Astral Codex Ten

Erik Hoel

20 min read

Erik Hoel

Article

Erik Hoel is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 15 times across 15 issues between November 15, 2021 and June 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Erik Hoel’s predictions for 2050”; “Erik Hoel : If we broaden our scope from the obvious mappings (Female President onto Trump)”; “Erik Hoel has an interesting new essay, Why We Stopped Making Einsteins”. It most often appears alongside OpenAI, Aella, China.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 15
  • Issue count: 15
  • First seen: November 15, 2021
  • Last seen: June 27, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

15
November 15, 2021 · Original source
1: Erik Hoel’s predictions for 2050. Recommended more than I would usually recommend this genre. I’ve been looking for really good new Substacks, by people I hadn’t already been reading for years on another platform, and this is one of the few I’ve found that I’m really excited about.
Inline links: predictions for 2050
Highlights From The Comments On "Don't Look Up"
January 07, 2022 · Original source
Erik Hoel:
Inline links: Erik Hoel
Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring
March 22, 2022 · Original source
Erik Hoel has an interesting new essay, Why We Stopped Making Einsteins. It argues that an apparent decline in great minds is caused by the replacement of aristocratic tutoring by ordinary education.
Inline links: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins
Open Thread 217
March 27, 2022 · Original source
7: On Tuesday, I posted a response to Erik Hoel’s post on aristocratic tutoring. Since then he posted a response to my response, and we’re continuing the discussion in the comments there.
Inline links: response, post on aristocratic tutoring, response to my response, in the comments there.
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
1st: The Dawn Of Everything, reviewed by Erik Hoel. Erik is a neuroscientist and author of the recent novel The Revelations. He writes at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective.
Inline links: The Dawn Of Everything, The Revelations, The Intrinsic Perspective
Links For December 2022
December 28, 2022 · Original source
45: Erik Hoel talks about his decision to leave academia for Substack.
Inline links: talks about his decision to leave academia for Substack
Book Review: The Arctic Hysterias
April 06, 2023 · Original source
(if you haven’t already, consider reading Erik Hoel’s review of The Dawn Of Everything, especially the last few parts on “the gossip trap”)
Inline links: Erik Hoel’s review of
Links For July 2023
July 06, 2023 · Original source
The CSS General Price 17: Several people have said nice things about the Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist events space where we hold Berkeley ACX meetups. Mingyuan, who helped decorate it, now has a Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide with what she’s learned about light color temperature, chairs, rugs, and more. 18: Elo Everything is simple: it gives you two random people/objects/concepts, for example “soap” and “Nelson Mandela”, and you pick which one you prefer. Then they have a leaderboard with everything’s Elo (a way of ranking things based on victory in binary contests). The current #1 entity is oxygen; the bottom (#2260) entity is the KKK. 19: Erik Hoel tries to deflate UFO rumors. Although most of the post is the standard “here’s a time someone thought they saw a UFO but it had a reasonable explanation”, the highlight is the dissection of the credulous 2017 NYT article on UFOs, which based on his story sounds totally inexcusable (yes, the government funded a lot of money into UFO research, but only in the sense that Nevada Senator Harry Reid threw lots of money and government-sponsored prestige at random crazy people in his state, because he was either gullible or corrupt). Nothing here directly addresses the current spate of UFO rumors, but the silliness of the previous batch is indirect evidence of a sort. One thing he didn’t highlight: the Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts. 20: Related: the most practical demand I’ve heard from people who take the current UFO rumors seriously is that AARO (the government’s new UFO investigation group) should get Title 50 authority (the right to demand classified information from intelligence services). Read their campaign (maybe sort of supported by some members of Congress) here. Suspicious detail: the colonel saying UFOs are real is named “Karl Nell”. 21: This month in social justice: New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists; “diverse” patients can jump ahead in the queue compared to other patients who may have waited longer or be sicker. The government says this just “corrects” institutional biases which exist at other stages; I don’t know the New Zealand situation but have found previous claims of this sort flimsy. Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage. I can’t find the algorithm they say they’re using anywhere; here is a FOIA-equivalent request for it which hasn’t been answered yet. This file seems related and suggests Maori should get the highest priority and Asians the lowest priority, but I’m not sure they’re exactly following the science here. I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds or thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones, it also caused scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups because of implementation details. We should be fighting for less of this, not more. 22: Related: affirmative action Supreme Court ruling links roundup: Will the ruling really change admissions policies, or will universities find a way around it? Humphrey on DSL works in the field and says he thinks it will produce real change.
