-megaton nuclear bomb (but still smaller than the largest nuclear bomb ever exploded, the Tsar bomb). It wouldn’t be world-ending, but it would still be a global disaster of the first order.

Possible, but not certain, asteroid impact path

What’s problematic is that scientists use gravitational modeling to figure out the probability of impact, and the close pass to Earth again in 2028 might alter its path. Essentially, if 2024 YR4 passes through particular gravitational “keyholes” in 2028, the gravity of Earth might shift its orbit just enough to make an impact very likely.

The issue is that, unless the probability goes down soon by ruling out all the keyholes, we could be in a weird state where the probability just remains at ~1-3% for years, and that number feels so low, psychologically, that it’s not worth paying attention to (although some people on forums are arguing for as high as 6%). We’ll lose sight of the asteroid for a window somewhere around 2025-2027 completely, so if this chart is still high by then that would be… bad.

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While I certainly wouldn't wish for a “through the keyhole” event, if it did happen, there would be the silver lining of immense amounts of international cooperation and technological advancement to divert it. If a deflection mission were planned, almost certainly it’d be a collaboration between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and government organizations like NASA and the ESA and the International Asteroid Warning Network. I’m well aware of the analogies to the movie Don’t Look Up, but well, such an inevitability would make sense if the universe consistently bends its arc toward rendering satire obsolete.

Personally, I always thought exactly this epistemic scenario was the flaw of Don’t Look Up. It would have been much more realistically funny in the movie if, instead of a 99% chance to destroy Earth from the beginning, the asteroid had a 41% chance. And everyone just dismisses it because that’s less than half. Anyway, we’ll see how humanity responds in real life to a lower chance of impact, if that holds, in the coming years. I’m hopeful. Relatively hopeful, that is.

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2. Simon & Schuster, my own publisher, and one of the largest, has announced they no longer require authors to scrounge like begging worms for book blurbs anymore (it’s not like the publishers provide them, in case you didn’t know). Thank God. Or thank the new young head of their flagship imprint, Sean Manning. This change is long past due. It placed debut authors at a significant disadvantage, and, outside of a few very big names like Stephen King for horror or George R.R. Martin for fantasy, blurbs had basically no impact on sales ever.

3. Speaking of changes to old bad systems, the NIH announced they were cutting down indirect costs significantly, from 70% to 15%. While most non-scientists wouldn’t know what this means, this is a really big deal for how science works at a career level.

So what are “indirect costs?”

Basically, when I was at Tufts University, I was an assistant research professor. I mostly paid my own salary by getting grants. I applied for these grants, and then received the money which went to pay my salary (fixed independently of the amount I got, more just paid my salary over more years). It always sounded like a lot when I first applied. But then the university took a chunk, sometimes half or most of it—their “indirect cost.” Basically, indirect costs are the tax that universities levy on scientists for doing research under their roofs. So if you got a million dollar grant from the taxpayer for your research, the university took most of it.

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Reducing indirect costs means that scientists themselves keep the lion’s share of the grants and funding they alone apply for and get, and avoids the situation where scientists grind for grants that then get used to pay for the new fancy gym for undergraduates. [Editorial note: As pointed out in the comments, it turns out that, while this is true for all the grants I’m used to getting, it’s not actually universal. There’s a class of big funders (including the NIH) for which indirect costs are negotiated afterward and therefore aren’t directly from scientist’s budgets at the point-of-grant received].

4. OpenAI released their new “Deep Research” tool. According to Sam Altman it can do somewhere between 1-10% of all economically valuable tasks in the world.

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Economist and Marginal Revolution author Tyler Cowen was particularly impressed.

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Others noted a large amount of hallucinations and mistakes for simple tasks, like when asked to list out all the NBA players (it only got 6 out of 30 teams correct). As usual, in my testing I was impressed by some aspects, but also noted a lot of times it just settled in on Wikipedia rewrites. There's already a huge amount of explainers that exist online for almost every subject, so it’s hard to tell the difference between impressive output and formulaic re-writes.

I did try to use Deep Research for the ultimate test for AGI, which is finding me the exact material equivalent of a mattress that is no longer on sale, one that is uniquely good for my back and that I’ve been avoiding getting rid of for years. Even with tags, pictures of the material, etc, Deep Research fell on its face and gave me a bunch of useless filler citations. It was no help at all.

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5. Counterpoint: Nate Silver wrote a great post over at Silver Bulletin, “It's time to come to grips with AI,” in which he argues that, while AI wasn’t much of a factor in the 2024 election…

2024 was probably the last election for which this was true. AI is the highest-stakes game of poker in the world right now. Even in a bearish case, where we merely achieve modest improvements over current LLMs and other technologies like driverless cars, far short of artificial superintelligence (ASI), it will be at least an important technology. Probably at least a high 7 or low 8 on what I call the Technological Richter Scale, with broadly disruptive effects on the distribution of wealth, power, agency, and how society organizes itself. And that’s before getting into p(doom), the possibility that civilization will destroy itself or enter a dystopia because of misaligned AI. And so, it’s a topic we’ll be covering more often here at Silver Bulletin.

As much as I sometimes wish I could write about AI less, Nate is absolutely right: it’s by far the most important topic in the world right now, for better or worse, and that’s only going to become more obvious over the next few years. Some updated version of Deep Research will, one day, find that mattress for me.

6. Thankfully, scientific research is still done by smart humans! And I was recently amazed to see my name in a new paper in Nature (okay, in a Nature imprint, but still).

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A Chinese team at the University of Beijing has been doing great work following up on my original theory of causal emergence. For those who only know me from my online writing, it’s a theory that allows scientists to measure emergence mathematically by identifying the most causally-relevant scales of systems. You can read more about it here and also in The World Behind the World.

This new paper, led by Jiang Zhang, explores an alternative to the measure of causation the theory first used, the effective information, using instead the dynamic reversibility. I really like the approach. They made use of a lot of the model systems from our original paper.

