The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Fred Beuttler and Mark Stahlman about their new online graduate program, Trivium University. They discuss the trivium & the quadrivium, instilling a better sense of grammar, the current digital paradigm, five paradigms in communication technology, the outsourcing of memory, retrieving scribal ways of thinking, why we need another university, re-centering professor-student interaction, cost disease in higher education, three spheres in geopolitics (East, West, and digital), the replacement of globalism, shaping a new generation of leaders, alphabetic vs logographic thinking, the Ukraine War as conflict between 3 spheres, what it means to be human, averting the geopolitical dangers of the Davos attitude, Net Assessment, setting Great Conversation over Great Books, averting World War III, and much more. Episode Transcript Trivium University Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism, by Shadi Bartsch The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics For an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre McCloskey Mark Stahlman is a biologist, computer architect and ex-Wall Street technology strategist.  He is the President of the not-for-profit Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL, 501(c)3,  digitallife.center) and its educational project Trivium University (Triv U, trivium.university).  He is also CEO of Exogenous, Inc. (EXO, exogenousinc.com), a strategic risk analysis group and on the editorial staff of its publication, the Three Spheres Newsletter (TSN).  He studied for but did not complete advanced degrees in Theology (UofChicago) and Molecular Biology (UW-Mad).  He has been widely interviewed and published, including teaching online courses (available on YouTube via 52 Living Ideas). Fred W. Beuttler, Ph.D. is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL), as well as one of the founding administrators of CSDL’s new Trivium University.   He also teaches history at the University of Chicago’s Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. From 2015 to 2019 he was the Associate Dean of Liberal Arts Programs at the Graham School, overseeing a masters in liberal arts, the “great books” certificate program for adults, and the Fortnight in Oxford. From 2010 to 2015 he was Director of General Education at Carroll University, in Wisconsin. In 2012 and 2013 he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Germany, where he taught American political history. Prior to his return to academia, he was Deputy Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Washington, DC, from 2005 to 2010, where he coauthored and edited a number of histories of House committees. He received a BA at the University of Illinois, an MA from Trinity International University, and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, with a dissertation entitled, “Organizing an American Conscience: The Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, 1940-1968.”

Layman Pascal interviews Jim about the principles and strategies that could transform Twitter into infrastructure for collective intelligence. They discuss Jim's motivation in engaging the topic, Musk's current lack of strategic intent, the least bad unfairness, avoiding point of view moderation, distinguishing between style and content, decorum, user-controlled filters, GameB's erroneous ban from Facebook, principles of fair enforcement, setting thresholds between private & public domains, whether Twitter is a public utility, advantages & risks of open-sourcing Twitter's code, two kinds of censorship, culpability around links, replacing the ad model with a subscription service, a connection with liquid democracy, issues with de-platforming, modulating viscosity, social media choices as socially consequential, adding groups, risks of the downvote, gradient rating systems, emergent engineering & why no one's using it, identity authentication, likely near-future problems, automating sophisticated moderation, experimenting with character limits, wild-card content, a community disinformation immune system, optimizing for time well spent, and much more. Episode Transcript "Musk and Moderation," by Jim Rutt (Quillette) "Saving Twitter—A Roundtable," featuring Jim Rutt (Quillette) JRS Currents 080: Joe Edelman and Hellie Hain on Rebuilding Meaning weco.io Hylo Coordinape MetaGame Layman Pascal is a public speaker, nondual theologian and yoga & meditation teacher based in Victoria, British Columbia. His family has lived in the coastal islands for five generations. He is a writer on themes of cultural philosophy, shamanism and organic spiritual development.

