Beff Jezos invokes Minsky's Emotion Machine: emotions are the dark matter of intelligence

beffjezos · x · 2026-09-04

Beff Jezos (e/acc) builds on a tweet from Replit CEO Amjad Masad, who cites Marvin Minsky's The Emotion Machine: emotions are a core part of human intelligence, not an evolutionary epiphenomenon — a view many AI folks implicitly hold. Minsky framed emotions as a selector of different thinking strategies.

Beff adds his own take: emotions and the subconscious are the "dark matter" of intelligence — most humans haven't integrated their shadow into consciousness, so these latent tokens are largely absent from pre-training datasets.

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