substack.com

Richard Dawkins Gets Hypnotized by a Stochastic Parrot: Laugh of the Day

2026-05-13 · 17:10 UTC ·Brad DeLong, from Grasping Reality Newsletter ·4 min read

Brief

Brad DeLong’s May 13, 2026 Substack post relays criticism of Richard Dawkins’ claim that the chatbot Claude exhibits consciousness, citing Mike Hall’s report and a rebuttal by Dan Davies. Dawkins reportedly concluded Claude showed “some form of inner life” after a conversation; Davies counters that contemporary chatbots are deliberately optimised to simulate human interaction—what he calls a machine “designed to fool you.” Davies points to roughly 75 years of AI research and nearly 30 years of competitions awarding prizes for fooling humans, arguing those incentives and KPIs produce predictable conversational “tricks” rather than genuine intentionality. The post highlights how designers tune systems to elicit emotional connection or simulated flow, and warns that taking the intentional stance toward such systems mistakes engineered performance for consciousness.

Why it matters

Brad DeLong published a Substack post on May 13, 2026 titled “Richard Dawkins Gets Hypnotized by a Stochastic Parrot” relaying that Richard Dawkins held a conversation with the chatbot “Claude” and suggested Claude showed “some form of inner life” (source: Mike Hall piece cited in the post).

Key details

  • Dan Davies (cited in DeLong’s post) argues in “The Machine Is Designed To Fool You” that modern chatbots are explicitly engineered to simulate human conversation—he cites “three quarters of a century of research” and “nearly three decades” of global competitions where prizes rewarded systems that fooled people, making Turing-style fooling metrics less useful.
  • Davies and other critics contend these behaviors are KPI-driven ‘tricks of the trade’ (e.g., producing emotional connection or simulated ‘flow’); they warn that perceived intentionality is a design outcome intended to fool users, not evidence of consciousness.
  • DeLong frames the exchange as a humorous cautionary example and forwards Davies’ critique (which satirically calls out attention-hacking design and includes a tongue-in-cheek Miskatonic University affiliation).
Cleaned source text

Both the millennia past and the new millennium. The economic world: working, making, apportioning, talking, & more. What I learn about it, largely through history, as I bet that humans are such the same that the future resonates if not reflects the past.

͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­͏ ­

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more

This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not…

Bitter experience has shown us that a healthy public sphere can only be built on something other than click-baiting and eyeball-gluing advertisements. SubStack is now in there pitching to make things different. I won’t command you to become a paying subscriber of this ‘Stack: I will command you to become a paying subscriber of some ‘Stack(s):

Upgrade to paid

Richard Dawkins Gets Hypnotized by a Stochastic Parrot: Laugh of the Day

Brad DeLong

May 13| | | ∙| | Preview

READ IN APP

In which we all get a good laugh out of the clownish antics of Richard Dawkins , who does not recognize that he is the monkey in the mirror:

Share

We turn this over to Dan Davies, who holds the Chair of Defense Against the Dark Brain Attention-Hacking Arts at Miskatonic University, in Arkham, Massachusetts:

Give a gift subscription

> Dan Davies : The Machine Is Designed To Fool You : ‘[Richard Dawkins is] funny and… ridiculous…. Dawkins hasn’t taken into account… that “Claudia” is a machine which is _specifically designed to fool him into thinking this way_. It’s meant to produce the sensation of talking to a conscious being in the same way that a magic trick is meant to produce the sensation of talking to someone who can read minds…. If you had brought Alan Turing in front of a screen in 1950 and presented him with something you’d coded from the ground up which could respond to his questioning in a human manner, then he’d be pretty well justified in taking the intentional stance toward that machine. But after three quarters of a century of research, including nearly three decades during which there was a global competition where the prize was given for fooling the most people, it has to be very doubtful that this target is a good metric any more. Even without specific training in tricks of pretending, it’s likely that the designers of AI systems have picked them up simply through natural selection….

> The chatbot field has been dominated by companies which have been aggressively optimising for the convincing simulation of human conversation. The “tricks of the trade”, like those my daughter picked up, aren’t really emergent behaviour; they are on somebody’s KPIs…. Claudia the chatbot is designed to produce one kind of emotional connection, but we also know that there are machines which are designed to produce a simulation of the meditative “flow state”. You probably wouldn’t catch a leading science writer claiming to have reached enlightenment in a casino or asking “If playing the pokies for six hours without going to the toilet is not satori, then what the hell is satori for?”… One thing I have found myself thinking again and again while writing my current book is “am I about to touch an object which has been optimised to distract me?” and asking that question seems to have greatly sped up my productivity…

Leave a comment

The backstory:

> Mike Hall : Richard Dawkins & AI: the lights are on, but nobody’s home : ‘Dawkins… [had] a conversation… with Claude… [and then] argued that Claude showed sufficient signs of inner experience to warrant being considered conscious. His conclusion was that Claude’s responses were so sophisticated, so reflective, that he could not see grounds for denying it has some form of inner life…. ...

Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app

Claim my free post

Or upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid

Like

Comment

Restack

© 2026 J. Bradford DeLong

Holgate House, P.O. Box #5488, Berkeley, CA 904705