Jim talks with Joe Edelman and Ellie Hain about their new movement, Rebuilding Meaning, and two recent talks introducing ideas towards a better world. They discuss tools for building toward more meaningful lives, the meaning of meaning, looking behind the void, the litany of shit, exercises in eliciting meaning, coherent pluralism, containers vs meanings, how religions lost their grounding, values articulacy, the importance of aesthetics, using language learning models to extract meaning profiles, values vs virtues, sobering up from internet optimism, the decay of spaces, when focus shifts from meaning to incentives, funnels, tubes, & spaces, piling up strangers vs creating spaces, metrics of meaning, meaning cards, space trains, the example of science, Carl Rogers's concept of congruence, designing good ideal selves, spreading the message, and much more. Episode Transcript Rebuilding Meaning (website) JRS EP34 - Joe Edelman on the Power of Values "Exit the Void: A Movement for Meaning," by Ellie Hain "Rebuilding Society on Meaning," by Joe Edelman A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, by Heather E. Heying and Bret Weinstein JRS EP 173 - Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodern Self-Help Joe Edelman developed the meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing.com, then co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, and coined the term “Time Well Spent” for a family of metrics adopted by teams at Facebook, Google, and Apple. Since then, he's worked on the philosophical underpinnings for new business metrics, design methods, and political movements. The central idea is to make people's sources of meaning explicit, so that how meaningful or meaningless things are can be rigorously accounted for. His previous career was in HCI and programming language design. Ellie Hain is an artist, researcher, and cultural strategist working on new imaginaries and ideologies for the post-industrial age.

Jim talks with Hanzi Freinacht about his book 12 Commandments: For Extraordinary People to Master Ordinary Life. They discuss the book as a response to Jordan Peterson & his "12 rules" books, metamodernism, fostering sober crazy people, magical thinking in highly developed personalities, integrations of science & spirituality, stabilizing higher phenomenological states, lower average states as a phenomenon of late-stage Game A, living in a mess moderately, fucking like a beast, sincere irony, quitting, doing the walk of shame, reverse death therapy, Carl Roger's idea of congruence, healing with justice, burning your maps, the pernicious belief that our maps are complete, killing your guru & finding the others, Jung's golden shadow, playing for forgiveness, and much more. Episode Transcript 12 Commandments: For Extraordinary People to Master Ordinary Life, by Hanzi Freinacht JRS EP36 - Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodernism JRS EP53 - Hanzi Freinacht on the Nordic Ideology JRS EP82 - Hanzi Freinacht on Building a Metamodern Future JRS EP 172 - Brendan Graham Dempsey on Emergentism JRS EP 170 - John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall on The Religion That Is Not a Religion JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of The Listening Society, Nordic Ideology, and the upcoming books The 6 Hidden Patterns of History and Outcompeting Capitalism. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps.

Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about his book Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. They discuss the meaning crisis & its symptoms, reciprocal narrowing, the pre-modern & the modern, the emergence of reductionism, the meaning of complexity & emergence, sacralizing the scientific creation narrative, Prigogine's theory of dissipative systems, the universe as a process of endless complexification, marrying Bobby Azarian's Unifying Theory of Reality & Gregg Henriques's Unified Theory of Knowledge, consciousness vs sentience, Integrated Information Theory vs John Searle's biological functionalism, the odds that intelligent life evolved only once in our galaxy, tying complexification to the God concept, making the "religion that is not a religion" accessible through mythopoeia & storytelling, the Omega Point, whether approaching the Omega Point implies pushing for a techno-Singularity, Emergentist ethics & practices, and much more. Episode Transcript Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Modern World, by Brendan Graham Dempsey "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis," by John Vervaeke - YouTube series JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold Morowitz The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, by Bobby Azarian JRS EP 159 - Bobby Azarian on the Romance of Reality JRS EP105 - Christof Koch on Consciousness JRS EP 167 - Bruce Damer on the Origins of Life JRS EP 171 - Bruce Damer Part 2: The Origins of Life – Implications JRS EP40 - Eric Smith on the Physics of Living Systems Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer whose work focuses on the meaning crisis and the nature of spirituality in metamodernity. He is the host of the Metamodern Spirituality podcast and the writer behind the six-volume (and counting) Metamodern Spirituality Series. He earned his BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and his MA in Religion and the Arts from Yale University. He lives in Greensboro Bend, Vermont, where he runs the holistic retreat center Sky Meadow.