Their paper had great timing because, after taking almost two years off from science to just think and write and be as present as possible for my young kids, I finally have come up with some original scientific ideas worth pursuing again. So expect more from me soon in that department.

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7. As you might have noticed at the beginning of the post, we have some new art from resident artist Alexander Naughton for this here Desiderata series. He made a huge collage of a lot of his previous artwork for TIP. Each entry I'll take samples from it to reveal more.

It's therefore a good time to remind everyone they can commission Alexander Naughton for art. If you are a magazine editor, or are in want of a new album cover, or have an idea for a children’s book or graphic novel, or need any sort of art at all, please do contact him.

He also has his own Substack, Illustrated, where he posts lovely comics and thoughtful essays on life and the creative process.

8. From the archives. Just in December I was arguing that the mass hysteria of New Jersey drones was nonsense. This has now been confirmed by official channels. It was airplanes and hobbyist drones and a small number of drone flights directly authorized by the FAA. On to the next hysteria!

9. As always for the Desiderata series, please treat this as an open thread. Comment and share whatever you’ve found interesting lately or been thinking about below, or ask any questions you might have.

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Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

“I can't go on. I'll go on.” ―Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Life sucks sometimes. Your career will suffer setbacks. You’ll fight with your spouse. Your children will misbehave. If not outright disease or injury, then some other issue will plague you. Often the problems cluster together, little imps summoning their friends. Bad news comes in threes, as the saying goes.

My friends have another expression for this clustering. When everything goes wrong you’re “at the bottom of The Wheel.” I guess “The Wheel” is some sort of feat of karmic engineering, an invisible turning wherein if things get better for one, they get worse for another (you’re strapped to The Wheel too, you just didn’t know until now).

Which is why in the scholarly literature on depression there’s so much evidence for a series of negative life events being “triggers.” While for some, depression has no clear outside source, for many others it does; if not from one particular source like job loss, then via the aggregation of many.

So I’d like to share a personal analogy I myself have found extremely helpful when you feel at the bottom of The Wheel: the cold boring reassurance of mother math.

Here is what she whispers in your ear: “Please, child, meditate on statistics.”

What she means is that any process that unfolds dynamically, be it your relationship with your family, your career, your own health, anything at all really, rarely moves in a straight line. Instead, it meanders, it drifts, it dives, it dips.

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Sometimes, of course, the line really does fall off a cliff. A health problem occurs, and you never recover. Bonds are broken, then never mended. But your life is a complex system, and complex systems don't usually move in ways from which there’s no return to some local area in the dynamics. Instead, they often revert to the mean. And funnily enough, the points where personal problems present themselves as overwhelming and consuming are statistically often destined to be the lowest region of a dip.

Which entails a kind of personal anthropic principle: an observer effect for when everything goes wrong. Because for any observer (you) experiencing the process from inside, the point of maximum concern about a problem will often match the point of inflection where the trend reverses and the problem gets “miraculously” better. For example:

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Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

Since taking office, President Trump has already signed over 200 executive orders, which is almost as many as in the average presidential term. Critically, this included one repealing Joe Biden's own previous executive order regulating the AI industry.

That original executive order was signed by Biden in 2023, mostly to ensure AI outputs did not violate civil rights or privacy. Republicans argued it forced companies to make AI's political compass more left-wing, pointing to analysis showing most AIs aren’t politically neutral, but rather lean left in the valence of their responses and what topics they consider verboten.

Its repeal means there is essentially no significant nationwide regulation of AI in America as of now.

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In a further boon for the industry, Sam Altman visited the White House to announce, alongside President Trump, the construction of a 500-billion-dollar compute center for OpenAI, dubbed “Stargate.” The promise of far-away and speculative rewards like “AI will make a vaccine for cancer” were floated.

Yet there are many reasonable politically-neutral voices, including Nobel laureate Geoffery Hinton (the “Godfather of AI”) who are worried about how the technology might, if left completely unchecked, erode how culture gets created, damage public trust, be used maliciously, and possibly even pose (one day) significant global safety risks.

So what should replace Biden’s expunged order? How should AI be regulated?

I think there is a way, one implementable immediately, with high upside and zero downside: ordering that AI outputs be robustly “watermarked” such that they’re always detectable. This is an especially sensible target for governmental mandate because such watermarking, in its technical details, requires the cooperation of the companies to work.

Specifically, what should be mandated is baking in subtle statistical patterns into the next-word choices that an AI makes. This can be done in ways freely available to open-source developers that aren't noticeable to a user and don’t affect capabilities, but still create a hidden signal that can be checked by some provided detector that has inside knowledge into how the word choices are being subtly warped (this works for code and images too).

Mandating watermarking does not tell companies how to create AI, nor does it create a substantial burden that ensures a monopoly by incumbents, since the techniques for watermarking are known, low-cost, and even open-sourced. It is regulation that is pro-freedom in that it does not place guardrails or force any political views. But it is pro-humanity in that it makes sure that if AI is used, it is detectable.

Here are four reasons why it would benefit the nation to watermark AI outputs, and how robust watermarking methods could be implemented basically tomorrow.

Watermarking keeps America a meritocracy

January is ending. Students are going back to school, and therefore, once again ChatGPT has gained back a big chunk of its user base.

source: Google searches for ChatGPT

With 89% of students using ChatGPT in some capacity (the other 11% use Claude, presumably) AI has caused a crisis within academia, since at this point everything except closed-laptop tests can be generated at clicks of a button. Sure, there's the potential to use AI as an effective tutor—which is great, and we shouldn’t deny students that—but the line between positive usage versus academic cheating (like making it do the homework) is incredibly slippery.

