Zohar Atkins

He is a rabbi, philosopher, blogger and podcaster. His podcast is called Meditations With Zohar

Show Notes

1. Who is your favorite philosopher?

2. What is non-aggressive socratic questioning?

3. Why do you like Heidegger?

   1. How was he Nazi-ism

4. How do you relate to the history of philosophy?

5. How do you walk the line between tradition and being a revolutionary?

6. What was your first experience learning for yourself instead of learning top-down?

7. What does it feel like to have a hunger for learning?

8. What happens when we decide we are going to learn everything and then run into the block of only having so much time?

9. How do you relate to patience when confronting the weird language of philosophy?

10. How do you define good communication?

11. What is the value of incomprehensibility?

12. How important is banging your head on the wall?

13. Who is a philosopher that you think is a fraud?

14. Was Jesus a philosopher?

15. Do philosophers build truth structures?

16. What is hagiography?

17. What is your philosophy of technology?

18. How is Socrates exceptional?

19. Where do philosophy and religion meet?

20. What happened to the public intellectual?

21. Was Wittgenstein religious? 

22. How was Wittgenstein obsessed with language?

23. What is your take on rationalism?

    1. What about scientism?

24. What is the job of philosophy?

25. Why are most people not interested in philosophy?

26. Who is Leo Strauss?

    1. Philosophy is opposition to the state

    2. What happens when the state get too powerful and the philosophy gets crowded out?

27. What is the dominant philosophy of the US in the 20th century?

    1. Pragmatism

28. What was the difference between philosophy and science for ancient philosophers?

29. How is philosophy a technology?

30. How is UX a strain of phenomenology?

31. What is the feedback cycle between technology and philosophy?

32. What is the problem of induction?

    1. Aristotlean is ok with doing case studies

    2. Deductionism leads to cancelling all the case studies

33. What defines the modern essence of technology?

34. What happens when humans commoditize themselves?

35. Without technology why can’t most understand leisure?

36. How does Science doesn’t think?

37. How did the original science people become more humble about the origins of science?

38. How does achievement distract from the question of meaning?

39. Why don’t you think Scientism is a big deal?

40. How is Scientism is bad for religion?

41. What is your take on new age occult stuff?

42. Irrationalism sees with a squint to what rationalism is blind

43. How can we become open to the strangeness of the universe?

44. How can we be epistemologically humble?

AJ is a software engineer interested in Urbit and data composability. 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajlamarc

https://www.ajlamarc.com/

Keep an eye out on Holium, and making it easier to code in Javascript for Urbit

Notes

1. What is data composability?

   1. Multiple applications sharing data and make the interfaces work together

   2. OpenAIs that both Twitter and Facebook had and then were shut down

   3. Data is the main product that these applications have

   4. You can separate the data and the code

   5. Personal AI

2. How did we get to such a fragmented application landscape?

3. Legacy internet vs New Internet?

4. What is AJ working on?

   1. TomeDB

   2. Javascript package

   3. Associated gall agent

   4. NoSQL database

   5. The front end side is the interesting part

5. What are gall agents?

   1. Standardized backend of Urbit

   2. Rules for moving data between different servers and accounts

6. What are you looking for in a backend?

7. Why are you reinventing the wheel when building a new urbit backend?

8. What is the promise of urbit?

9. What is the main draw of urbit?

10. What does it mean to be permissionless?

11. Urbit brings the best out of the past

12. How much data is stored when you host your urbit on the cloud vs your own database?

13. What are the technical limitations that an Uribit can store?

    1. 4-8 GBs can be stored and its stored in RAM

14. How long until we have video streaming on Urbit?

15. What is your take on where AI and Urbit mingle?

16. How do you have an AI work for you rather than a big corporation?

17. Urbit is creating a virtual world where you get only what you want and little of what you want

18. The success of Urbit is the apple OS with the next generation of software

19. How do you get the cost down?

    1. How do you run an urbit inside an urbit?

20. What is the main difficulty of scale for computing on the cloud?

21. If a million people join urbit tomorrow would it break?

22. What is the biggest scale that Urbit has seen?

    1. 1-2K people

23. What is the new narrative of Urbit?

24. How do you use urbit as a really simple use case that urbit can solve to start getting urbit adoption?

    1. How do you store data and transfer it between two people in a secure way?

25. Urbit as an infrastructure that can help build infrastructure

    1. There has to be the normal infrastructure that we are used to in terms of databases and networking 

    2. Urbit is mostly a backend technology

    3. Urbit could eventually have HOON native AI

26. Did you use crypto to pay for anything in El Salvador?

27. What did you learn at the Volcano Summit in El Savlador?

28. Logan’s talk on Zorp using Knock

Dave Snowden is the Chief Scientific Officer of Cynefin. Head of Knowledge Management for 30 years.

Author of Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World (https://tinyurl.com/4958x362)

1. When did knowledge management start in the 90s?

   1. The ultimate disciplinary field

2. What is intellectual capital?

   1. Intellectual property

3. What is the anarcha book?

4. Knowledge management is information management

5. What is relevant knowledge?

6. What is messy coherence?

7. What is exaptive innovation?

8. How do you add value to organizations?

   1. Focus

9. What is the difference between teleological idealism and realism?

10. What is the KM process?

    1. Find out what is keeping middle management awake at night

    2. Do not want to be a CEO pet project

11. How do you map what a company already knows?

12. How do you map current knowledge from the things that keep people awake at night?

13. Where are we on the cycle now?

    1. At the early stage of the hype cycle

14. What is complexity theory?

15. How do you map the unknown unknowns of a company?

16. How do you create resiliency within an organization?

17. How do you build informal networks across the organizations?

18. European field guide on complexity management

19. Does getting involved with tactics take away from strategy?

20. Trying to make the cost of virtue greater than the cost of sin?

21. How has knowledge management changed with Covid and remote work?

22. How do you replicate pheromones in a remote environment?

23. What are hexis?

24. How does knowledge transfer work?

25. How do you make decisions that keep options open?

26. How do you create processes that stop ambiguity?

27. Why are stories of linear processes greatly exaggerated?

28. How do you deal with too much information?

    1. Focus on connecting people and storing information

29. Entangled trios with task from different groups

    1. Run that every three months

30. Secret is not to take an information centric approached

31. Knowledge is only ever volunteered, not conscripted

32. We always know more than we can say and we can always say more than we can write down

33. What is necessary ambiguity?

34. What is the role of narrative when it connects tacit to explicit information?

35. Narrative asks you questions that make you think differently

36. Lessons learning rather than lessons learned

37. 90% of knowledge is walking out the door

38. The danger of machine learning is dumbing down how we know things

39. THE RIGHT SOURCE DATA IS THE KEY

40. Machine learning is inductive 

41. Feed ML better training data

42. How did you get the role at IBM at knowledge management?

43. Institute for knowledge management at IBM

44. IBM center for complexity studies 

45. How do you measure knowledge management?

    1. outcome/ouput measures

       1. Fine with predictable systems

    2. Outcomes produce a perverse incentive

    3. Vector measure for intensity of effort

    4. How do you structure KPIs?

46. What are the power dynamics of exchange?

47. Fear of abuse is the main reason people seek knowledge in organizations

48. Art comes before words before human language

49. Semiotics is symbols and signs

    1. UK is the most mapped country in the world

50. We need renaissance instead of an enlightenment

51. What is catholic with a small c?

Adam is the 

• VP of engineering at Invisible Technologies and active angel investment
• If you have specific questions, send them on to [email protected]