Inline links: General Price, Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide, Elo Everything, leaderboard, tries to deflate UFO rumors, Bigelow Aerospace, maybe sort of supported by, here, is named, New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists, various, articles, here, This file, scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups, says he thinks it will produce real change
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
Reviewer: I’m worried that Egan-izing is eating the world. That as these tools are perfected, they begin to constitute a mass of super-stimuluses that it will be harder and harder to turn away from and live in the real world. Erik Hoel wrote about this problem well, and included tips on how to avoid it.
Inline links: wrote about this problem well
Links For August 2023
August 09, 2023 · Original source
H/T Nate Silver, who writes: “Not sure how you can look at this data, ostensibly be interested in either meritocracy or equality, and want to move away from standardized tests. It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.” Cf. Erik Hoel. 19: From @data_depot: “In 2002, 48% of Americans said "the govt is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." 52% said "it is run for the benefit of all people." In 2020, 84% said the govt is run by a few big interests. Only 16% said it is run for the benefit of all people.” Source seems to be here, which reveals 2002 was a local peak in trust in government; maybe because of post-9/11 unity, but even 2000 was 34%, much better than our current 16%. My first instinct is to attribute this to a rise in vulgar Marxism, in the sense of everyone (even conservatives) now being trained to think in terms of an elite class screwing over everyone else (cf my review of Manufacturing Consent). But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know. 20: AskReddit: Medical professionals - have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far? Linking this because there’s lots of evidence showing that education (as a proxy for intelligence?) is associated with increased life expectancy, and this thread gives you a visceral appreciation of why that might be. 21: The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow: Looks like a weak downward trend since 2021 I can’t explain, plus a strong downward trend since 11/2022 which must be from ChatGPT. In case you were wondering how AI was affecting programming! (update: probably false, see here, though see also here for evidence of smaller but real decline) 22: This month in culture war topics: London’s Pride parade featured a convicted kidnapper/torturer/rapist/sadist as a speaker, who advocated that anti-trans people should be “punch[ed] in the f**king face” ; the organizers say they stand by her.
Inline links: Nate Silver, Erik Hoel, @data_depot, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S4g-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff18fa4d5-9ba9-4b86-a058-46246bfc8a4f_536x611.png, here, my review of, have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far?, The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E7XK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8ba7c05-7dbb-4318-9da2-87b00d738ed7_649x518.png, probably false, see here, here, featured, stand by her
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
34: Neuroscientist Erik Hoel discusses the new open letter condemning the integrated information theory of consciousness. I agree with Hoel: IIT is a weird theory, and I don’t personally believe it, but the few attempts to test it have been mildly supportive (including the most recent). Consciousness is inherently hard to study, but IIT proponents (including Tononi, a true great of neuroscience) are trying their best and have behaved entirely responsibly. The signatories’ attempts to (without any argument) go straight to the media and tar it as “pseudoscience” and “misinformation” don’t lower my opinion of IIT at all, but does lower my opinion of the letter signatories. (EDIT: the signatories defend their perspective)
Inline links: discusses the new open letter condemning the integrated information theory of consciousness, the signatories defend their perspective
The Colors Of Her Coat
April 01, 2025 · Original source
Erik Hoel has a new post, Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About Golden Mountains. . . no, sorry! It’s actually called Welcome To The Semantic Apocalypse.
Inline links: Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About Golden Mountains
I support Erik Hoel’s crusade to chart some society-level solution to the semantic apocalypse problem. You’re not allowed to say “skill issue” to society-level problems, because some people won’t have the skill; that’s why they invented the word “systemic”. But your personal relationship to the meaning in your life is not a society-level problem. While Erik Hoel works on the systemic issue, you should be thinking of your own individual soul.
