The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Kevin Dickinson about the ideas in his recent essay "A Short History of the F-Word." They discuss the mystery of the F-word's origins, a damn fucking abbot in the sixteenth century, the hierarchy of curse words, religious profanities, the poet William Dunbar's use of "fukkit," the case of Roger Fuckedbythenavele, folk etymologies, false acronyms, movies with the most fucks, fucks per minute vs absolute number of fucks, a high Ngram watermark in 2017, the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial, senses of fuck, veiling words, John McWhorter's research, the history of fuck in the dictionary, language as fashion, and much more.

Jim talks with Cody Moser about the ideas and findings in his and Paul Smaldino's paper "Innovation-Facilitating Networks Create Inequality." They discuss transient diversity, group performance vs the agent level, taking an agent-based modeling approach, Derex & Boyd's group potion-mixing experiment, no free lunch theorem, random network structures, an inverse correlation between network connectivity & performance, effects of sharing intermediate results, Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, measuring inequality with the Gini coefficient, higher performance in less equal networks, connected caveman networks, ring networks, Ashby's good regulator theorem, exploration vs exploitation, randomly allocating lifetime endowed academic chairs to 25-year-olds, institutional design, generative entrenchment, implications for internet platform design, the parochial pyramid, tribalism at the Dunbar number, and much more.

Jim talks with Douglas Rushkoff about the ideas in his podcast monologue/Substack post "Why I’m Finally Leaving X and Probably All Social Media." They discuss Douglas's history with social media, the early social internet, Facebook's parasitism of legacy news, the decontextualization of content, The WELL, owning your own words, leaving Facebook in 2013, Jim's social media sabbaticals, the opportunity to create an info agent, the number of daily interruptions, attention-deficit disorder as an adaptive strategy, books versus articles, effects of long-term social media use, the quest for nominal identity, how careful curation improves X, using social media as a professional writer, the organic in-between, strong vs weak social links, the ability of strong weeks to hold & metabolize, how the internet spawns billionaires, airline subsidies, Girardian mimesis, liberal universal humanism, rebuilding embodied life at the Dunbar number, John Vervaeke's "religion that is not a religion," starting where you are, and much more.

Jim talks with Robin Hanson about the ideas in his recent Substack writings on human fertility rates. They discuss why the fertility rate is important, fertility decline as a harbinger of societal decline, how income impacts fertility rate, investing in status markers vs fertility, runaway selection effects, copying elites, absolute vs relative levels of wealth, South Korea's low fertility rate, implications of the decline, losing scale economies, pay-as-you-go retirement plans, innovation as linear to population, effects of declining innovation, likely dominant ethnicities of the future, insular high-fertility religious communities, what happens in a scenario of worldwide population decline, the main trends causing low fertility, high-effort parenting standards, legal protections for religious groups, capstone vs cornerstone marriages, learning from the winners, Robin's childhood cult experience, promoting less crazy insular subcultures, and much more.

Jim talks with Joy Hirsch about the findings in her paper "Separable Processes for Live 'In-Person' and Live 'Zoom-like' Faces," which explores how humans respond at the neural level to Zoom calls versus in-person interactions. They discuss the advantages of near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) & how it works, the speed of imaging, brain imaging for social interactions, what fNIRS can do that fMRI can't, previous work on face processing, the design of the experiment, controlling for distance, angles, & presence, the data collection process, longer eye fixation in in-person interactions, increased pupil size compared with Zoom calls, differences in neural activity between groups, EEG findings, decreased neural synchrony in Zoom interactions, what the results might indicate, social media & strength of social links, how this research might be used to make video calls more brain-friendly, and much more.

Jim talks with recurring guest Ben Goertzel about the ideas in his paper "Generative AI vs. AGI: The Cognitive Strengths and Weaknesses of Modern LLMs." They discuss the exponential acceleration of AI development, why LLMs by themselves won't lead to AGI, OpenAI's integrative system, skyhooking, why LLMs may be useful for achieving AGI, solving LLM hallucinations, why Google hasn't replicated GPT-4, LLM-tuning lore, what differentiates AGI from other forms of AI,  conceptualizing general intelligence, Weaver's theory of open-ended intelligence, multiple intelligence, the Turing test & the Minsky prize, what LLMs aren't good at, the danger of defining AGI as whatever LLMs can't do, the derivative & imitative character of LLMs, banality, doing advanced math with GPT-4, why the human brain doesn't form arbitrary abstractions, the duality of heuristics & abstractions, adding recurrence to transformers, OpenCog Hyperon, using a weighted labeled metagraph, orienting toward self-reflection & self-rewriting, the challenge of scalability of infrastructure, acceleration on non-LLM projects, and much more.

Jim talks with Frank Lantz about the ideas in his new book, The Beauty of Games. They discuss Frank's analysis of Benjamin Soule's arcade game Serpentes, reflecting on the enjoyment of games, panicking & choking, levels of understanding, Jim and his wife's experience playing Othello, Hanabi, partnership games, games as an aesthetic form, art vs aesthetics, playing for its own sake, thinking & doing, fulfilling the desire to be a coherent agent in the world, the performance of desire, games as systems, heuristics, strategy in military games, a game as a series of interesting decisions, overindexing on the flow state, going up the ladder of heuristics, maximizing for rate of learning, systems literacy, games as an art form for nerds, and much more.

Jim talks with C. Owen Paepke in part three of a mini-series on the No Labels potential third-party presidential campaign. They discuss Owen's early chemistry career, being without a political party, the situation of voting against instead of for candidates, the distribution of conservatism between parties over time, the Ross Perot 1992 campaign, the nomination of Antonin Scalia, primaries as the root of all partisan evil, the 2022 elections, the percentage of voters who want neither Biden nor Trump, the value of vetoing spending bills, solving the electrical storage problem, No Labels' commitment to pulling a spoiler candidate, what spoiling means, No Labels' visibility problem, possible candidates, the timing of the convention, the desire to avoid gamesmanship, recent Biden vs Trump polls, and much more.

Jim talks with Jack Visnjic, aka Lantern Jack, about Polybius's theory of anacyclosis and cyclical history. They discuss the origins of the name Lantern Jack, cyclical patterns in history, a one-minute history of the first millennium B.C., public gain vs private gain, Polybius's concept of anacyclosis, great man theory vs processes & institutions, examples of anacyclosis, whether Rome was ever a democracy, critiques of anacyclosis, corruption & collective reaction, imperialistic growth, the Glorious Revolution in 1688, why Spain & France didn't transition to aristocracy, anacyclosis in the modern world, Polybius's influence on the Founding Fathers of the U.S., the impressiveness of the Founding Fathers, mobocracy, fighting to the death over second- and third-order issues, the crisis epoch, factional division as a feature not a bug, and much more.

Jim talks with Paul Watson about his recent book Hit Man for the Kindness Club: High Seas Escapades and Heroic Adventures of an Eco-Activist. They discuss an early friendship with a family of beavers, cruelty to animals, the Kindness Club, moral commitments, rescuing cattle from a slaughterhouse, less cow farts & more whale poop, the 3 laws of ecology, the issue of eating animals, the growth of the vegetarian/vegan movement, an occupation at Stanley Park, co-founding Greenpeace, the strategy of aggressive non-violence, killing baby Hitler, painting baby seals, creating Whale Wars, history of the whaling moratorium, the absence of enforcement, Canada's Seal Protection Act, Edward Abbey, the Southern Ocean campaigns, escaping arrest in Germany, targeting illegal activities, inventing tree spiking, the importance of good legal defense, funding sources, founding Sea Shepherd, current pursuits, and much more.