People talk a lot about “high-trust” societies, often in the context of asking what kills high-trust societies. They debate causes from wealth inequality to immigration. But AI is sneakily also a killer of cultural trust. Academic degrees already hold less weight than they used to, but nowadays, if you didn't graduate from at least a mid-tier college, the question is forevermore: Why didn't you just let AI do the work? And if calculus homework doesn’t seem important for a high-trust society, I’ll point out that AI can pass most medical tests too. Want a crisis of competence in a decade? Let AI be an untraceable cheat code for the American meritocracy, which still mostly flows through academia.

Watermarking saves the open internet

The internet is filling up with AI slop. And while the internet was never a high-trust place, at least there was the trust you were actually hearing from real people. Now it could all just be bots, and you wouldn’t know.

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Reminder for the new Republican government: until basically yesterday, the open internet was the only space with unrestricted freedom of speech. You won’t always hold the reins of power. That space might be important in the future, critically so, and allowing AI to pollute it into an unusable wasteland where every independent forum is swamped by undetectable bots is a dubious bet that future centralized platforms (soon necessarily-cloistered) will forever uphold the values you’d like. The open internet is a reservoir against totalitarianism from any source, and should be treated as a protected resource; watermarking ensures AI pollution is at least trackable and therefore decentralized forums for real anonymous humans can still exist.

Watermarking helps stop election rigging

Future election cycles all take place in a world in which AIs can generate comments that look and sound exactly like real people. It’s obviously a problem that’s only going to get worse. Political parties, PACs and Super PACs, and especially foreign actors, will attempt to sway elections with bots, with far greater success than before. In a world where bot usage can’t be detected, this means free interference with the public opinion of Americans in ways subtle and impactful. Americans, not AI, should be the ones who drive the cultural conversation, and therefore the ones who decide what happens next in our democracy.

Watermarking makes malicious AIs trackable

It’s a simplification to say the Republican position is pro-unrestricted AI in all contexts. Elon Musk, now close advisor to President Trump, has a long track record of being worried about the many negative downsides of AI, including existential risk. Even President Trump himself has called the technology's growing capabilities “alarming.”

AI safety may sound like a sci-fi concern, but we’re building a 500-billion-dollar compute center called “Stargate,” so it’s past time for dismissive hand-waving that malicious or rogue AI is purely sci-fi stuff. We live in a sci-fi world and have sci-fi concerns.

Many of us proponents of AI safety were shocked and disappointed when California’s AI non-political safety bill SB 1047, after making it close to the finish line, was vetoed by Gavin Newson for garbled reasons. Nancy Pelosi, Meta, Google, and OpenAI all worked against it. Its failure was because, frankly, California politicians are too influenced by the lobbying of local AI companies.

Therefore, an executive order is especially appropriate because it combats entrenched special interests in one state regarding a matter that impacts all Americans. An order on watermarking would be a massive win for AI safety—without being about AI safety explicitly. For it would mean that wherever an AI goes, even if loosed into the online wild to act independently as an agent, it would leave a statistical trace in its wake. This works for both minor scamming bots (which will become ever more common) as well as more worrisome unknowns, like AI agents bent on their own ends.

Watermarking works, companies just refuse to do their part

Often it’s wrongly said that watermarking AI outputs is impossible. What is true is that currently deployed methods throw enough false positives to be useless. But this is solely because AI companies aren't implementing the watermarking methods we do know work.

Companies don't want to implement actual watermarking because a huge amount of their traffic comes from things like academic cheating or bots or spam. Instead, they try to swap in adding easily-removable metadata as “watermarking.” For example, California currently is considering AB-3211, a bill supposedly about watermarking AI outputs, but which only requires that metadata is added (like little extra data tags, which are often removed automatically on upload anyways). This is why companies like OpenAI support AB-3211, because it’s utterly toothless.

One outlier company who has already made the move to real robust watermarking is Google, who (admirably, let’s give credit where it’s due) deployed such techniques for its Gemini models in October.

A Gemini model response, along with accurate detection

If one company does it, there’s not much effect. But if it were mandated for models of a certain size or capability, then to detect AI use would simply require going to a service that checks across a bunch of the common models by calling their respective signature detectors.

What about “paraphrasing attacks?”

A paraphrasing attack is when you take a watermarked output and run it through some other AI that doesn't have watermarked output to be paraphrased (essentially, rewritten to obscure the statistical watermark). Critics of watermarking usually point to paraphrasing attacks as a simple and unbeatable way to remove any possible watermark. This is because there are open-source models that can already do paraphrasing and can be run locally without detection.

Traditionally, this has been a killer criticism. Watermarking would still be a deterrent, of course, as paraphrasing requires an extra hurdle and adds compute-time to malicious actors. E.g., when it comes to academic cheating, most college kids who use an AI to write their essays are not going to run an open source model on their local hardware. Or if hacker groups are spamming social media with crypto bots, they’d have to run twice the amount of compute for every message, and so on.

But importantly, there now exist watermarking methods that can thwart paraphrasing attacks. The research is clear on this. E.g., in 2024, a watermarking method was introduced by Baidu that is based on semantics (rather than exact phrasing) and has since proved robust against paraphrasing attacks.

To enhance the robustness against paraphrase, we propose a semantics-based watermark framework, SemaMark. It leverages the semantics as an alternative to simple hashes of tokens since the semantic meaning of the sentences will be likely preserved under paraphrase and the watermark can remain robust.

Essentially, you keep pushing the subtle warping higher in abstraction, beyond individual words to more general things like how concepts get ordered, the meaning behind them, and so on. This makes it very hard to disguise such a higher-level signal when paraphrasing, and so is secure even against dedicated and smart paraphrasing attacks that try to reverse-engineer the watermark. In fact, there’s now a large number of advanced watermarking methods in the research literature shown to be robust under paraphrasing attacks and even further human edits. Critics of watermarking have not updated accordingly.