• How do you organize information and data in order to spend most of your time on high-level work?
• How do you manage people who report to you to also do the same?
• What does knowledge management mean to you?
• What are the applications that will leverage LLMs?
  • What is an intranet?
  • Transition from card catalog to Google
• How do you take structured things and make them unstructured?
• Can LLMs do unstructured data?
• What is tabular data?
• Who is going to shine when it comes to leverage LLMs?
• How do LLMs hallucinate?
• How can we prevent LLMs from hallucinating?
• What would happen to a law firm that has an LLM that hallucinates a contract?
• What happens when NYC opened up all its APIs?
• What is data availability?
• Will LLMs have big moats? (13 minutes in might be when we get too close to OpenAI)
• What will happen with LLama from Meta?
• What has been overhyped in terms of LLMs?
• Have you started to use Copilot in your own programming?
  • Reference tool rather than programming aid
  • LLM code has a higher security risk
• What is your take on AI ethics?
  • How do you deal with collective commons type of stuff?
  • How does bias training come into play?
  • How do we think about the implicit biases that the models have been trained on?
• How does technology help us to understand ourselves?
• How is technology an amplification of human ability?
• What is the frustration of knowledge management for you?
  • Bot at Facebook that goes through and warns people when something needs to be updated
  • Finding something and its wrong
  • How do we make sure that information stays updated and relevant
• What is the curse of knowledge?
  • Onboarding is testing the system
• How should we think about knowledge leakage?
• Does Notion have an API?
• Keep metrics on how much people are writing
• What were some ways that Facebook excelled at knowledge management?
  • Investment in search tools
  • Code documentation
  • Chat bot messages
    • scale of 1-10 how do you feel
    •  
• What are the barriers that we have at invisible to implementing great search?
• What is the issue with implicit knowledge at Invisible?
• What is status hero?
• 8 or 9 engineering teams at invisible
• When there is high trust all processes work and when there is low trust no processes work
• What is the biggest problem going to be for me as knowledge management guy?
• How can we bring spaced repetition software into Invisible?

Kirill Zubovsky

Prompt Engineer and CEO of @ SmartyNames.com 

1. What is Smartynames.com?

2. Does Godaddy front-run domain names by buying them as soon as you search for them?

   1. They are 12 billion $ company

3. What have you learned about Machine Learning from doing this?

4. Did you have to learn a lot to develop on openai’s algorithm?

5. How do you add uncertainty to your AI prompts?

6. Why do people like to hack individual AI systems instead of hacking the big ones?

7. What are the companies that will start to build in-house models?

8. What is the difference between consumer and enterprise AI?

9. What is the AI that has been used for airplane design for over 20 years now?

10. Are we headed for utopia and dystopia?

11. What is your take on Silicon Valley Bank?

12. What is moral hazard and how does it play with what is going on SVB?

13. What did Hayek say about all this?

14. What will AI do to the decentralization of capitalism?

Pablo Peniche does front-end engineering, marketing, and design. Wears many hats at Viennahypertext

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PabloPeniche
• https://vienna.earth/

• What do Mexicans think about Central Americans?
• What is the relationship between urbit and vienna hypertext?
• What is vienna hypertext?
  • An information network
  • Create different canvases with blocks
• Why is vienna hypertext hard to build on urbit?
• Does engineering advance science or does science advance engineering?
• What is the relationship between science and engineering?
• What is the difference between hard sciences and soft sciences?
• How do you build a tool for the humanities? What effect will that have on engineering and science?
• What is the anti-anti-anti-anti liberalism speech from Peter Theil?
  • https://youtu.be/fQ4rc7npiXQ
• What are the false idols of Scientism?
• What is the relationship between millenarianism and scientism cults?
• Why do human beings fall under homo religious rather than homo sapiens the thinking primate?
• Lets do space travel! Why is Elon Musk right and why is he wrong?
• Why should the pope declare a space crusade?
• What is the kardashev scale?
  • type 1 is all the resources of one planet
  • type 2 is another the sun
  • type 3 is multiple stars
• Why do atheists believe that collecting books is the way to western enlightenment?
• How did Charlemagne invent the book with his codexes?
• How are all historians revisionists?
• If the news fake, imagine history?
• Lets talk about climate change
  • What do the models measure?
    • Physics of fluids
    • Movements in the atmosphere and the oceans
    • Can’t get quality of soil or animals dying or matter outside of that
    • Topsoil captures carbon
  • Can you be pro-environment and pro-immigration at the same time in terms of top-soil?
• Can you look at the global scale and actually change anything meaningful?
• How do you deal with unknown unknowns?
• Can computers ever discover what we don't know we don't know?
• How is the stock market an example of the way things are getting done?
• All models are incorrect but some are useful sometimes
• Are humans due for another ice age?
• Who is Freeman Dyson?
  • What is a dyson sphere?
  • What is the relationship between Feynmen and Freeman?
• Why do you specifically have the ability to question heretical answers?
• How is the internet the most powerful tool that humans have ever created?
• How is contrarianism the secular antidote to the problem knowledge?
• How did René Gerard decide that Christianity is the way to solve the problem of unknown unknowns and mimetic rivalry?
• What did Gerard say about scapegoating?
• How did Gerard meme himself into being Christian?
• Why you shouldn’t fight on the minutiae of mimetic rivalry?
• How do you measure carbon in the topsoil?
• How can we build personal biological computers?
• Who is John von Neumann?
  • How did he build a machine for war?
• How did Liberia end up in such a different place from the US even though they have almost the same constitution?

