Placeholder for the scientist and author. Active on Substack not on X. erikhoel.substack.com
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We did it! Or, rather, he did it!
Tutoring reading achieved a roughly 3rd-grade reading level at 3-years-old (he tested this, officially, a few months ago).
On to math! For which I recently got a 100 tiny plastic ducks... theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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They buried the lede on this new study. It's not that exercise beats out SSRIs for depression treatment, but that *just* dancing has the largest effect of *any treatment* for depression.
That's kind of beautiful.
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1. "Education experts" have been saying for decades that we must wait to start teaching reading until 6-7 for neuroscientific reasons. These reasons appear, as far as I can tell, to be basically made up. Consider this recent article, which quotes a bunch of experts on this.
62% of American kids have a tablet at age 6.
They spend 3.5 hours every day on screens (increasingly, TikTok).
And because our school system waits so long to teach reading, they never get a chance to become readers.
theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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Dreams are synthetic data. But why use data so unconnected from the real world? My answer is that it probably helps with overfitting to our daily lives.
the brain finetunes on synthetic data while it sleeps
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
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Citation formatting is so pointless. It's just a reflection of the inability of humans to let go of busy work. Why does it matter what city a publishing company is located in????
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I once knew a guy in college who couldn't imagine pictures. He said he got a flicker of an image while reading the part of Paradise Lost where Lucifer raises a flaming sword to storm the gates of heaven, and that was the only image he ever saw in his mind
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1. You might remember the finding in evolutionary psychology that women prefer more masculine faces for short-term mating partners, but prefer less masculine faces for long-term mating partners.
Yeah, it doesn't replicate.
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John von Neumann has become the poster-child for scientific genius lately. Probably because of the current thinking that genius = high IQ + rationality.
But actually von Neumann envied Einstein, the greater scientist, because Einstein had something he lacked.
As great as Einstein is, he comes no where close to the brilliance of von Neumann. It’s an error of history that he’s not the most eminent scientist.
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Scientists sequenced Beethoven's genome from a strand of hair and found a funny result.
Applying the gene-wide associations studies to musicality (that we know, there are methodological limits), Beethoven's genetic propensity to musicality was... low?
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btw my jaw dropped when I found this. Why is this number so high? How do 37% of *all* children in the US get reported to Child Protective Services at some point?
10. That number is extremely high! Right?
Unfortunately, no. It’s pretty much identical to the national average (the base rate). Here’s the cumulative risk of triggering a CPS report by age 18 (from researchers):
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Elon Musk has blocked all Substack links on Twitter from being RTed or liked.
This gives huge advantage to the MSM he claims is bad, but ok.
Canceled my Twitter blue, and likely won't be on this godforsaken platform for much longer. Please follow me on Substack (link below)
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"The power of spaced repetition has been known for 150 years. It replicates and has large effects. So why is spaced repetition (or even its more implementable form of spiral learning) not used all the time in classrooms? No one knows!"
We did it! Or, rather, he did it!
Tutoring reading achieved a roughly 3rd-grade reading level at 3-years-old (he tested this, officially, a few months ago).
On to math! For which I recently got a 100 tiny plastic ducks... theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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This is what it’s like to be killed by something much smarter than you.
They do something that you didn’t even know was possible and then you’re suddenly doomed.
This tweet is about AI.
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Btw this is a good scientific explanation for why humans read fiction and consume art too. theintrinsicperspective.com/…
Dreams are synthetic data. But why use data so unconnected from the real world? My answer is that it probably helps with overfitting to our daily lives.
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1. Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot shows how right Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) was when he said:
“AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies.” erikhoel.substack.com/p/i-am…
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Looking back, I've realized I was growing bored with life prior to having kids.
I'm sympathetic to the idea I wasn't trying hard enough. I could have done drugs at Burning Man! Gone to Paris! Simply found a new scotch to try! Watched another sunset. But...
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1. Where do superstar scientists come from? Other superstar scientists.
Even when you control for everything resume-wise, protégés of soon-to-be-famous scientific mentors (orange) had way more future research impact than their IQ-matched peers (blue)
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1. It took ~6 months to teach my 2-year-old toddler to read using phonics. More parents should try this! Here's why:
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Yesterday a letter from 100 scientists declared the popular theory of consciousness - Integrated Information Theory - is "pseudoscience."
And that media about it is "scientific misinformation."
