Erik P. Hoel

1 week ago | theintrinsicperspective.com | Erik P. Hoel

Over a year has passed since I began teaching my toddler—then two years old—how to read (a process chronicled here). Now, I’m prepared to answer a burning scientific question that has kept absolutely zero researchers up at night: Can a three-year-old read The Hobbit? Turns out: yeah, pretty much. Here’s Roman reading from Chapter 1:In a hole, in the ground, there lived a hobbit.

3 weeks ago | theintrinsicperspective.com | Erik P. Hoel

The summer solstice comes. In just over a month, the sun’s rays will hike to their northernmost peak. At Stonehenge, the sunrise will summit the Heel Stone, turning the stone’s shadow into a long blade that pierces between the monoliths and touches the Altar Stone. There, amid the cramped tourist encampments, Fey creatures will have made their annual pilgrimage. Wearing faces so perfectly average they slip from memory, the Fey will sip their coffees and be jostled amid the crowd.

1 month ago | theintrinsicperspective.com | Erik P. Hoel

The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and commentary, and an open thread for the community (paid-only). Overstatement of the Year? “Everyone is cheating their way through college.”The Consciousness Wars continue. “The most fascinating graph.”If the US were an upper-class family, DOGE has saved $367. Does the Great Filter hypothesis mean finding alien life is bad? How close were the Ancient Greeks to calculus? Peter Singer’s chatbot betrays him and endorses deontology.

1 month ago | theintrinsicperspective.com | Erik P. Hoel

When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself. A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps. Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real.

1 month ago | theintrinsicperspective.com | Erik P. Hoel

New directives from on high, shouted from a governmental megaphone at scientists, might not be so bad if they were clear. But since they are very much unclear, there is a new mood among my fellow scientists: paranoia. I don’t remember this ever happening before. The director of the National Science Foundation—which, for all major scientific fields, except biology/medicine, is the main federal funder of basic research—resigned yesterday after the NSF was ordered to be cut by 55%.