The Jim Rutt Show

Max Borders, writer and commentator, discusses his response to Christopher Rufo's 'The New Right Activism.' They cover pillar saints vs boy Pharaohs, the Gray Tribe, Rufo's impact as a gladiator, capturing institutions, youth indoctrination, the means & ends problem, the University of Austin, public universities as indoctrination factories, the danger of rejecting an open society, changing language & 'equity,' defending abstract principles, and re-enlivening America's founding principles.

Ben Goertzel, co-author of "OpenCog Hyperon: A Framework for AGI at the Human Level and Beyond," discusses the definition of AGI, the history and evolution of OpenCog, Atomese vs MeTTa languages, knowledge metagraphs, cognitive synergy, the limitations of transformer-based language models, and the challenges in AGI development.

Kevin Dickinson discusses the origins of the F-word, religious profanities, the poet William Dunbar's use of 'fukkit,' folk etymologies, the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial, the evolution of the word in movies, and the changing attitudes towards profanity over the years.

Cody Moser, author of the paper 'Innovation-Facilitating Networks Create Inequality,' discusses transient diversity, group performance vs agent level, effects of sharing intermediate results, Gini coefficient for measuring inequality, higher performance in less equal networks, Ashby's good regulator theorem, exploration vs exploitation, generative entrenchment, implications for internet platform design, and more.

Douglas Rushkoff discusses leaving social media, the decontextualization of content, owning your own words, the effects of long-term social media use, the quest for nominal identity, strong vs weak social links, rebuilding embodied life, and more.

Robin Hanson, an economist, discusses declining fertility rates, the impact of income on fertility, copying elites, implications of low fertility rates, the future dominant ethnicities, high-effort parenting standards, capstone vs cornerstone marriages, and learning from successful high-fertility cultures.

Joy Hirsch discusses her research on neural responses to Zoom calls vs in-person interactions. They explore advantages of fNIRS imaging, design of the experiment, longer eye fixation in-person, increased pupil size in-person, EEG findings on Zoom, decreased neural synchrony in Zoom interactions, social media's impact on social links, and making video calls brain-friendly.

AI researcher and author Ben Goertzel joins Jim Rutt to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of modern LLMs, why LLMs alone won't achieve AGI, OpenAI's integrative system, solving LLM hallucinations, and the duality of heuristics and abstractions. They also explore the limitations of LLMs, the challenge of scalability, and the future of AGI with the OpenCog project.

Game designer Frank Lantz deconstructs the famous game Snake, explores the unique mechanics of Serpentes, recommends Hanabi as a couples game, discusses the aesthetic nature of games, analyzes ensembles of trajectories, examines the advantage of tactical defense in warfare, explores the challenges of game design, discusses the limitations of rationality as a global framework, and delves into the beauty of games and the search for truth.

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. Episode Transcript The Purple Presidency: How Voters Can Reclaim the White House for Bipartisan Governance, by Owen Paepke EP 204 Matt Bennett on the Case Against No Labels EP 206 Ryan Clancy on No Labels C. Owen Paepke is the author of The Evolution of Progress (named best nonfiction book of 1993 by NPR’s Talk of the Nation) and the three-volume series The Seinfeld Election, which was praised by reviewers as “a provocative investigation into the American political divide.” He has written and spoken widely on technology and science policy, including a keynote address on the future of science to the fiftieth-anniversary meeting of the Federation of American Scientists and a speech on the prospects for technological and economic progress at the Smithsonian Institution. He lives in Arizona, where he practiced for many years as an attorney specializing in antitrust and intellectual property, and is a graduate of Stanford and the University of Chicago.