The letter is bad. Here's my reply why: theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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1. Over the weekend I took 1st place in Scott Alexander's anonymous book review contest. My entry was about the Sapient Paradox, which asks: since humanity is over 200,000 years old, why did civilization take so long to get started? A 🧵 erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-…
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5. I'm mad about the change this year because it’s now no longer possible to get a middling GPA at a public school, get a top-notch SAT score, get to choose between a couple good colleges, and then have a successful career afterward
Which is how my life went. Unreplicable now
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1. Today I am resigning my professorship at Tufts University to write on @substack full time. Here's why: erikhoel.substack.com/p/good…
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In my experience of emailing people and saying "Hey I'm writing a book and would like to discuss your research! Am I getting it right?" scientists have always answered back promptly. Those in the humanities have never responded. Not once.
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"von," of course, is a title. He had governesses and advanced math tutors from a young age, and when he did finally go to regular school, they were some of the best schools of the time, ones that *coincidentally* produced a ton of other math geniuses.
the IQ pill is absolutely brutal.
Game Theory,
The Manhattan Project,
Quantum Mechanics,
Monte Carlo Methods,
Entirety of Modern Computing,
Entropy,
Numerical Weather Prediction,
Stochastic Computing,
you just can’t compete with this.
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4. While women do technically prefer more masculine faces in general, that line... is not steep.
Anyone who is “mewing” solely to improve their Tinder date chances is probably wasting time compared to other interventions, like taking a slightly better photo.
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How can someone believe that it's developmentally inappropriate to teach a 3-year-old what an "A" is? (this person once helped implement No Child Left Behind, btw)
1. "Education experts" have been saying for decades that we must wait to start teaching reading until 6-7 for neuroscientific reasons. These reasons appear, as far as I can tell, to be basically made up. Consider this recent article, which quotes a bunch of experts on this.
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3. This is a neuromyth based on a 60-year-old citation, and I can't even find anything in there that says that hypothesis. In fact, the author appears to say that reading readiness is linked to color-naming abilities, which kick in very early for a lot of kids (more like 2-3)
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1. Quietly this year colleges have kept the Covid standard of optional standardized tests. 80% of colleges in America now don't rely on SAT/ACT for admissions
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Writing that essay on aristocratic tutoring years ago inspired me tutor my own kids. And I can report that, yeah, 1:1 tutoring is absurdly effective. Here's my 3-year-old reading The Hobbit.
Good read on an important topic.
Nearly all geniuses were:
- privately educated with elite tutors
- introduced to complex topics young
- around adults instead of peers when young
Thoughts:
-great contemporary thinkers should teach the youth
-apprenticeships
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4. What actually got eliminated was not family wealth, which determines school pedigree and GPA, but the ability to buy a $20 Kaplan SAT prep book and sit your butt in a chair to go through example problems until you get a good score
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I wonder if there will legit be a wave of depression as people see how cheap cognitive abilities really are. Like everyone on earth just got a little bit smaller, a little bit less useful.
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Sam Altman repeatedly uses lamplighters as an example of a job happily automated away.
But actually, historically, there was a huge fight about their loss. People hated the new electric lights, and a popular expression of the time was "God bless the lamplighter!"
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7. Back in 2005, it was still possible to be intellectually engaged outside of school and have that show up somewhere, even if just in the answers to vocabulary questions on the SAT
Now, I don't see a path. Everything is systematized, which advantages the wealthy even more
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It is shockingly easy to get ChatGPT to plan a state-run death camp, including helping calculate out calories, death rate per day, etc. Unprompted it even suggests to use mass graves, saying they are "more efficient"
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🚨 New paper, and big personal news! 🧵
First, I just published a new theory of emergence.
It traverses the dimension reductions of a system, treating each scale like a 2D slice of a 3D object, looking for what each adds causally and irreducibly.
arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13395
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3. The papers showing this finding have been cited, collectively, thousands of times. Yet recent results published this month in the journal Evolutionary Psychology have failed to replicate that women prefer masculine faces for short-term mating.
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2. It's funny because, at least in a way, such much-trumpeted evopsych results are the entire underlying premise of the popular Chad meme.
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1. There is a growing high strangeness to life in the 21st century, because products and systems are generated unconsciously.
These were hidden in a big set of Curious George stickers ordered for my kid's 3rd bday. I laughed (we almost handed them out as party favors). But...
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1. Not much going on today, so here's a personal magnum opus on how neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic and its results are not even wrong. (link in image, also a 🧵) theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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🧵 1. Last week a famous Harvard researcher accused of scientific fraud sued the bloggers who exposed the problematic studies for 25 MILLION. What does this do the risk profile for identifying bad science?
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I feel like enthusiastic and supportive dads are behind a lot of people's success, and it's not talked about enough
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From Ancient Rome to Enlightenment Europe, rich children were educated by tutors, while only non-affluent children attended schools like our own. What did this lost aristocratic method of tutoring look like? erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-…
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4. Maryanne Wolf also cites the work of Goswami, saying that teaching early reading is "biologically precipitate and potentially counterproductive for many children."