Ivan Vendrov is AI researcher, ML engineer interested in speculation of future systems

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/IvanVendrov
• Website: https://www.vendrov.ai/

Questions discussed or for further discussions

• What do you think is the great X-risks humans face today?
• What are some weaknesses in terms of technology in general?
• How do you steer technology to make sure it's not developing in ways that are harmful?
• What is your take on spirituality?
• What is the intersection between the Russian Orthodox religion and meditation?
• What do Russian orthodox people do for lent?
  • Go vegan for the entire month
  • emphasis on spirituality
• What happened to the soviet union and orthodox Christianity?
• What is the word “mir”?
• What is the difference between a time of troubles and a dark age?
• Were the dark ages really dark?
• What is the relationship between centralization and golden ages?
• Who are the cypher phunks?
• What are heterogenous networks?
• What is cyborgism?
• What is your take on rationalism?
  • superintelligence
  • At its best, its a community that has the best truth orientation
  • Where do rationalism and dogma meet?
• What is post-rationalism?
• Can you be dogmatic and rationalist at the same time?
• Who were the original rationalists?
• What is bayesian reasoning?
  • How can you establish all the events that could happen?
  • Naive bayesian reasoning
• What does rationalism say about trusting others?
• What are the other sources of truth for rationalists?
• How do you convert or create knowledge?
  • The book “The social history of truth”
  • Truth or knowledge depends on a bedrock of trust and punishes liars
  • In 18th century only gentlemen could speak truth because they had “F-U” money
• Why does knowledge follow a cyclical pattern of openness and dogma and how do they interact?
• Can a bureaucracy last longer than 300 years old?
• Can knowledge paradigms last long?
• Will technology allow us to establish non-bureaucratic systems that can stay flexible?
• Is cultural knowledge dying?
• How do you preserve cultural knowledge?
• How do you preserve knowledge that is implicit and hard to make explicit?

Woody Wiegmann

https://twitter.com/WoodyWiegmann

What will AI do the ability of people who have limited intelligence and agency?

1. What will AI do to humans who tend to create rituals for guidance on what to do?

   1. Back in the 400BC, humans were ritually inclined, to put off their questions to ritual

2. Are there going to be business moats around AI?

3. How do humans seem to get things wrong and that ends up being their superpower?

4. The tribe is now occulted behind crazy complexity, what does that mean?

5. What is the importance of status games in human relationships?

6. What is Keynesian beauty/stock dynamics?

7. Is there a ground truth?

8. What is the relationship between gossip and myths for what both for tribes and meta-tribes?

9. What is trend on vices that represent escapism?

   1. In what ways is Twitter escapism?

10. What happens when a bureaucracy tries to intervene?

11. What happens when bureaucracies clash with the uncertainty of the implications of AI?

12. What is humanity going through in terms of its faith in the expert class?

13. Where does credit go when you have low-interest rates and the government pumps trillions of monopoly money into the system?