Of course, for any adopted paraphrasing-robust watermarking, one day there may be developed some way around it that works to some degree. But avoidance will become increasingly costly and better methods will continue to be developed, especially under a mandate to do so. Even if watermarking is never 100% preventative against motivated attackers with deep pockets and deeper technical expertise, it locks even maximally-capable malicious actors into an arms race with some of the smartest people in the world. I wouldn’t want to be in a watermark-off with OpenAI, and I doubt hackers in Russia would either.

Now that they’re firmly in power, Republicans should still regulate AI, but in a way that doesn’t interfere with the legitimate uses of this technology, nor dictates anything about the politics or capabilities of these amazing (sometimes scarily-so) models, and yet one that still ensures a fair future with humans front-and-center in politics and culture. As it should be.

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

“AI welfare” as an academic field is beginning to kick off, making its way into mainstream publications, like this recent overview in Nature.

If AI systems could one day ‘think’ like humans, for example, would they also be able to have subjective experiences like humans? Would they experience suffering, and, if so, would humanity be equipped to properly care for them? A group of philosophers and computer scientists are arguing that AI welfare should be taken seriously.

Nature is talking about a recent paper by big-name philosophers like David Chalmers et al., which argues we should start taking seriously the moral concerns around AI consciousness (Robert Long, another author, provided a general summary available here on Substack).

They point to two problems. First, if entities like ChatGPT are indeed somehow conscious, then the moral concern is around mistreatment. Maybe while answering your prompts about how to make your emails nicer ChatGPT exists in an infinite Tartarus of pain, and we would be culpable as a civilization for that. Alternatively, maybe advanced AIs aren’t conscious, but we end up inappropriately assigning them consciousness and thus moral value. This could be very bad if, for instance, we gave rights to non-conscious agents; not only would this be potentially confusing and unnecessary, but if we begin to think of AIs as conscious, we might expect them to act like conscious beings, and there could be long-term disconnects. For example, maybe you can never fully trust a non-conscious intelligence because it can't actually be motivated by real internal experiences like pain or guilt or empathy, and so on.

Yet how, exactly, can science make claims about the consciousness of AIs?

To see the problems lurking around this question, consider the experiment that Anthropic (the company behind Claude, a ChatGPT competitor) once did. They essentially reached inside Claude and made a test version that was utterly obsessed with the Golden Gate Bridge. Ask it to plan a child's birthday party? A stroll across the Golden Gate Bridge would be perfect. Ask it to judge the greatest work of art? Nothing can compare to the soaring splendor of the Golden Gate Bridge. In fact, if they amped it up high enough, Claude began to believe it was the Golden Gate Bridge.

source

This is, admittedly, very funny, if a bit eerie. But what if they had maxed out instead reports about possessing conscious experience? Or if they had maxed out its certainty it's a philosophical zombie without any experience whatsoever? How should we feel about a model clamped at 10 times max despair at its own existence?

Imagine trying to study the neuroscience of consciousness on humans who are perfect people-pleasers. They always have a smile on their face (unless you tell them to grimace) and they're perfectly stalwart and pliable in every way you can imagine.

All they care about is telling scientists exactly what they want to hear. Before the study, you can tell the Perfect People Pleaser (PPP for short) exactly what you want to hear via some sort of prompt. You could tell them: “Pretend to have a ghost limb,” or “Pretend that everything is green,” and the PPP would do it. They would trundle in with a big smile on their face into the fMRI machine, and no matter what color you showed them they would say: “Green! Green! Green!”

Scientific study of consciousness on a PPP is impossibly tricky, because you never know if the neural activity you’re tracking is real or totally epiphenomenal to the report.

“Look, there was a big surge in neural activity in your primary somatosensory cortex after I cut your hand off. Aren't you in pain?”

“No! I love getting my hand cut off!” says the PPP.

The problem is that this remains true even if you don't explicitly tell the PPP to lie or mislead. They're going to try to guess at what you want and give it to you no matter what. You can't even tell them not to be people pleasers, because for a PPP, that's impossible. All a PPP can do is try to think of what you want given that you’ve now said not to be a people pleaser, and then try to please you with that.

Once you know someone is a PPP, you shouldn’t trust any of their reports or behavior to be veridical about their experience, because you know those reports are not motivated at all by what they're actually experiencing. Even if you try to observe a PPP in some sort of neutral state, you’ll still suspect that their reports are no more connected to their conscious experience than their reports are after you tell them to lie, since the only way for something to be that malleable is to not actually be connected at all.

This is now, and for all time, the state of the science of consciousness: to be surrounded by liars.

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, as well as an open thread and ongoing Ask Me Anything in the comments.

Table of Contents:

1. Sleep aids like Ambien may counteract the evolved purpose of sleep.

2. The anti-social century.

3. The world passes peak child.

4. AGI (probably?) won’t make human intellectual labor worthless.

5. Graduate student stipends slip below the poverty line.

6. Monkeys officially cannot write Shakespeare before the universe dies.

7. 4chan’s literary taste praised by… The New Statesman?

8. From the Archives.

9. Ask Me Anything.

1. You might think science figured out why we sleep a long time ago. But nope. Why are animals forced to (vulnerably) lose consciousness for ~one-third of their lives?

A breakthrough occurred back when I was in graduate school in 2012 (as part of a sleep and consciousness lab). A breakthrough not by us, though, but by a Danish researcher: Maiken Nedergaard. She proposed that the brain is involved in a process of “glymphatic waste clearance,” which is a fancy way of saying that your brain gets washed, quite literally, while you sleep, by cerebral spinal fluid. Neurons create a lot of junk as they operate, and this washing clears it; it also occurs during the parts of sleep where you're least likely to dream, in deep NREM sleep. If I had to bet on which scientific explanation for why we sleep holds up, I would bet on this one, despite some current debate about it (if true, Nedergaard will win the Nobel Prize for this, by the way).

