The Jim Rutt Show

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to John Robb about network decision making & consensus vs dissent dynamics, COVID as a decision making test, herd immunity vs social distancing, key population dynamics, John’s big tech solution & its main roadblocks, reflections on UBI & stimulus, the value of simple solutions, the failed US political response & potential fixes, regional compacts & local responses, managing the backside of the curve, broad testing feasibility, and more. Episode Transcript John’s Global Guerrillas Report John is an author, inventor, entrepreneur, technology analyst, astro engineer, and military pilot. He’s started numerous successful technology companies, including one in the financial sector that sold for $295 million and one that pioneered the software we currently see in use at Facebook and Twitter. John’s insight on technology and governance has appeared on the BBC, Fox News, National Public Radio, CNBC, The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. John served as a pilot in a tier-one counter-terrorism unit that worked alongside Delta and Seal Team 6. He wrote the book Brave New War on the future of national security, and has advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NSA, DoD, CIA, and the House Armed Services Committee.

Joe Brewer talks to Jim about homeostasis in living systems, future collapse, fat-tail risks, evolutionary transitions, collaboration, bioregionalism, and much more... Joe Brewer talks to Jim about the memetics of regeneration & its connection to homeostasis in living systems, eco pessimism & Joe's view of future collapse, foodchain fragility, fat-tail risks, the role of emotions in existential risk, understanding manufacturing disruptions, potential silver linings in collapse, incremental vs transformation change, permaculture, evolutionary transitions, the complexity of human collaboration, bioregionalism & trade, efficiency risks, the commons, regional-scale economies, and much more. Episode Transcript Mentions & Recommendations Joe's Earth Regenerators Study Group Bill Baue's Paper, Compared to What? Overshoot by William Catton Jr. The Limits to Growth Forcast Stockholm Resilience Center's Planetary Boundaries Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles for Managing A Commmons Chatham House on High-impact, Low-probability Events Detroit: The 'Shrinking City' That Isn't Actually Shrinking Allegheny Mountain Institute Blacksheep Regenerative Resource Management Planet at risk of heading towards “Hothouse Earth” state Cultural Evolution Society Joe Brewer is the Executive Director for the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution. He is a complexity researcher trained in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. His work focuses on the converging global challenges that currently threaten the future of humanity. He helped create the Cultural Evolution Society — a scientific organization devoted to advancing the scholarly field of research in this integrative domain. Joe has also helped launch Evonomics magazine to promote the applications of evolution and complexity to the field of economics. He recently started a study group called Earth Regenerators to build a community of practice around the restoration of planetary health while safeguarding humanity’s future. Joe was formerly a member of the Center for Complex Systems Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and was a research fellow with George Lakoff at the Rockridge Institute in Berkeley.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Nora Bateson about how the pandemic is changing our relationship to time & mortality, recontextualizing the essential, non-linear future speculation, opportunities & dangers, the fragility of efficiency, changing how we work & travel, our political priorities, prioritizing community, family, locality, health and more. Episode Transcript JRS: EP30 Nora Bateson on Complexity & the Transcontextual Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. Her work asks the question, “How we can improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?” An international lecturer, researcher and writer, Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Michelle Girvan about the network dynamics of COVID-19 spread, fat-tailed risks, unintuitive network insights, social distancing dynamics, efficiency vs robustness, challenges of modeling the backside of the curve, the need for testing, economic analysis, potential corporate roles, the Network Epidemiology Online Workshop Series, and more. Episode Transcript JRS: Extra: On COVID-19 Strategies with Robin Hanson JRS: Extra: On COVID-19 Opportunities with Jessica Flack Network Epidemiology Online Workshop Series COMBINE Network Biology at UMD on YouTube Michelle Girvan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a member of the External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research operates at the intersection of statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, and computer science and has applications to social, biological, and technological systems. More specifically, her work focuses on complex networks and often falls within the fields of computational biology and sociophysics. While some of the research is purely theoretical, Girvan has become increasingly involved in using empirical data to inform and validate mathematical models.

