(2022-11-15) Hoel Goodbye Academia Hello Substack

Erik Hoel: Goodbye academia, hello Substack. TL;DR I’m introducing paid subscriptions. This allows TIP to be funded and continue.

Today I am resigning my professorship at Tufts University, where I have worked for the last four years

I’ve had a very lucky career for someone who is 34. I got to help develop aspects of the leading scientific theory of consciousness, Integrated Information Theory. I’ve walked the wooded paths of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a visiting scholar, been a Forbes 30 Under 30 in science, and bounced between prestigious institutions, from Columbia University to Tufts.

some actual intellectual contributions (which is all a scientist can ever ask), particularly my work on formalizing emergence mathematically, my research on how to falsify theories of consciousness, and outlining the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis of dreaming

Despite this, I’ve come to believe I can do more original and meaningful intellectual work outside of academia

my academic prospects are actually somewhat lackluster. It’s likely I will never get a tenured position at a top-tier university.

I’ve always felt I was playing a game that only partially synched up with contemporary academia

only a tiny portion of my effort registers in academia. So, where would it register?

online newsletters like The Intrinsic Perspective (TIP) are entries into a literary genre at most two decades old—and in terms of the genre’s momentum, perhaps only a couple years old.

Going paid will allow me to scale up TIP, a thing concerning which I have great ambitions. I want to show what happens when this form is not considered a lark, or some vestigial way for already-famous names to make a buck, but taken deadly seriously as an emerging genre that can be both literature and an outlet for original intellectual work and research.

One reason I’m doing this is my belief that, now we have the technology to do so, creating a class of independent audience-supported scholars and writers and thinkers is likely very healthy for our culture. (public intellectual)

if I write at least an essay a week as I’ve been doing, and continue this for 20 years, I will have written more than 1,000 essays in my life. The more I think on it, the more this seems a worthy goal. If I could accomplish 1,000 good essays, perhaps even a few great ones, touching at various points on every topic of my age about which I have something worthwhile to say, I could die with dignity.