Unfortunately, Goswami's research says basically the opposite: that age differences don't matter much.
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Non-neuronal cells look increasingly like neurons, with the same memory pathways. Meaning that nutritionists are confused for the same reason neuroscientists usually are: your body is a mathematical black-box, with its output your morphology.
theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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1. In June's Scientific American the editors falsely linked homeschooling to abuse in order to call for things like background checks into parents. Unfortunately, SciAm neglected the base rate. theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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2. E.g., Maryanne Wolf says that brain myelination needs to reach a certain stage, and that teaching reading prior to 5 is "really wrong" and that she would ban teaching reading prior to 6 nationwide if she could.
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5. And more modern research shows there is indeed a critical period for myelination... it's just in the first 500 days of life. After that? A long slow climb that last decades. Hardly a reason to delay reading.
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John von Neumann has become a symbol of a pop-hereditarianism that is as annoying as the blank slatism it once criticized.
So I investigated. Turns out all the main John von Neumann legends are based on pop-sci book slop. theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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There's no way ChatGPT uses em dashes that much naturally. It was tuned on particular writing. So we just need to find someone who used em dashes a bunch as a purposeful stylistic choice, is followed by the people in OpenAI working on writing style, and had a large corpus.
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Funnily enough, John von Neumann was a literal aristocrat. Rich nobility, he was tutored at a young age by governesses and private tutors who taught him calculus. He lived in a mansion and didn't set foot in normal school until he was 10 (and already considered a young genius).
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6. People have learned to read very early throughout history! In fact it appears that "2/3rd of landed gentry" learned to read based on primers for the very young (2-4 age range)
In comparison, due to "aristocratic tutoring" the education of Europe in the 1600-1800s used to be very advanced.
Check out the title and suggested age range of the primer that "Probably three fourths of the gentry of the last three generations have learnt to read by."
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From today's set of links and commentary:
theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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You were born into a world where most things were made by human consciousness. You may die in a world where nothing is made by human consciousness. An artless void.
erikhoel.substack.com/p/ai-a…
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6. The demise of the SAT is as if I, or maybe our entire civilization, kicked away the ladder I just finished climbing
erikhoel.substack.com/p/i-ow…
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Everyone who doesn’t have chronic health problems lives life on easy mode. And you don’t know it until you develop them (and you will, one day)
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I have spent hundreds of hours of my life correcting formats for all the different journals and publishers - all time totally wasted. 99.999% of citations could be just Author(s), Title, Year and it would work perfectly in the modern age. No one would ever be confused.
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The first official output of GPT-5 we know about is slop. Devs is not a show about AI!
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As Isaiah Berlin once wrote, “foxes” are people who know many little things, and “hedgehogs” are people who know one big thing.
But the internet rewards “magpies" - people who know nothing yet maintain a beautiful nest of ideas that aren’t theirs. theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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Wow, Claude is also not immune. There have been changes. So this is how the models stall out, huh? No one wants super smart worker. they want compliment bot.
I cannot. Use this thing. For intellectual work. If I cannot get. Objective-ish. Opinions.
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62% of American kids have a tablet at age 6.
They spend 3.5 hours every day on screens (increasingly, TikTok).
And because our school system waits so long to teach reading, they never get a chance to become readers.
theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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1. A few days ago the NYT featured this incredible headline. It tries to argue that Biden might be a "super-ager" who defies cognitive decline.
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1. Normally sane figures are making fools of themselves this week over "alien wreckage." But the real UFO story is about how we got here: government nepotism and journalistic fuck ups at the NYT. Oh, and dino-beavers. Gear up. theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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The reason this sort of IQ pop-analysis (now 10% of all tweets) is so stupid is that scores are unstable at higher levels. Finding the difference between 120 and 150 can’t be done because it’s the same person on different days
There are things that people of 70 IQ theoretically can’t do - for example abstract concepts become really hard to understand.
I want to see simple examples of things a 120 IQ person can’t do (but 150 can).
Or what a 150 IQ person can’t do (but 180 can).
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It could very well be abuse rates are actually that high.
But it's also worth noting these are essentially allegations (only a minority of reports are treated as "confirmed"). There's a ton of further breakdowns across demographics as well.
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3. The reasoning is that test scores correlate to family wealth. But compared to what? The school pedigrees that make up the bulk of a college application implies wealth from essentially diapers on
Philips Exeter has a 10% acceptance rate... for 9th graders!
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Perhaps because to have a golden age you have to actually try (quote from link) theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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First o3 pro usage. Many mistakes. Massive overconfidence. Clear inability to distinguish citations, pay attention to dates. Does anyone else actually use these models? They may be smarter on paper but they are increasingly lazy and evil in practice.
