[newsletter]
Honeybees Are Smarter Than They Should Be and other things
9 Nov 2026
Hello, from the armchair.
Here’s everything we’ve had since the last missive:
It’s been a very busy few months for me as probably for many of you, but not so busy I haven’t managed to push out a lecture a fortnight for an entire year! I’m impressed with myself. You should be too.
Audio (with edited transcript):
Me explaining an idea to others. Usually tighter, more coherent, and easier to parse than my articles because I’ve already thought it through. Come with edited transcripts, for the readers.
Honeybees Are Smarter Than They Should Be
Main idea: A honeybee can think in abstractions—once the thing we thought singled humans out as special—with a brain so small you couldn’t even scan it. Not well, but they can do it. Every mind solves the problems of its niche. AI looking human isn’t uncanny—it’s what any mind does.
Eerie Coincidences Aren’t That Eerie
Main idea: Your phone probably isn’t listening. Your brain is just built to notice all the ads that surprise you, and forget the thousands that don’t. I reckon most eerie coincidences are like this.
My notes on content online and elsewhere. Sometimes me reminding myself of something, sometimes pointing interesting stuff out to you. Often they accumulate into an article. Enjoy.
Skimming Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind and came across his passage on Marcuse:
Liberating tolerance, Marcuse explained, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”
Was thinking about how it was different from the paradox of tolerance. I suppose Haidt’s point is that the former can sound like the latter. But then Haidt seems to be spiralling into the very anxiety that he writes about so avidly and controversially in The Anxious Generation, so I don’t know how much we should trust that.
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Stuart Hall’s definition of ideology, the working one in cultural studies:
By ideology I mean the mental frameworks—the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation—which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, figure out and render intelligible the way society works.
Neither Marxist nor pejorative: ideology as the frameworks every group uses to make sense of the world, not a synonym for false belief. Which is what I mean by everything is ideology, though I admit Hall doesn’t say everything but rather everything about society. But this isn’t Hall’s website is it.
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Scott Alexander, in Meditations on Moloch, almost in passing:
I remembered the rationalist proverb that if you don’t understand something, you need to call it by a term that reminds you that you don’t understand it or else you’ll think you’ve explained it when you’ve just named it.
This isn’t really rationalist, it’s everywhere. It’s the naming problem, and it’s all over the sciences of mind. Clark Hull worried about it in 1943; the homuncular problem is the same mistake with a little man in it.
Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch
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I hope you found something worth keeping.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
From my armchair to yours,