The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Jamie Joyce about the organization she founded and directs, The Society Library. They discuss the Library's mission, its ontological structure, offering diverse interfaces, methods for overcoming limitations & biases, operating with integrity, contextualizing information deeply, intellectual honesty, intellectual independence, intellectual inclusion, the example of flat-Earth theory, earnest service, contrasting with Wikipedia, bias on Wikipedia, the work's positive effect on analysts, hiring librarians, the Pro-Truth Pledge, a collection on nuclear energy, working with is & ought, possibilities for automation, citations & UX design, and much more.

Jim talks with Michael Nielsen about the ideas in his and Kanjun Qiu's recent essay, "A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science." They discuss the meaning of metascience, a vivid example in Genovese maritime insurance, attracting intellectual dark matter, creation & limitations of the h-index, frozen accidents in our scientific operating system, what allowed the original DARPA to be so productive, funding-by-variance, failure audits, changing the unit of evaluation from papers to software, at-the-bench fellowships, science funders as detectors & predictors, endowed professorships by age 25, eliciting the secret thesis, metascience as an imaginative design practice, bottlenecks to decentralized improvement, the Open Science Collaboration, pre-registered study designs, metascience entrepreneurship, the arXiv preprint server, and much more.

Jim talks with John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall about Vervaeke's concept of "the religion that is not a religion." They discuss the need to create a home for ecologies of practices, Jordan and John's ongoing collaboration, the meaning crisis & our wisdom famine, meaning of life vs meaning in life, the category error of prioritizing propositions, limitations of the Axial Age religions, the two worlds mythology, a series of major conceptual involutions, the arising of social engineering, recursion & multi-part toolmaking, challenging the idea that the sacred is supernatural, the imaginal vs the imaginary, disambiguating notions of truth, defining sacred experience, the important & the dangerous, interpreting epiphanies, the ecological notion of rationality, living in the collapse of 19th-century epistemology, the Cartesian promise of certainty, defining religio & equivocation, relevance realization & fundamental connectedness, parallel interventions, the need for both meditative & contemplative practices, folk psychotechnologies, ecologies for communities, religion as the essence of culture, creating birth & death rituals, breastfeeding as religious practice, the question of scaling, creating developmental sequences & pedagogical continuity, embedding Metcalf's law, how practices that increase relationship propagate themselves, the combinatorial feedback loop afforded by shit being fucked, a final sales pitch for young men, and much more.

Jim talks with Serge Faguet about emerging transnational networks of cooperation. They discuss the mismatch between rates of technological development & cooperation abilities, building a good Singularity, uniting an already-existing movement, "the right way to live" as a root of evil, coherent pluralism as a basis for metacommunity, taking responsibility for the world, a coming fork in humanity's future, bringing the universe to life, examples of decentralized community-building, opportunities for applying large language models, technological tools for communities, psychological issues & the insanity of society, TikTok as pure monetization without virtue, the possibility of unlimited energy, omni-consideration, a coming point where money is irrelevant, radical abundance, why we'll have to think about AI as sentient, disappointing dynamics in drug approval, reforming by playing a different game, charter cities, a call to action, and much more.

Jim talks with Owen Cox and Daniel Fraga of the Technosocial podcast about their critique that the GameB movement has underestimated the importance of sex and violence. They discuss the attempt to deal logically with illogical forces, the origins of the Game C joke, the limits of analytical systematization, coherent pluralism, whether GameB is a neo-Benthamism, sex & conflict as spiritual practice, how limits create pleasure clusters, Twitter wars as unacknowledged kink, the social operating systems of Kibbutzes, a norm against pornography, being sophisticated about sexual norms & whether it's possible in a movement designed for everyone, building night-club-style dynamics in GameB, social conviviality, the sublimation of war & violence, allowing ritualized violence, designing social containers that take hidden motivations into account, the end of American hegemony, investigating the moral question of energy usage, Game B's need for more artists & social designers, building more institutions for weirdos, and much more.

