The Jim Rutt Show

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.

Jack Visnjic, Expert on Polybius's theory of anacyclosis and cyclical history, discusses cyclical patterns in history, anacyclosis in Rome, corruption & collective reaction, the Glorious Revolution, Polybius's influence on the U.S. Constitution, mobocracy, polarization in American politics, and the potential trajectories of the democratic system.

Paul Watson, author and eco-activist, discusses his book and early experiences with animals, the cruelty towards them, rescuing cattle from slaughterhouses and advocating for less cow farts and more whale poop. They delve into the vegetarian/vegan movement, co-founding Greenpeace, aggressive non-violence, and targeting illegal activities. They also touch on tree spiking, good legal defense, and the founding of Sea Shepherd.

Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels, discusses the origins & history of the campaign, increasing polarization, avoiding a second Trump term, open process for nomination, fixing democracy by having less democracy, history of third party runs, vote shrinkage, likely final decision point in July, odds of a Biden-Harris ticket beating Trump, building transparent exit triggers into post-convention process.