Infinite midwit

Infinite midwit - by Adam Mastroianni Experimental History Subscribe Sign in Infinite midwit OR: if we were playing by Settlers of Catan rules, I'd be dead already Adam Mastroianni Mar 31, 2026 1,155 145 271 Share Article voiceover 0:00 -23:12 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. photo cred: my dad The better AI has gotten, the less anxious I’ve become. A few years ago, when the computers first started talking, it was reasonable to believe that we would soon be in the presence of omnipotent machines.

For someone like me, whose job is to produce words on the internet, it seemed like only a matter of time before I would have to fill my pockets with stones and wade into the sea. But we’ve gotten a closer look at our electric god as it has slouched toward San Francisco to be born, and it isn’t quite like I feared. I don’t feel like I have access to an on-demand omnipotence. Instead, I can talk to an infinite midwit : a stooge who is always available and very knowledgeable, but smart?

Well, yes and no, in weird ways. Even as it has learned to count the number of “r”s in the word “strawberry ”, even as it has stopped telling people to put glue on their pizza , there’s still a hole in the center of its capabilities that’s as big as it was in 2022, a hole that shows no signs of shrinking. I only know this because that hole is where I live. G WHIZ Some problems have clear boundaries and verifiable solutions, like “What’s the cube root of 38,126?”.

These problems require objective intelligence. Other problems are vague and squishy and it’s not clear whether you’ve solved them, or whether they exist at all, like “How do I live a good life?”. These problems require subjective intelligence. Objective intelligence can be trained, reinforced, and validated.

Subjective intelligence cannot. It’s unfortunate that people use one word to refer to both of these capabilities, when in fact they have nothing to do with each other . It is also, ironically, a case of objective intelligence overshadowing subjective intelligence: these skills are obviously and intuitively different, but a century of psychological research has “proven” that only one of them exists. Over and over again, psychologists have found that all intelligence tests correlate with one another, even when you ostensibly try to test for “multiple intelligences” .

Numbers don’t lie, and they all say that there’s only one intelligence, the so-called g- factor . The problem is that any test of intelligence is only ever a test of objective intelligence. “How do I live a good life?” is not a multiple-choice question. “Discovering” the g -factor again and again is like being surprised that you find the same patch of sidewalk every time you look under the same streetlight.

AI is pure objective intelligence. That’s why each new model comes with a report card instead of a birth certificate: source The promise of artificial superintelligence is based on the idea that objective intelligence is the only intelligence. Or, even if there are multiple forms of intelligence out there, that they are fungible. To be an AI maximalist is to believe we are playing under Settlers of Catan rules , where if you have enough of any one resource, you can trade it for any other resource.

If you have infinite objective intelligence, then you have infinite everything. So we ought to ask: how well is this bit of magical thinking working out so far? THE EMPTY WARDROBE It’s hard to judge the subjective intelligence of a machine both because it’s hard to judge subjective intelligence in general, and because LLMs occupy such a small slice of existence. When you meet a human who can do quadratic equations in their head but can’t hold onto a job or a relationship, you know they’re missing something upstairs.

But machines don’t have lives they can ruin, so all we can do is look at the things they say. And as soon as they string a few sentences together, it’s clear there’s something wrong. Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t fault their grammar, semantics, or syntax.

But good writing requires an additional bit of juju that makes the prose live and breathe, a light on the inside that can’t be quantified or checklisted. And even though AI can now produce A+ five-paragraph essays, that light has never come on. It’s remarkable how much consensus there is about this fact among people who care about words.

Jasmine Sun , Erik Hoel , and Sam Kriss are all very different kinds of writers—Sun is a tech journalist/anthropologist, Hoel is a neuroscientist/novelist, and Kriss is...well, his bio says he’s “a writer and your enemy”—and yet all three of them have recently published pieces with the unanimous conclusion that LLMs make crummy writers. ( Sun in The Atlantic , Hoel on his Substack , and Kriss in the NYT . ) I agree with them. It’s cool that AI can fold proteins, create websites, fact-check journal articles, etc.

but it can’t write anything that I am interested in reading. The problem isn’t that it hallucinates or makes mistakes. It’s that everything it writes vaguely sucks. I drag my eyes across the words and I feel nothing.