Jim talks with Roar Bjonnes about the ideas in his new book co-authored with Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy: Beyond Crisis Capitalism and Environmental Destruction. They talk about a quote from Naomi Klein, interlocking crises, COP27, the collective cognition problem, replacing the real economy with a financial economy, the idea of inherent selfishness, 4 integrated circles, the carbon pulse, nature as a machine, the misnomer of de-growth, why the U.S. is a debtor economy, dividend money, how the Eurozone made the rich richer, Greece's high military spending, private corporate ownership as a driver of inequality, Doughnut economics, reforming co-op laws, where government ownership comes in, what would happen if finance collapsed, a global jubilee, an approach to eliminating public debt, increasing alternative energy responsibly, resacrilizing economics, rehypothecating collateral, how nation-states should manage their economies, a refutation of comparative advantage, caps on wealth & income, the coming storm, and much more.

Jim talks with Nate Hagens about his new book co-authored with DJ White, Reality Blind: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures, volume 1. They discuss Nate's Reality 101 course, the core fundamental drivers of our current situation, writing "through an alien lens," steering away from optimism and pessimism, the tradeoff between accuracy and helpfulness, telling the truth & letting the chips fall, the buildup of underground carbon, the carbon pulse, a bank account of ancient sunlight, invention of the Newcomen atmospheric engine, the Jevons paradox, exponential growth in a finite world, disliking the word "degrowth," how humanity became a heat engine, gene agendas, advertising as the most deleterious invention, fast fashion, hypernovelty, trophic pyramids, the sixth great extinction, building a post-carbon life, energy as the currency of life, energy return on investment, why we don't want free energy, thinking about the future probabilistically, predicting a drop in the resource economy, hitting the reset button on finance, consumer abundance as a peacock's tail, and much more.

Jim talks with Ben Goertzel about the ideas in his recent essay "Three Viable Paths to True AGI." They discuss the meaning of artificial general intelligence, Steve Wozniak's basic AGI test, whether common tasks actually require AGI, a conversation with Joscha Bach, why deep neural nets are unsuited for human-level AGI, the challenge of extrapolating world-models, why imaginative improvisation might not be interesting to corporations, the 3 approaches that might have merit (cognition-level, brain-level, and chemistry-level), the OpenCog system Ben is working on, whether it's a case of "good old-fashioned AI," where evolution fits into the approach, why deep neural nets aren't brain simulations & attempts to make them more realistic, a hypothesis about how to improve generalization, neural nets for music & the psychological landscape of AGI research, algorithmic chemistry & the origins of life problem, why AGI deserves more resources than it's getting, why we may need better parallel architectures, how & how much society should invest in new approaches, the possibility of a cultural shift toward AGI viability, and much more.

Jim talks with Bruce Damer about the origins of life. They discuss what Earth was like 4 billion years ago, how the oceans formed, the new concept of urability, the distinction between supporting life & bringing it into being, the source of organic building blocks, combinatorial selection, the ocean vents theory vs the warm little pond hypothesis, the Murchison meteorite, wet-dry cycling, the water problem, using stromatolites & other natural analogs to test conjectures, finding the oldest evidence of life in a hot spring setting, shouting matches as evidence of paradigm shifts, what warm pools were made of, a one-pot solution that's testable at every stage, the source of vesicles, why the ocean is implausible as a starting point, chemical gardens, the great search for the origins of emergence, semipermeable membranes, "the ignoble sludge of the Progenitor," the jacuzzi origin of life, the origin of life as a communal unit, the ratchet to greater complexity, thermal change in near-real time, the error catastrophe in evolutionary computing, actual experiments being performed, the Fermi paradox & astrobiological implications, a hot spring on Mars, urability scores, the Drake equation, where complexity theory meets biology, the rarity of complex life & the responsibility that comes with it, bringing the universe to life, and much more.

Jim talks with Liam Madden, a congressional candidate in Vermont who strongly resonates with the GameB ethos. They discuss Liam's decision to run as a Republican, Vermont's primary laws, personal responsibility & community as reciprocal values, stewarding complex & godlike technologies, the Consilience Project, the sacredness of life, the meaning crisis, Ted Kaczynski's critiques, ending war mentality, multipolar traps, fixing the machinery of democracy, liquid democracy, ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, election finance reform, qualified democracy, the possibility of a constitutional convention, an alternative to universal basic income, monetary reform, ending the growth imperative, creating a Public Service Corps, risks of exponential technology, how the campaign is going so far, what Liam would need to win, Jim's endorsement, and much more.