Jim talks with Douglas Rushkoff about the ideas in his essay series, "What's a Meta For?" They discuss Facebook's renaming to Meta, the semantic web, ChatGPT, a Turing test recalibration period, Rocco's Basilisk, the conversion of the real world into a meta-world, Elon Musk as techno-monarch, the limitations of his understanding of free speech, returning Twitter to the people who use it, Zuckerberg's Caesar obsession, Rushkoff's criticisms of GameB, the dangers of an abstracted "omega point," understanding the complex binding energies of GameA, dominant political isms as a result of industrialism, GameB's schism over personal vs institutional change, the need to actually deliver, coherent pluralism, what being a member of GameB will mean, dangers of a totalizing narrative, not knowing what GameB is, cultivated insecurity, rejecting the metaverse, GameB's resilient response to critiques, and much more. Episode Transcript Douglas Rushkoff (website) "What's a Meta For?" by Douglas Rushkoff (part 1 and 2) Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, by Douglas Rushkoff JRS Currents 051: Douglas Rushkoff on the Once and Future Internet Character.AI "If I Were CEO of Twitter," by Douglas Rushkoff "The Liminal Web: Mapping An Emergent Subculture Of Sensemakers, Meta-Theorists & Systems Poets," by Joe Lightfoot Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, by Christopher Boehm The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber & David Wengrow Doomer Optimism JRS Currents 049: Ashley Colby & Jason Snyder on Doomer Optimism Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.

Jim talks with John Ash about his use of AI art tools and their implications for society... Jim talks with John Ash about his use of AI art tools and their implications for society. They discuss the basics of how the latest models work, using AI to communicate complexity, removing noise from noise, style transfer, pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge, expressing complex ideas through images, iterative de-noising in human conversation, stochastic gradient descent, receptivity to meaning, latent spaces, a high-order taxon of creative iteration, songwriting, finding the ideal number of iterations, stylistic interpolation, Cognicism, attribution & sourcing, citations in ChatGPT, the coming debates about ownership & permission, why the first court ruling will probably be about porn, the world as a giant interconnected neocortex, propaganda bots, owning our cognition, stochastic terrorism, future shock, solving internal alignment before we solve AI alignment, and much more. Episode Transcript Al Actress Performs a Mesmerizing Tale of Duality ("Atheus and the Golden Braid"), by Speaker John Ash - YouTube Play.ht The Congress (IMDb) Deep Reckonings, by Stephanie Lepp JRS EP129 - Stephanie Lepp on Deep Reckonings John Ash is a thought leader in AI-assisted technologies, decentralized sensemaking, a writer, a visual and musical artist, and a steward for the ideas around Cognicism.

