Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal: Why Write?

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

As a listener of TOE you can get a special 35% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Curt Jaimungal argues that in an age where LLMs can produce beautiful prose on demand, we've discovered that output was always just a proxy for something deeper — understanding you can't outsource, especially on the questions that actually matter: death, meaning, identity, morality. Shallowness now wears the robe of eloquence. FOLLOW: - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/subscribe - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/de803625-87d3-4300-ab6d-85d4258834a9 - PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=XUBHNMFXUX5S4 TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00 - You Can't Vibe Your Way to Understanding - 02:22 - Shallowness Now Wears the Robe of Eloquence - 04:09 - Why We Never Knew Output Was a Proxy LINKS MENTIONED: - Why Write [Article]: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/why-write - 3 Rules of Writing [Article]: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/my-3-rules-of-writing - One Push Up [Article]: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/this-may-be-one-of-the-most-important - The Most Terrifying Philosopher Encounter I've Encountered [TOE]: https://youtu.be/BWYxRM__TBU - The Abused Theorem in Math [TOE]: https://youtu.be/OH-ybecvuEo Guests do not pay to appear. #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash tow. That's Shopify.com slash T-O-E. People often ask me, what is it that's going to be left for them after LLMs take over virtually any output that they desire? My answer is that your output was always there in part to serve as an indicator of what's inside you. There's no such thing as vibe understanding. You can vibe code. Yes, you can even vibe art, but you can't vibe your way to understanding. You have to work at your understanding. Vibes can get you through Coachella, but not Kierkegaard. Now, of course, LLMs can aid your understanding in the same way that literacy aids or that the internet aids understanding or Tudor's aid understanding, but LLMs can't convert

output tokens to understanding for you tokens. Many of the problems that you wrestle with, say the ones about who are you, what happens after you die, what happens after your child dies, what is time, what is rightness, morality, why is it all meaningless and torturous simultaneously, etc. themes that are on this channel. Now, none of these are something that you outsource your decision about. Neither is it something that you want to adopt because of concept. Otherwise, you just join some local flavor of religious institution and pick up your beliefs like you pick up an accent. Getting an LLM to write for you would be the equivalent of getting a machine to lift weights for you. Machines can aid you, yes, but ultimately the pump needs to be

primed with pain. You may challenge and say, hey, Kurt, well, if the LLMs come to consensus, then I trust the LLMs. They have some rationality behind them. Well, that's a large assumption, but let's go with it. Even granting this, you would still want to convince yourself that the rationality that the LLMs possess

is of the sort that you deem relevant and worthy of a sound conclusion for these metaphysical issues. That act itself would require understanding tokens. And those understanding tokens are something that no current LLM can do for you. Potentially, no future text producer can ever do that for you. You can't vibe understand. You have to achingly understand. Grock can't grok for you. Now, an issue that doesn't get

discussed as much is that when you produce text via an LLM, you may mistake the LLM's understanding for your own. This is because no time in history has ever been like this. The format that we use to judge other people's understanding is now something that can be outputted with minimal input from us. Fluent natural language has comprehension just baked into its structure, and this is unprecedented.

Shallowness now wears the robe of eloquence. A calculator never tempted anyone to think that the calculator understands arithmetic. At least nowhere near to the same degree that LLMs tempt people into thinking that they themselves understand what the LLM is outputted. The output was always a proxy. We never knew this until LLMs came along. Many tests are like this, though. So, for instance, we thought that the Turing test was a test

of consciousness or minimally machine thinking. Once it was achieved, though, we then moved that alleged goalpost. However, it's not a fallacy in this case, like most people think. It's not a fallacy because we realized how wretched the measurement was. And unfortunately, much of the time, the only way to realize the wretchedness of a measurement is to reach the goalpost. It measures something up into a point. Only then do we realize that what we thought was God was an idol.

Similarly, we used to think that the beautiful prose someone handed to us was entirely indicative of what's in their mind. It wasn't until LLMs came about such that anyone can produce said beautiful prose, that we realized that it was only a useful measure up until a point. We used to think painting was about replicating reality until photography came along. We used to think that memorization carried wisdom until the printing press came along. There's so many times in history that we realized we were doing some task, not for reason X, but for reason why, and this has happened, and this will happen over and over.

The more something fulfills our need, the more that that thing reveals our needs as one, It's only actually then that we realize what we're doing this all for. So write. Not for the beautiful pros. It likely won't be beautiful. Write for the tedious and tormenting production of understanding. That's something only you can do. By the way, someone asked me about my writing process in the comments. Here are two relevant links from my substack. This one's on my three rules for writing and this one's on how I build habits. If you like this, video then you may like this other video on Kierkegaard or Gertles and Completeness Theorem both are linked on screen and in the description. The Economist covers math,

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