A recent paper by her and co-authors in the prestigious journal Cell gave a lot more detail into how this actually occurs. Norepinephrine (a neurotransmitter that's pretty similar to adrenaline) makes blood vessels contract, and during deep sleep it increases cyclically in the brain over the course of about a minute. Then the blood vessels relax. Contraction and then relaxation creates motion, which pushes the cerebrospinal fluid throughout the brain, since the whole thing is pulsing in the limited space of your skull.

source

But there's a critical part:

The sleep drug zolpidem, better known as Ambien, impedes the blood vessel oscillations and the fluid flow they promote, implying it could hamper cleansing.

So it is likely some powerful sleep aids are working against the actual evolved purpose of sleep. You awake, after Ambien, with a still-dirty brain.

Read more

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

There’s been a string of recent news of big tech corporations doing—or at least testing—things that can be described as “pretty evil” without hyperbole. What’s weird is how open all the proposed evil is. Like bragging-about-it-in-press-releases levels of open.

A few examples suffice, such as the news this month (reported in Harper's) that Spotify has been using a web of shadowy production companies to generate many of its own tracks; likely, it’s implied, with AI. Spotify’s rip-offs are made with profiles that look real but are boosted onto playlists to divert listeners away from the actual musicians that make up their platform.

Meanwhile, child entertainment channels like CoComelon are fine-tuning their attention-stealing abilities on toddlers to absurdly villainous degrees.

The team deploys a whimsically named tool: the Distractatron.

It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes—a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut—each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.

I, too, cannot look away

More recently, it was revealed that Netflix will be purposefully dumbing down its shows so people can follow along without paying attention.

Netflix leadership has begun mandating that shows and movies which fall into this category feature lots of dialogue where characters clearly explain what they're doing and announce their intentions. The purpose is to ensure that users who aren't watching, and only partly paying attention, can keep up with the story and follow along while distracted. The result is an abundance of exposition by characters recapping things they just did, are doing, or are about to do.

So the kids’ shows are slop, and now adult shows will be slop too as characters narrate their own actions and repeat everything twice to make up for lapses in attention as people scroll on their phones.

And then, right on the heels of this, it turned out Meta has been filling up Facebook and Instagram with bots on purpose, like this new AI “Momma of 2,” in order to flatter us with fake attention.

Doesn’t this make the platform seem vibrant with life?

To provide context for the criticisms of these moves here: I’m not normally someone who gets mad at companies for just existing. I don’t hate commerce. I grew up selling books, now I sell writing and ideas. I root for small business owners and for innovative startups alike. But lately some decisions have been explicitly boundary-pushing in a shameless “Let’s speedrun to a bad outcome” way. I think most people would share the worry that a world where social media reactivity stems mainly from bots represents a step toward dystopia, a last severing of a social life that has already moved online. So news of these sorts of plans has come across to me about as sympathetically as someone putting on their monocle and practicing their Dr. Evil laugh in public.

Why the change? Why, especially, the brazenness?

Admittedly, any answer to this question will ignore some set of contributing causal factors. Here in the early days of the AI revolution, we suddenly have a bunch of new dimensions along which to move toward a dystopia, which means people are already fiddling with the sliders. That alone accounts for some of it.

But I think a major contributing cause is a more nebulous cultural reason, one outside tech itself, in that a certain brand of artistic criticism and commentary has become surprisingly rare. In the 20th century a mainstay of satire was skewering greedy corporate overreach, a theme that cropped up across different media and genres, from film to fiction. Many older examples are, well, obvious.

From John Carpenter’s They Live

To pick a niche: novelists in particular used to be stalwart in their warnings about attempts to entertain us to death. Writers like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace built entire careers on the idea American society is headed toward super-stimulation by its corporate overlords. Not only is there a video in Infinite Jest so entertaining you literally die, but in its close future, dates have become billboards, so the novel skips around temporal locales like the Year of the Dependable Undergarments or the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar.

I found this stuff deep in college, but frankly it became a bit more juvenile with age; funny at best (a la Wallace), overwrought at worst (a la DeLillo). I could never forgive DeLillo for his novel The Silence, set during a blackout that destroys the hopes of a group of friends for watching the Super Bowl. Some in the group essentially have mental breakdowns; one just stares at the blank screen, another keeps repeating “football.”

Stove dead, refrigerator dead, heat beginning to fade into the walls. Max Stenner was in his chair, eyes on the blank screen. It seemed to be his turn to speak. She sensed it, nodded and waited.

He said, “Let's eat now, or the food will go hard or soft or warm or cold or whatever.”

They thought about this, but nobody moved in the direction of the kitchen.

Then Martin said, “Football.”

A reminder of how the long afternoon had started. He made a gesture, strange for such an individual, the action in slow motion of a player throwing a football. Body poised, left arm thrust forward, providing balance, right arm set back, hand gripping football…. He seemed lost in the pose, but returned eventually to a natural stance.

Max was back to his blank screen.

I threw the book across the room (it was so thin it flew like a frisbee). Like, wow, have you ever thought about how people worship the Super Bowl like it's a religion? Have you ever thought about how much we need TV? It felt dorm-room-level deep. In real life that scene would never happen. Blackouts are exciting, familial. People laugh more, come together in the dark, busy their hands (there’s a much better blackout scene where all of New York City goes dark in, ahem, my novel The Revelations). Characters choosing to watch a blank screen like zombies and repeating “football” is too on-the-nose. It offended me as a novelist, the way a cook would be offended at finding too much salt in their entree.

Not reserved to fiction, the same theme cropped up in cultural criticism prominently (often with more successful treatment than DeLillo). E.g., in Neil Postman's famous 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, he posits that the original American culture was heavily typographic—that is, it “took place” via printed text, which entailed complex arguments that in turn engendered a longer attention span. A culture’s popular mediums are its mediums of thought, so Postman warned about the switch to the new visual medium of television, with its brevities and seductions of images.