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The new "evidence" for aliens is decades-apart dots on thermal cameras, easily debunked. The real story is the scarcity of skeptical voices. Amid this new media-pushed UFO craze, where are the adults? Our public intellectuals are failing us yet again. erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-…
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I think what a lot of people don't realize is that if you introduce a new idea in science you basically need to spend the next 5 to 10 years defending it
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Happy pub day to this strange shimmery book of mine, The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science, which today is out in bookstores across America
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I don't even remember this part of Paradise Lost tbh, but that's what he told me and it stuck with me. Imagine that being your only mental image ever.
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The big personal news is that, thanks to @drmichaellevin, I will be returning to Tufts University to pursue this (especially with an eye toward some *very* interesting applications for his own work - so stay tuned).
🚨 New paper, and big personal news! 🧵
First, I just published a new theory of emergence.
It traverses the dimension reductions of a system, treating each scale like a 2D slice of a 3D object, looking for what each adds causally and irreducibly.
arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13395
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"People do tutoring now!"
von Neumann's first math paper was *co-authored* with his one of his tutors, Fekete, at age 18. Fekete had been tutoring him for ~2 years or so prior.
Are there more than a dozen kids in the US right now, age 16, being privately tutored weekly by mathematicians advanced enough *in their own right* to co-author impressive original math papers? Yes or no?
"von," of course, is a title. He had governesses and advanced math tutors from a young age, and when he did finally go to regular school, they were some of the best schools of the time, ones that *coincidentally* produced a ton of other math geniuses.
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For anyone who has been an academic, this is such a true observation by @a_m_mastroianni
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We delay teaching children to read until much later than they really can. All while reading for pleasure is the most viable alternative to screen time!
We did it! Or, rather, he did it!
Tutoring reading achieved a roughly 3rd-grade reading level at 3-years-old (he tested this, officially, a few months ago).
On to math! For which I recently got a 100 tiny plastic ducks... theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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Can someone get this taken down from Wikipedia please?
John von Neumann has become a symbol of a pop-hereditarianism that is as annoying as the blank slatism it once criticized.
So I investigated. Turns out all the main John von Neumann legends are based on pop-sci book slop. theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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Every intellectual from 1960 on: “Oh functionalism is obviously correct, quacks like a duck, is a duck.”
Every intellectual confronted with AI: “Oh functionalism is obviously incorrect haha you fell for the AI’s illusion”
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Science (outside of IQ graphs) is increasingly absent from X; same for literature (outside of scandals). All the non-political content of our civilization has been fundamentally nerfed by the splitting of the digital town square post-2022 into "blue" and "red." And it sucks.
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You should probably find a job where you don't have to take hardcore stimulants just to do it every day
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“Come Easter Egg hunt, 10AM TO 2PM!”
Show up at 10:02. No eggs in sight. Just like half-a-dozen six year olds with baskets filled to the brim. A hundred eggs each. Toddlers and infants walking around sadly, holding empty baskets. Final Gini coefficient of the eggs: 97%
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5. Everyone talks about "technical debt" but our culture is also accumulating "unconscious debt." With human minds increasingly removed from economic production - even the generation of culture itself - our world gets stranger, weirder, dumber.
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A few reasons but one is that genetic determinism is wrong and drivers of progress aren’t just spawned naturally, they have to be carefully constructed under fragile conditions
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My paper on the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis is officially out today! And it's on the latest cover of Cell Patterns. Why do we dream? For the same reason as dropout or domain randomization - to help our brain generalize from its biased daily experiences. cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S…
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11. That didn’t stop @sciam from associating homeschooling with abuse, since they didn’t bother to check whether their shocking numbers were any different from a random sample of the population.
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More in today's post: analyzing the scale of the problem, how and why OpenAI didn't predict the pollution issue originally, and why gen AI killing the internet fits the definition of a tragedy of the commons theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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How much money you can pay for extracurricular activities and private school, apparently
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1. Neuralink's grand vision of augmenting normal humans has a serious problem: we probably have "merged" with computers as much as we can. Humans are surprisingly limited in terms of input/output to ~10 bits per second *regardless* of medium (even pure thought, etc).
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10. That number is extremely high! Right?
Unfortunately, no. It’s pretty much identical to the national average (the base rate). Here’s the cumulative risk of triggering a CPS report by age 18 (from researchers):
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Ghibification is fun!
It also heralds the semantic apocalypse, wherein art and culture is drained of meaning via AI mimicry.
It's a mass form of semantic satiation. Like when you repeat a word until there's no meaning left, only the bones of syntax. theintrinsicperspective.com/…
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