Jim continues his conversation with Serge Faguet, this time focusing on the nature of consciousness and its implications for the wise and ethical use of AI systems...Jim continues his conversation with Serge Faguet, this time focusing on the nature of consciousness and its implications for the wise and ethical use of AI systems. They discuss a technological Singularity, the evolution & significance of consciousness, integrated information theory (IIT) vs. John Searle's arguments, whether current AIs exhibit consciousness, applying the golden rule to AIs, AI alignment, consciousness as solution to the combinatoric explosion of inference, the importance of systems thinking, an upcoming workshop on free will, virtue ethics without religion, building a decentralized nondogmatic religion, gender parity in GameB, Serge's move from entrepreneurship to full-time community-building, and much more. Serge looks forward to receiving any feedback or expressions of interest at first.last@gmail or (better) first_last on Telegram. Episode Transcript Serge Faguet (website) Serge Faguet on Twitter Serge Faguet on Medium JRS Currents 074: Serge Faguet on Building Metacommunity "In Search of the 5th Attractor," by Jim Rutt (Medium) Integrated information theory (Wikipedia) Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by Max Tegmark JRS EP 157 - Terrence Deacon on Mind’s Emergence From Matter Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness, by Gerald M. Edelman "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel JRS EP 170 - John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall on The Religion That Is Not a Religion Serge Faguet is a Russian-Ukrainian entrepreneur and prolific thinker. He has founded multiple tech companies including multi-billion-dollar B2B online travel company Emerging Travel Group, concierge medicine care delivery company Novami, AI drug discovery company Multiomic Health, automated clinical trial recruitment company Nexus and Web2 ⇒ Web3 onboarding product Identix. A proponent of biohacking, his vision is to build a large-scale commercial data/biobank that gathers healthcare data to make major progress for increasing productivity, longevity, and quality of life. As a philosopher-entrepreneur, Serge believes that we need to adopt a syncretic approach to innovation and use entrepreneurial ideation to enact enduring material change and eventually construct a more hospitable future for all of humanity. Serge is interested in implementing the principles of Web3 and crypto to build decentralized institutions, govern ourselves, and control our own data. His greatest passions lie in inspiring others to discover their authentic selves through communal collaboration and encouraging political action by creating a healthier, more self-aware society.

Jim continues his discussion with Bruce Damer on the origins of life... Jim continues his discussion with Bruce Damer on the origins of life. They discuss Darwin's "warm little pond" hypothesis, hydrothermal fields as selection engines, wet-dry cycling, proto-cells, competing theories, implications of the hypothesis, niche construction theory, the origin of life as mostly collaborative, the Probability Interaction Memory (PIM) model, effects of crowding together, sharing results, the emergence of memory, PIM as a general principle of emergence, Covid-19 as an example of amplification, applying PIM to civilizational health, the loss of face-to-face community membranes in late-stage capitalism, "hearthology," applying PIM to the search for artificial general intelligence (AGI), collaborations with Ben Goertzel & Google's AI group, protocellular systems as general learning systems, creating a genesis engine, the Fermi paradox & the Drake equation, the new concept of urability, the low probability of sustaining life long enough to reach complexity, new data from Mars & exoplanet atmospheres, the possibility that Earth is extremely rare, bringing the galaxy to life, creating hundreds of thousands of warm little ponds using asteroids, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP 167 - Bruce Damer on the Origins of Life BIOTA Institute JRS EP140 - Robin Dunbar on Friendship JRS Currents 072: Ben Goertzel on Viable Paths to True AGI The Open Cognition Project (OpenCog) Tierra (Wikipedia) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, by Stephen Jay Gould SETI Institute Canadian-born Dr. Bruce Damer has spent his life pursuing two questions: how did life on Earth begin? and how can we give that life (and ourselves) a sustainable pathway into the future and a presence beyond the Earth? A decade of laboratory and field research with his collaborator Prof. David Deamer at UCSC and teams around the world resulted in the Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life, published in Scientific American in 2017 and the journal Astrobiology in 2020. The scenario has now passed its first key experimental tests in the laboratory and at volcanic hot springs around the world and has emerged as a leading contender for a general theory of abiogenesis. Implications of the work are now spreading through evolutionary biology, philosophy, AI and the search for life beyond Earth. New work with collaborators has proposed the urability framework, how life can start on many different worlds, and addresses some aspects of the Fermi Paradox.

Jim talks with Jamie Joyce about the organization she founded and directs, The Society Library... 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. Episode Transcript The Society Library JRS Currents 061: Nora Bateson on a Return to Earnestness Pro-Truth Pledge Jamie Joyce is the Founder and Executive Director of The Society Library, a 501(c)3 collective intelligence organization which works on developing tools, resources, and methods to address epistemic issues in the United States. Her work includes modeling societal-scale deliberation, developing decision-making models, building libraries of knowledge, and offering educational curricula to fact-checks and university students. Jamie is also a 2022 Collective Intelligence Fellow at the Foresight Institute.