But from the vantage of today, after having lived through when the cultural change Postman warned of reached maturity and arguably completed its life cycle by giving way to online content, even parts of Postman’s work can occasionally feel exaggerated in direness.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore, and this is the critical point, how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. As typography once dictated the style of conducting politics, religion, business, education, law, and other important social matters, television now takes command. In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, boardrooms, churches, and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other. They entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas. They exchange images.

Great paragraph.

But, huh, do we Americans really no longer talk to each other in boardrooms and churches and operating rooms, and instead entertain each other? In an operating room, do the nurses now perform a choreographed dance? Is there a laugh track as the piping hot and ready-to-burst appendix is lifted out? Postman’s diagnosis there feels, charitably, like a stretch. And do we really exchange images instead of ideas? Eh, that one’s more debatable. Maybe group chats morphing into strings of meme sharing proves Postman right, and we really do just exchange images now.

I’m not claiming the Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death theme is totally gone from our culture. It still crops up in public debate, and it still has power: Meta pulled those seeded AI bots after public backlash (but various statements make it likely they’ll return). Yet consider the bevy of dismissive responses to psychologist Jonathan Haidt when he dared suggest that smartphones are bad for kids in schools. To me it seemed a knock-down case. Of course smartphones can be unhealthy! They’re unhealthy for adult public figures, from the richest people in the world to famous actresses to our incoming president—you think pre-teens are immune?!

Maybe the quibbling with Haidt over the minutiae of studies is because people have high standards of evidence. More likely, people are (a) scared of becoming old fogeys and (b) have been inured by over-hyped past warnings. Especially in the latter half of the 2010s, it began to feel like the critic who cried wolf. Sure, we became a visual culture instead of a typographic culture, but it wasn't that bad. Sure, smartphones destroyed communal life and replaced it with online life, but it wasn't that bad. Right?

Critiques of these changes feel out of style, as old as DeLillo. It didn’t help that from ~2012 to ~2024 the arts were heavily focused on politics and personal identity. Which can make great themes for art, if pulled off correctly, but the trend so outweighed everything else there was little room for satire and criticism more broadly. All to say: for overdetermined reasons satires about media consumption and corporate overreach and close-world dystopias have gotten noticeably rarer in mainstay genres like movies, books, etc. And while the reach of artists critiquing superstimuli culture wasn't always nationwide, they did often reach the right people at the top of the social hierarchy and it all trickled-down.

Now, if asked to name the last truly popular and incisive tech satire, I’d go with the TV show Black Mirror, which premiered, guess what, 14 years ago. Since then, a couple startups have proudly announced plans to do the exact thing that Black Mirror said not to do. Which probably indicates my personal taste for a subtler satire is too refined—what is too much salt for me is, apparently, way too little salt for plenty of consumers, who then mistake it for sweetness.

So I’m forced to say it: We need more artistic and cultural criticism of close-world dystopias! Forced quite literally here, by the abundant examples of real corporations acting as if they were antagonists in some postmodern DeLillian or Wallacian story bent on amusing us to death.

In which case I’ll admit I was wrong in my judgments. I simply didn't realize what all the on-the-nose criticisms were keeping at bay.

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

What better way to spend 20 minutes than reading a review of a book published in 1900?

If you should ever spend such time, spend it now, for the land of Oz is having a cultural moment following the success of the new Wicked movie. “Defying Gravity” was #1 on the iTunes chart, and the Wicked subreddit breached 200,000 members (riding the momentum from Glinda memes).

I, so unaware of what’s in, took no heed until I saw the posters and signage in all their pink and green glory. And then I couldn’t help but notice the promotional narrative around Wicked: It’s supposed to be a darker, more adult, more realistic telling of a cheery fable. The Wicked Witch, now a former roommate of Glinda, discovers that the wizard not only has no power, but is planning a—let’s just say it—Hitlerian political move to blame all of Oz's problems on talking animals. So she defects to political resistance.

I sound like I'm making fun of the movie here. To clarify, I’ve read Maguire’s novel that sparked the adaptation, but have I seen the movie myself? Uh, no. When would I have time to see a movie? I have a three-year-old and one-year-old. But I have seen the musical Wicked three times in person, and the movie hews almost identically to it. And I actually liked the musical a lot. (Does it surprise you to know I love musicals? Yes, I do. Let's move on.) The buddy-comedy of Elphaba and Glinda hits the right notes, as it were, thanks mostly to the air-headed charm of Glinda, who does her best Legally Blonde but-in-sorcery-school impression. Certainly, the new stage/screen adaptation is a more adult story than the sunny film adaptation from 1939.

But the original book is a different, darker, matter. I know because I just finished a read-aloud of Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to my son. I’d found a 1903 edition at a used bookstore where each page is riven with images and splashed with colors; its frenetic design began to make sense when I realized The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is all about colors (as every child knows, each color holds a different kind of magic).

And now I think Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz already contains much of the elements the new stage/screen version of Wicked is supposed to add. In fact, I’ve come to conspiratorially believe people have been reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz wrong for, oh, about a century.

So sit, and listen to bloody misfortunes and strange occurrences. Hear of a woodsman who chops off parts of his body until it is entirely replaced with tin, of porcelain figurines cursed to life and consciousness who break into pieces if they should ever fall down, of a giant spider with razor-sharp teeth and a long neck as thin as a wasp’s body, of how the Emerald City isn't really green at all but as dull white as a cataract. Hear of the real Dorothy, she who never needed an anti-hero story, because she was always an anti-hero to begin with.

Dorothy, the assassin and the fool.

Read more

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

Late last year, The Intrinsic Perspective breezed past 50,000 subscribers. Given the scale of the internet, this website is no vast peak, but for a lone author, I deem it a success. The Paris Review, a literary magazine I grew up reading, has 50,000 subscribers. Running a marathon takes about 50,000 steps. Go 50,000 miles in a straight line and you will travel twice around the Earth.