Laurence Gonzales talks to Jim about his book “Deep Survival” a look at survival in extreme conditions from a cognitive science & “you are there” POV, and more... Author Laurence Gonzales talks to Jim about his book “Deep Survival” a fascinating look at survival in extreme conditions from both a cognitive science and “you are there” narrative perspective. Includes: multiple survival stories, the value of being cool in survival situations, preparing for an emergency, his perceive & believe heuristic, dangerous group dynamics, fighting stress with humor, learned helplessness, using emotion & reason properly in stressful situations, negative emotional capture, the value of failure, deep fatigue & rest, the value of being helpful, normal accidents, the nature of being lost, positive mental attitude, formal survival training, surviving survival, and more. Episode Transcript Mentions & Recommendations Laurence's Website Laurence's book, Deep Survival Laurence's book, Flight 323 JRS: EP46 Daniel Schrag on Climate Dynamics JRS: Extra: On COVID-19 Potentials with Bonnitta Roy\ Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman The Kekulé Problem Essay by Cormac McCarthy Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow Laurence Gonzales is the author of numerous books and has won many awards, including two National Magazine Awards and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He was also awarded the Montaigne Medal from the Eric Hoffer Society in 2018 and won the Eric Hoffer Award in both 2018 and 2019. Laurence is also a keynote speaker, lecturer & editor. In 2015 he received the Miller Distinguished Scholarship from the Santa Fe Institute and in 2016 was given an appointment as a Miller Scholar there. Scholars are internally nominated and may have backgrounds in the humanities, arts, or sciences.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Jessica Flack about stressing & testing cultural organization styles, optimizing for wholistic robustness, acting-oriented sensemaking, a department of wicked risks, top-down vs bottom-up response dynamics, liminal spaces, speculative market safeguard techniques, long-term thinking, safety nets, inequality, and more. Episode Transcript JRS: EP48 Jessica Flack on Complex System Dynamics Hedonometer Long-Term Stock Exchange Jessica Flack is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Flack directs SFI’s Collective Computation Group (C4). Flack was formerly founding director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Flack received her Ph.D. from Emory in 2003, studying cognitive science, animal behavior and evolutionary theory, and B.A. with honors from Cornell in 1996. Flack’s work has been covered by scientists and science journalists in many publications and media outlets, including Quanta Magazine, the BBC, NPR, Nature, Science, The Economist, New Scientist, and Current Biology.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Robin Hanson about possible dosage related effects on exposure and the related trade-offs of viral dose & deliberate infection strategies, the need for more investment in robustness, capacity vs flexibility, optimizing for adaptability, our lack of leadership, and more. Episode Transcript JRS: EP2 Robin Hanson – Decision Making and “The Age of Em” Robin Hanson is an Associate Professor of Economics, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech. He joined George Mason’s economics faculty in 1999 after completing a two-year post-doc at U.C Berkely. His major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Simon DeDeo about what moving out of social isolation could be like, social norms for risk management, the wide diversity of COVID reactions, making sense personally & collectively, homeostasis & hysteresis, post-COVID impacts on data privacy, travel, free time, education, and more. Episode Transcript Simon's post on Getting the quarantine end game right... JRS: EP1 Simon DeDeo – The Evolution of Consciousness Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. For three years, from 2010 to 2013, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He and his collaborators study how people use words and signals, and the ideas they represent, to create a world. They have studied a diverse set of systems that includes the French Revolution, the courtrooms of Victorian London, the research strategies of Charles Darwin, the insurgency of modern-day Afghanistan, the emergent bureaucracy of Wikipedia, the creation of power hierarchies among the social animals, and the collusions and conspiracies of petrol stations in the American Midwest. They combine data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition from Bayesian reasoning and information theory to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve.

Jessica Flack talks to Jim about causality in complex systems, theoretical biology, emergence, agent-based modeling, social policing, & much more... Professor Jessica Flack talks to Jim about micro vs macro causality in complex systems, coarse-graining, primate power hierarchies, downward causation, robustness, free will as a feeling, consciousness theories, theoretical biology, laws in adaptive systems, the non-spookiness of emergence, her work's philosophical connections, question asking vs answering, social engineering dynamics, Lord of The Rings & The Foundation Trilogy, agent-based modeling, social policing & punishment, how mature complexity science really is, Jessica's reflection on her experiences with primates, and more. Episode Transcript Mentions & Recommendations Collective Computation Group @ SFI Jessica's paper, Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism The Feeling of What Happens by António Damásio Geoffrey West The Emergence of Everything by Harold Morowitz Jessica on Edge.org JRS: EP1 Simon DeDeo – The Evolution of Consciousness Jessica's paper, Policing stabilizes construction of social niches in primates Networks: An Introduction by Mark Newman Jessica Flack is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Flack directs SFI's Collective Computation Group (C4). Flack was formerly founding director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Flack received her Ph.D. from Emory in 2003, studying cognitive science, animal behavior and evolutionary theory, and B.A. with honors from Cornell in 1996. Flack's work has been covered by scientists and science journalists in many publications and media outlets, including Quanta Magazine, the BBC, NPR, Nature, Science, The Economist, New Scientist, and Current Biology.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Bonnitta Roy about what it means to ‘stay with the trouble’, habitual behavior, the value of reflection, consumerism, scarcity & abundance, resourcefulness, the allure of going back to the rat race, system dependence vs interconnection, lack of community in the capitalist system, Game B, the downsides & narrow capabilities of monetary efficiency, and more. Episode Transcript Referenced Quote Bonnitta Roy teaches insight practices for individuals who are developing meta-cognitive skills, and hosts collective insight retreats for groups interested in breaking away from limiting patterns of thought. She teaches a masters course in consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology at the Graduate Institute. Her teaching highlights the embodied, affective and perceptual aspects of the core self, and the non-egoic potentials from which subtle sensing, intuition and insight emerge. Through her company, APP-AI, Bonnitta is developing applications that can visualize changing patterns as teams work through complex problems. Her research shows how simple but powerful protocols that underlie these patterns can be used to represent various dispositional states of human systems. Bonnitta is the author of the popular Medium publication Our Future at Work. She is an associate editor of Integral Review where you can also find her articles on process approaches to consciousness, perception, and metaphysics.