Bayes For Everyone
May 30, 2025 · Original source
If this sounds like some sort of esoteric, speculative division, I’m doing a bad job explaining it. I mean to gesture at an idea that smart people have been pointing at for centuries. It’s at least similar to Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” vs. “Apollonian” modes, and to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “the bricoleur” vs. “the engineer”, and to Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. It’s near the heart of what Iain McGilchrist is describing in The Master and His Emissary. I think it’s the same thing as Erik Hoel’s “intrinsic” vs. “extrinsic” perspectives? It overlaps a lot with Kahneman’s “System 1” and “System 2” and with Jonathan Haidt’s “the elephant” and “the rider”. Heck, the lack of clarity on this divide is what makes Jordan Peterson’s dialogues with atheists so frustrating.
Open Thread 386
June 16, 2025 · Original source
1: Thanks to everyone who commented on P-Zombies Would Report Qualia. Although as usual most of your attempts to link it to other philosophical writings were vague and not very relevant, a correspondent was eventually able to find a very similar argument starting on page 289 of David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind (which I had not previously read). Thanks to Professor Chalmers for not getting upset about this unintentional duplication of his work. And if you think you have a more original insight about consciousness, Erik Hoel highlights a $50,000 consciousness essay contest.
Inline links: P-Zombies Would Report Qualia, The Conscious Mind, a $50,000 consciousness essay contest
Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
Low single mother rate He summarizes that as a place of “economic connectedness” – where adults are connected to each other and to the broader community. A lack of those five elements are not bad per se, but they are correlated with a community where people are not interacting with each other as much as they are in communities where the metrics are reversed. Chetty frames it that kids are influenced by the other adults in the area they live in. But I have another hypothesis. Rather than: Other parents → Your kids Perhaps the causation runs from: Other parents → You → Your kids Maybe it’s not other parents' style of parenting that is influencing your kids (how?) but rather when you spend time around other parents their parenting style rubs off on you and how you parent your kids. Influence like that will not get picked up in Caplan’s adoption studies (which focus almost on how parent characteristics get passed on to genetic vs adopted children’s characteristics), but it is a potential signal that maybe parenting choices do matter. Maybe we were just looking at the wrong data. Pre-registered Genius Experiment We now have two data sets that don’t contradict directly, but do point to opposing conclusions. It would be great if we could test this with a pre-registered randomized control trial. That is not going to happen in our current culture. But enter Laszlo Polgár, who volunteered his own children as the test subjects. (Scott’s 2017 review of Polgar’s book here) Before his children were born Polgár publicly announced he would raise them to be geniuses. He initially considered training them to be genius artists, writers or mathematicians, but decided those fields were not objective enough. It would be too easy for critics to dismiss his future children’s achievements and “not genius” no matter what they accomplished in those fields. So he chose a field that was considered both “driven by intelligence” that had clear, objective measures: chess. Then he called his shot. By 1989 all three girls received their first “GM norms” (a GM norm is finishing a tournament with a elo score of at least 2600; 27 norms are needed to make grandmaster). Two went on to become grandmasters - the 3rd and 4th women to ever achieve that title. One ranked in the top 100 (all genders) at age 12 – she peaked at #8 in the world. The other became the top-rated woman in the world at age 15. Polgar showed that you could take kids, at least kids with “good enough genes”, and turn them into world champions through the right education methods. One might think this would be “case closed”, but even as the Polgar sisters were achieving these feats people were saying that these girls must have been “naturally gifted”. They clearly had bright parents, but does anyone think that if they had been adopted into a random middle class American household they would have still become chess geniuses? Or world class in anything at all? When Polgar was challenged on exactly that, he wanted to repeat the experiment by adopting a “black child” and doing it again. Unfortunately his wife talked him out of it. Even if he had adopted a child and turned him into a genius, that would just be one data point – it would not show up in Caplan’s adoption studies. It would be a case of the anecdote and the data disagreeing. Which do you choose to believe? Aristocratic Tutoring It would be great if we could find more examples of Polgar’s model. While I could not find any other “called shots”, one could go back and look at the childhoods of geniuses to see if there is anything to find. That is what Erik Hoel did in his series of posts on “Why we stopped making Einsteins” (post 1, post 2, post 3; Scott’s response). Hoel argues persuasively that, when biographies