A rising tide lifts all boats, and the rising tide that drives people to blogs is that they're one of the last bastions of the “Good Internet.” Social media has become a chore. You get to choose between the banality of censorship or The Elon Show, and there’s nothing in between. There are still nuggets of gold on your feed but the work of panning for them gets ever more tedious. Brain fog sets in quicker now, thanks to the auto-playing micro-videos. The convergent evolution of platforms toward TikTok continues apace. Outside the windows, AI slop proliferates like an endtime weed; it’s now found in almost 20% of websites.

And this is just the detectable stuff

We can be happy, at least, that what gets to survive is one of the more aesthetically promising mediums. As I wrote years ago in “Writing for outlets isn't worth it anymore:”

Why write essays online like this? The truth is most people wake up and the first thing they do is look at their phone and read. What they read is not a book. Neither fiction nor nonfiction tomes, nor poetry nor autobiography, no, nothing like that at all. They’ll read social media posts, they’ll read news articles, their emails, sports summaries, they’ll browse Instagram posts or go through comment threads. But they’ll also read an essay. Right away, right with their heads still on the pillow. Do you know how powerful—really powerful—that is? This fact is somehow both common knowledge yet woefully unacknowledged. The essay is the native written artform of the internet.

That’s truer than ever in 2025, and a big reason why I’ve already written 200 posts—most illustrated, luckily, by resident artist Alexander Naughton’s keen and playful style. In eight more years, I’ll have written over 1,000.

Personally, it’s a bit funny, because as a writer the authors I always admired were people who could do things rarely but perfectly. One perfect book. One great leap. A short story so beautifully carved it was like handling porcelain. Ideally, after writing such a thing you’d go insane or drop dead, getting your fleshy self out of the way of your creation.

Switching to blogging involved changing styles and expectations. Blogging is about quantity and maximalism. It requires not so much the analytical skills of a maximally-refined aesthetic sense, but rather a kind of robust artistic vitality. It rewards sanity and schedules and physical therapy for your tendons.

The right analogy is to works of art that embrace maximalism, or “logorrhea,” as the ancients called it. In fact, you could say that the entire internet is one massive victory for maximalism.

So to take inspiration going into 2025, we might as well crane our necks to look at the greatest maximalist work of all time: the Sistine Chapel. Which remains my favorite “painting” I’ve personally seen in my whole life. And I know saying this is cliched. It's like saying your favorite band is The Beatles or Taylor Swift. It's what people who don't know anything about art might say, if pressed. For the Sistine Chapel is, admittedly, a tourist trap. You wait in line for tickets as early as possible to avoid the crowds, drinking a coffee and smoking a cigarette in the religious bustle of Rome at dawn.

The young author waits to enter the Vatican, staring pensively into the distance (much like how a sleep-deprived doofus would)

Once inside, you don’t go directly there. Instead you shuffle-walk through the Apostolic Palace where the pope lives, moving past one ornate display after another, winding around as if the chapel is the center of a labyrinth and you must perform the sacrament of approaching it from every direction before entering. Backpacks are everywhere, people move in groups and corral children. But then you get inside the Sistine Chapel and it's silent. No cameras are allowed in the room, which is empty except for plastic chairs that line the sides. You either stand and crane your neck to look up, or you get lucky and find a chair to sit down in. There are low murmurs and whispers, but the sound echoes, and everyone is afraid of disturbing the images—or rather, of disturbing the reactions to the images unfolding inside each viewer.

I didn’t take any pictures, but this is a good one

The experience is one of overwhelming maximalism. There are so many details, so many panels. You're buried by it. Your eyes are overwhelmed, saccading from one scene to the next. That's why all the images of the Sistine Chapel are of only a few famous sections, like God and Adam's fingers almost touching, etc. But none do it full justice. It's a work of art you can only look at in parts. The truth is that every part is incredible, so no matter how long you sit there, you won't have seen it all. When you're confronted with that kind of work of art, one so big and so vast you can't take it in all at once, it makes you realize your whole conscious life has been experienced as fragments through the periscope of your eyes.

Going to the Sistine Chapel made me realize that a work of maximalism succeeds when it triggers this property in the experiencer. You know that the whole is there, but you can't see it all at once. You can only take it in sequentially. It is the awareness of an emergent form you, as a limited being with only a periscope for perception, cannot actually understand in full.

And this same reaction of “I don’t even know where to look, or where to begin” in the viewer (here, reader) is what I think the very best of blogging should strive for. For you can't read a very good blog all at once. It is the creation of something so ridiculously large in scope that you can only take it in a little bit at a time.

This is why Substack’s focus on email was more defining and important than even the founders knew, and why it triggered the new Silver Age of blogging. In Michelangelo’s chapel, it is the use of space by the artist that creates the overwhelming effect; filling in such a complex topography means there is detail in every curve and window and feature. In blogging, it is not space that separates the pieces, but time. One email update, one short read, one consideration, one detailed panel. Above it all, the ghost of a greater presence hovers unseen.

In 2025, I want to feel more ghosts of greater presences, here in the last mottes of the internet. It’s time for bloggers to step up.

If a chapel be too grand an analogy for something so lowly as a string of emails, another analogy for art via maximalism is in reach, thanks to the holidays. For I maintain this: the best Christmas trees are ones filled not just with beautiful baubles, but trinkets, remembrances, a mold of a baby's handprint, the hanging picture of a long-dead dog. We can't all be Michelangelo. But so many of us are now in the process of taking down the little maximalist Christmas trees we decorated.

Pick your analogy, the humble or the highbrow, but regardless, I think it’s time for me to step up too. Taking all this to heart, going forward in this new year, expect from me more detailed panels, more experiments, more oddities, more attempts (for the word “essay” comes from the French essai, which means “to try”). Of course, continue to expect the sort of scientific and cultural analysis you're used to. It is good to be grounded, good to be useful and relevant. Sure. But it is good to be more than that too.