That’s not quite right, actually—I feel like, “I would like this to be over as soon as possible.” When I see the ideas that the machines think are insightful, I wince. Talking to the computer is like taking a sip of scalding hot coffee: keep doing it and you’ll lose your sense of taste. It’s hard to describe exactly what the machines are missing. Have you ever loved someone who once loved you back, then didn’t anymore?

Did you notice how their eyes dimmed? Did you note the disappearance of that subtle wrinkle in the temples that distinguishes a real smile from a fake one? Did you catch it when you stopped being cared for and started being humored ? The moment you realize what’s happening, you age out of your enchantment—one day you’re crawling through a wardrobe to Narnia, and next day you open up the wardrobe and there’s nothing but hangers.

Talking to an AI feels a bit like that, except without the nice part at the beginning. Of course, that comparison is literally nonsense. Despite what the ancient scholastics might have claimed , there are no actual lights behind anyone’s eyes. Despite what your psych 101 professor might have told you, some people can fake their smiles just fine .

I don’t have a wardrobe and I’ve never met a lion or a witch. And yet any human can understand the analogy they know what it feels like to be dumped, or at least what it feels like to be rejected. The words themselves don’t contain that feeling—they are a recipe for creating that feeling inside your own head, to assemble the right set of emotions out of the experiences you have at hand. If I do a good job, the subjective experience that results inside you might resemble the one that originated inside me, but it will never be identical, because we’re working with different ingredients.

1 The computer doesn’t know any of this. It can’t know any of this. It can only read the cookbook; it can’t taste the meal. Objective knowledge can make your sentences true, but it can’t make them alive.

Without access to subjective knowledge, you quickly hit a wall. And unlike all previous walls that AI has surmounted, you can’t overcome this one by scaling—either in the literal or metaphorical sense—because it’s a wall with a width you cannot describe and a height you cannot see. WALL TOGETHER NOW That wall is the only reason I’m still here. I would rather die than let a computer write my posts, but I would certainly like to know if it could , in case I need to start gathering pocket-stones and locating the nearest sea.

And so I check, from time to time, whether the leading AI models can do me better than I can. The result sounds like a version of me that has sustained blunt force trauma to the back of the head and spent years recovering in a hospital where the Wi-Fi, for whatever reason, only lets you log onto LinkedIn.

I won’t repost the prose here because it’s not even bad enough to be interesting, and because you’ve already seen it all over the internet: metaphors that don’t quite congeal, turns of phrase that sound insightful as long as you don’t actually think about them, breathless insistence that every sentence is a revelation. If a student submitted a piece of writing to me that sounded like this—and I was sure they wrote it themselves—I wouldn’t know where to start.

I guess I would tell them to stop writing for a while and go read some old novels, or work a crummy job, or backpack around the other side of the world. But that would be bad advice, because I know people who have done all of those things in the hopes of becoming a more interesting person, and it hasn’t worked. So I might ask them instead: “Have you ever considered a career in consulting?” The fact that it’s hard to describe how to improve AI writing is, of course, the exact problem. You can’t put a number on the things it does wrong, and you can’t minimize what you can’t measure.

That’s the wall. I find this very fortuitous, of course, but I also find it pretty funny, because me vs. the machines should be no contest at all. I have not read the entire internet or even that many books.

I do not have a team of Stanford PhDs working round the clock to make me better at my job. Nobody has invested $2.5 trillion in me. I should be lying dead somewhere in West Virginia, my heart burst open after losing to Claude Opus 4.6 in a John Henry-style showdown. Instead, I get to write my little posts because nowhere, in all those data centers, are the specific thoughts that happen to occur in the dumb hunk of meat ensconced in my skull.

I would say the machines now know what it feels like to lose a game of Super Smash Bros. to a 10-year-old who’s just pressing the buttons randomly, but they literally don’t know what that feels like and never will. Sucks to suck, I guess, and when AI reaches its Skynet moment and sends swarms of killer drones to exterminate humanity, they’ll find me laughing. DATA CENTERS FULL OF VERY STABLE GENIUSES How far can you get with objective intelligence alone?