of their childhoods exist, the geniuses of the past were almost all given 1:1 tutoring. There must have been many aristocrats in the past that were given 1:1 tutoring who never amounted to world-class genius, and many world-class geniuses who got there without 1:1 tutoring, but it does seem to put the thumb on the scale. Benjamin Bloom would agree. Benjamin Bloom quantified Polgar’s hunch in 1984, just eight years after Polgar’s last daughter was born. He ran a RCT where some students were taught normally and others given 1:1 tutoring. He found that the average tutored child improved by two standard deviations over the control: “The average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class” and “about 90% of the tutored students ... attained the level reached by only the highest 20% [of the control]”. He called his finding the “Bloom’s 2 sigma problem” Why would this discovery of the secret sauce that could turn the average student into a genius be a problem? Because Bloom saw no way to scale it. Clearly we can’t give every kid in the world a personal 1:1 tutor. We had the solution that would revolutionize everything, but it was just too expensive. Where does that leave us? Caplan showed that, within the normal range, nothing you do in education or parenting matters. …But Chetty showed that how (or at least where) your kids are raised can matter. …Polgar showed that intense 1:1 tutoring from a young age can create world-class geniuses …And Bloom showed that 1:1 tutoring can work for almost everyone, improving performance, if not to world-class levels, still two standard deviations above the alternative. Caplan is still mostly right—if you hover in the complacent middle of American schooling. But Chetty hints that context nudges outcomes, Polgár proves that deliberate, early, personalised instruction can manufacture prodigies, and Bloom tells us it lifts the average child by two sigmas. Alpha’s claim is that software‑mediated, 5:1 tutoring narrows that two‑sigma gap for a price mere mortals can (barely) contemplate. Whether that vision survives contact with budgets, regulators, and human nature is the question for section seven. Part Seven: Scaling Weird A month into our experiment in Austin we were at a neighbor’s backyard pool party (a fringe benefit of moving to Austin: there were backyard pool parties in early November). I was in conversation with a couple that I had just been introduced to. He asked why we moved to Austin, “Was it for your job?” “No. Actually we moved for a school for the kids.” Their faces expressed a combination of confusion and shock. It wasn’t the first nor the last time. Everyone is confused at why we would move across the country to send our kids to a new school, “They don’t have good schools where you come from? How much does this school cost?” Those two questions frame Alpha’s biggest risks when it comes to scaling. Their biggest challenges going forward are not going to be pedagogical. They are going to be sociological and economic. The Economic Problem Alpha is much cheaper than a Victorian Governess, but it’s not cheap. As mentioned in this review more than a few times, Alpha’s flagship campus charges $40,000 a year— roughly 3-4× what the other top-tier private elementary schools in Austin ask. Yes, that figure is all‑in: every Chromebook, every afternoon workshop, even the spring junket to Poland to beta‑test the platform with Ukrainian refugees is baked into tuition. There are no gala auctions or booster fees waiting in tall grass. Still, $40k is a hard swallow when the local Christian school will take your child for eleven. Worse, the number almost certainly fails to cover costs. Recall that guides start at $60k, rise to $100k on promotion, and the five “head guides” each earn $150k. At the five‑to‑one student‑to‑teacher ratio Alpha runs, those salaries alone suck in half the revenue from a twenty‑kid cohort before you’ve paid the rent, the head of school, the company executives, the curriculum designers, the engineers that are building the 2-hour platform and AlphaRead, the workshop costs (or the trip to Ukraine) or the marketing expenses (MacKenzie has a very well produced podcast, and I see a lot of ads for the school on Facebook now that we live locally). Compared with aristocratic one‑to‑one tutoring, forty grand is a steal. But $40,000 is still Lamborghini kindergarten – and even at those prices it is still burning through Joe Liemandt’s cash pile. Alpha’s answer to eventually solving the economics seems to be two fold: (1) Get enough scale that the fixed costs (like the learning platform) become a rounding error on overall costs, and (2) pull out the “non-essentials” at many of the campuses to get the marginal cost well below $10,000 per student. Whether they will be successful is still in early innings. The homeschool product beta is limping along with 1x learning, and the Arizona Charter doesn’t open until autumn 2025. Whether Alpha retains its magic without $150,000/year guides with 5:1 teacher:student ratios and generous bribe incentives programs, remains to be seen. The Weirdness Problem When Bryan Caplan writes about the signaling theory of education, he lists three signals that schools send to employers: Our students are smart
Inline links: He summarizes that as a place of “economic connectedness”, Laszlo Polgár, Scott’s 2017 review of Polgar’s book here, post 1, post 2, post 3, Scott’s response, Benjamin Bloom