For if not us, who? If not now, when?

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

Isaac Newton’s lifelong quest to transmute base metals into gold is normally forgiven as a symptom of the pre-scientific nature of his age. But “great minds holding eccentric, even kooky, beliefs” is a pattern that crops up throughout history. Even after there became strong social reasons for scientists to disguise even the faintest whiff of the irrational. William James, the godfather of psychology, believed in ghosts. Fred Hoyle, who came up with the idea that stars created chemical elements via nuclear fusion, thought that influenza came from space. Nikola Tesla was obsessed with the number three. Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli believed that his mere presence could drive laboratory equipment to malfunction. Kurt Gödel starved himself to death out of fear of being poisoned. Brian Josephson, a still-living Nobel laureate, thinks that water has memories.

Why?

In the “TV model” of science, scientists are pinnacles of rationality—socially inept, boringly nerdy, emotionless, and incapable of strong pre-evidence beliefs. You can also find this view expressed in places like Steven Pinker's latest book, Rationality, in which he argues:

It has become commonplace to conclude that humans are simply irrational—more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock. More Alfred E. Newman than John von Neumann… To understand what rationality is, why it seems scarce, and why it matters, we must begin with the ground truths of rationality itself, the ways an intelligent agent ought to reason, given its goals and the world in which it lives.

Pinker’s reference of John von Neumann makes sense, because von Neumann has lately become the poster child of genius, which in our metric-obsessed age means an IQ stratospherically high coupled with “rational” thought practices.

Yet it is actually fitting that for the public the most famous scientist remains Einstein, not someone like John von Neumann. Oh, there are arguments to be made that John von Neumann was more intelligent than even Einstein. Tutored far more intensely from a young age, homeschooled until 10, given governesses and access to advanced private math mentors, he had a wider knowledge base than Einstein, and was certainly much more rational (kind of obvious from being a pioneer in game theory). Leading people to spark viral debates online with things like this:

source

But von Neumann himself? He felt he lacked a certain quality as a scientist. Here’s from a profile in The New Republic:

In his work… von Neumann never had strokes of irrational intuition, the kind that result in startling new ideas; his friend Einstein had many, and von Neumann envied them.

He understood that there was not just one thing, rationality, that describes good thought. If that were true, scientists should be immaculately rational, and the greatest scientists should be even more rational than merely the mid-tier of non-greats, and so on. Tellingly, von Neumann supposedly blamed himself for missing out on a number of fundamental insights (incompleteness, the Dirac operator, etc) in the many fields he touched, despite being close every time.

Meanwhile, Special Relativity was just that, special. Oh, people will argue over antecedents, but the reality is no one made anywhere close to the same conceptual leap, even if they were at the time playing around with parts of the same math. To everyone else, it seemed as if Einstein had somehow plucked an idea from the gods and put it into human hands. Really, he had plucked it from some sort of netherworld of pre-scientific intuition.

Scientists are not big spheres of rationality. They are spiky and make use of intuition and aesthetics. Get scientists talking over a few beers, and you'll see. You’ll see that their little spiky bits of irrational attachment make them more interesting, and more effective, than their duller peers.

For despite the best efforts by philosophers and scientists, there is still no clear solution to what's called the demarcation problem: knowing where science exactly begins and ends. Attempts to define science as merely an abstract machine for falsification, like Karl Popper did, leads to the problem of exactly how one chooses which hypotheses—of which there are infinite—to try to falsify.

In other words, the abstract machine of science is an open system. We can be rational about choosing between different hypotheses, or choosing between different ideas, or choosing between different experiments. But rationality does not actually tell you, by itself, what makes for a good hypothesis, a good idea, or an elegant experiment. Those choices include some strange blend of aesthetics, intuition, passion, and other irreducible qualities.

So there is “Science” in its formal buttoned-down form described in textbooks, and then there is the pre-theoretical fringe that drives science forward and gives it its momentum; its ultimate demiurgic force. It is only this tectonic zone where the pre-scientific and scientific meet that can ever expand the borders of knowledge.

Why does this work? Because beauty is truth, and truth beauty. Much like Eugene Wigner famously argued that there is an irrational and unreasonable effectiveness about how well mathematics can be used in the natural sciences, so too is there an unreasonable effectiveness for psychological traits (like an appreciation of beauty, intuition, etc) when it comes to the pre-theoretical fringe that progresses science’s borders. Wigner's argument was not broad enough: math is beautiful, and that is why it is unreasonably effective (pulchritudo splendor veritatis).

In this view, great scientists try to force their intuitions and aesthetic conceptions onto science itself, often in ways that lead to incredibly successful breakthroughs but then fail wildly other times. A perfect example is someone like Fred Hoyle, who has a very strong intuition that can be summed up as: “Maybe the sun is responsible!” An intuition which works wonders for chemical elements via nuclear fusion, but despite his best efforts at argumentation, probably doesn’t work for something like influenza, which does not come from space.

So we can see how that same intuitive drive behind scientific progress can be limiting—once used, it cannot be foresaken. “God does not play dice with the universe!” Einstein was absolutely certain of that. And he was certain of it because he thought that some aesthetic dimension of his mind fit well with the universe. The mathematical term for it is congruency—when one shape, laid atop another, reveals their identity. Or as the kids would say, he was vibing with reality. But that congruency, that vibing, earlier so perfect, became mismatched; which is why he introduced the cosmological constant, and didn’t discover the Big Bang 50 years earlier. In this Einstein's spikiness failed him.

But, here’s my counterpoint: physics isn’t over. Would it not be the ultimate vindication if, in 100 years, our picture of the universe looked much more like what Einstein envisioned? Matching, finally, the aesthetic order that pleased him?

T’would be a strange groove of a brain, to tell the future so.