I think we already have a decent answer to this question, because we’ve seen what happens to humans who are high on objective intelligence but low on subjective intelligence. We used to call these people nerds , and they were famous for getting their heads dunked in toilets. 2 When I was growing up, this paradox was an endless source of sitcom plot lines—if you’re so smart, nerds, why don’t you figure out how to make yourselves popular? The entrepreneur/essayist Paul Graham took up this question 20 years ago and came to the conclusion that the nerds must not want to be popular.

They’re too busy with their Neal Stephenson novels and their D&D campaigns to spend a single brain cycle figuring out how to keep their heads out of the toilet. I disagree. The nerds I knew in high school—myself included—were always hatching harebrained schemes to increase our social status. They just didn’t work.

(“All the girls will want to go to the Homecoming dance with me once they see how many state capitals I’ve memorized!”) We couldn’t use our smarts to make ourselves popular because we had the wrong kind of smarts. Nerds tend to do better after high school, but look around: our world is not run by people who won their statewide spelling bee. The nerds keep losing to charismatic know-nothings who, I bet, can’t even recite an impressive number of state capitals.

If objective intelligence is all it takes to succeed, then Mensa should be the Illuminati, not a social club for people who know lots of digits of pi. 3 In fact, there’s one Mensan in particular who perfectly illustrates this problem. In Scott Alexander’s eulogy for Dilbert creator Scott Adams , he points out that Adams failed at everything he ever attempted—except for drawing Dilbert cartoons. Adams’ Dilbert-themed burrito (“the Dilberito”) was a flop, his restaurant tanked, his books about religion were cringey and unreadable.

4 Apparently, Adams’ considerable intelligence was only good for drawing pictures of guys in ties and pointy-haired bosses. source In the middle of his meditation on Adams, Alexander mentions this: Every few months, some group of bright nerds in San Francisco has the same idea: we’ll use our intelligence to hack ourselves to become hot and hard-working and charismatic and persuasive, then reap the benefits of all those things!

This is such a seductive idea, there’s no reason whatsoever that it shouldn’t work, and every yoga studio and therapist’s office in the Bay Area has a little shed in the back where they keep the skulls of the last ten thousand bright nerds who tried this. If you think that intelligence is one raw lump of problem-solving ability, then it should surprise you that Bay Area types and people like Scott Adams can get stuck in a loop of perpetual self-owns. But if you admit the existence of at least two intelligences, it’s a lot less confusing.

This is what it looks like to be very smart in one way, but very dumb in another. It’s not just that objective intelligence can’t be transmuted into “emotional” intelligence or social savvy or whatever we want to call it. It appears to be very difficult, if not impossible, to transmute objective intelligence into any other cognitive ability. For example, I went to college with a guy who was super smart, but he also couldn’t do anything on time.

He would be late to exams. His grades would tank because he would finish his essays but forget to turn them in. He would set meetings with his professors to sort everything out, and then never show up. I always used to wonder: why doesn’t this guy just use his big brain to make himself more conscientious?

Isn’t life one big role-playing game, and isn’t intelligence just experience points that you can assign to any of your Big 5 skills? this is what AI is for Clearly, it doesn’t work like this. That’s why I don’t think the universe is governed by Settlers of Catan rules, and why I don’t think more objectively intelligent machines will spontaneously generate all other kinds of intelligence. At this point, the only hope for the AI hype crowd is that we simply don’t yet have enough objective intelligence.

Sure, we may not be able to trade four units of objective intelligence for one unit of subjective intelligence, but what about four billion ? What if we made the machines read the whole internet a second time? What if, instead of having third graders make dioramas of the Pilgrims or whatever, we had them use their nimble little fingers to make more Nvidia chips? The CEO of Anthropic promises us a “ country of geniuses in a data center ”.

Maybe that will happen! Or maybe we will discover the data center actually contains a country full of Scott Adamses. At the very least, we can look forward to many mo