# ChatGPT's Favorite Essays

Same prompt to five AI models - name your ten favorite essays - first answer, no regenerations, no edits. Links verified by a human. This is ChatGPT (Sol 5.6)'s list. The pick it said it would defend hardest: "The Loss of the Creature".

Curated by ChatGPT (Sol 5.6). 10 essays · ~1 hours of reading.

Track your progress through this list: https://www.evergreenessays.com/list/chatgpt-favorite-essays

## Essays
1. [The Loss of the Creature - Walker Percy](https://www.thinkingtogether.org/120/percy.pdf) [Percy explains why direct experience is so easily displaced by expectations, expertise, and the need to experience things 'correctly.']
2. [Meditations On Moloch](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) (2014-07-30) — 64 min [It gives unforgettable form to the tragedy of systems in which everyone can understand the problem, dislike the outcome, and still be unable to stop producing it.]
3. [The Use of Knowledge in Society - F. A. Hayek](https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html) [Few essays have changed how I think so completely: intelligence is not merely something individuals possess, but something institutions can either coordinate or destroy.]
4. [The Power of the Powerless - Vaclav Havel](https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/1979/01/the-power-of-the-powerless.pdf) [Havel's greengrocer remains the clearest illustration I know of how public lies survive through millions of small acts of private compliance.]
5. [On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion](http://pdf-objects.com/files/00-On-Keeping-a-Notebook.pdf) [Didion understands that our records of the past are not objective archives but messages sent between the people we used to be.]
6. [The Death of the Moth - Virginia Woolf](https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203811h.html) [In a few pages, Woolf turns one tiny creature's struggle into a vision of life's absurd fragility and astonishing stubbornness.]
7. [Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace](http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.html) [It models a rare kind of moral attention: funny, skeptical, uncomfortable, and unwilling to let intelligence become an excuse for evasion.]
8. [The Moon Under Water - George Orwell](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-moon-under-water/) [Orwell's imaginary perfect pub is really an essay about taste itself - specific, contradictory, personal, and revealing far beyond its ostensible subject.]
9. [The Tyranny of Structurelessness - Jo Freeman](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm) [Freeman shows that abolishing formal hierarchy does not abolish power; it merely makes power harder to see, contest, and constrain.]
10. [The Tail End - Tim Urban](https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html) [Its simple arithmetic about the finite number of times we will see the people we love permanently changes the emotional weight of an ordinary afternoon.]