14. What are the negative externalities of corporations consolidating?

15. What is the relationship between monopoly money injected into the economy and finding consensus among humans?

16. What happens when AGI becomes the deity?

    1. What happens when the market becomes God?

17. What is the importance of optics? Can you be authentic when concerned with optics?

18. How does anti-trust law get it wrong?

19. Can we have decentralized anti-trust law?

20. How is the brain built off redundant systems?

21. What is your take on transhumanism?

Books mentioned:

Seveneves: https://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-Novel-Neal-Stephenson-ebook/dp/B00LZWV8JO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Rare Earth: https://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe-ebook/dp/B00L60PP0I/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?crid=V3UGRDR27PTV&keywords=rare+earth&qid=1676913897&s=digital-text&sprefix=rare+earth%2Cdigital-text%2C185&sr=1-1-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUEySUg5NjgyRlBBQ0hJJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwNjIyOTI0MkE1QlExN0xCM1NRRyZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwMDMxNjY0MTczTkU0VDdSQkpPMSZ3aWRnZXROYW1lPXNwX2F0ZiZhY3Rpb249Y2xpY2tSZWRpcmVjdCZkb05vdExvZ0NsaWNrPXRydWU=

Eric Helal Founder of Quartus a Dev shop for Urbit Apps

Rabsef-bicrym on Urbit 

https://twitter.com/SafePen

~dalten/new-aera

https://twitter.com/_dalten

1. Are we in Utopia or dystopia or neither?

2. What are the other options besides social dystopia?

   1. Resource constraint

   2. Wind from a dying star novel

   3. Technology stultification

      1. How does Urbit help to solve this?

3. What does it mean to lose understanding of first principles as an individual and a society?

4. How does technology influence us to dissociate from the first principles that the technology was built with?

5. Will the only people who populate the network states be the autists?

6. How will communities be restored after covid?

7. What are the religious implications of Urbit?

8. What are the expressions of development in Urbit vs other computer programming languages?

9. What does the user experience in Urbit look like in 5 years?

10. What needs to be done to make urbit something shareable with my sister?

11. What are the use cases for distributed networked computing instead of centralized systems?

12. Does Urbit need to be palatable to normies?

13. What is the address space model?

14. What is data composability?

    1. How does it relate to urbit and urbit adoption

15. What is remote scry?

16. What are the constraints from social conditions versus technology constraints?

17. How does the leadership of Urbit and/or Tlon and/or Quartus ensure that it eats the legacy internet?

18. How does content recommendation fit in of Urbit?

19. Where is the line between limbic engagement and limbic manipulation?

20. What is the relationship between content recommendation and reputation engines?

21. How do permissions works on Urbit?

22. What is sybil protection?

23. How does urbit trivialize software writing for networking versus the legacy internet?

24. What is canonical truth?

25. What is decoherence between various people and truth claims?

26. What is reputational flow?

27. How do you build a wikipedia that is not dominated by political whims?

Adam Chavez is a Founder of Freeplay, & Mokriya. 

We make sense of where we’re headed as a society in a post-trust, post-2020 world.

What’s up with Steve Jobs’ apparent belief in magic? Why does that matter? 

We also talk AI, holographic theory, the impact of ancient Abraham on America, & the Minecraft Generation.

https://alkebulan.substack.com/

[email protected]

https://twitter.com/anksolado

1. What is the relation between the occult and steve jobs?
2. What is a story of 0 to 1 in occult language?
3. What is the difference between the performative sense and the inner self?
4. What is freeplay, the company?
5. What is the relationship between adrenaline junkies and spiritual emergencies?
6. What is the difference between transactional and transformational relationships?
7. Do you think that AI is going to increase atomization?
8. How does the freedom that minecraft represent when it comes to kids ability to create think today?
9. What will AI do to the bureaucratic incentives of government?
10. What is the relationship between decentralization and AI?
11. What is the relationship between desire for freedom and being a good employee?
12. Why do ideologies make some people feel like they are real and others feel like are empty and meaningless?
13. Are the problems of meaning an issue with abrahamic cultures?
14. Why do scientists shy away from discussing the implications of quantum mechanics?
15. What is the holographic theory?