The Jim Rutt Show

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Currents 055: Paul Goble on Putin’s Strategic Mistakes Mar 04, 2022

Show notes

Continuing his series of expert interviews on the unfolding situation in Ukraine, Jim talks with Paul Goble, a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious issues in Eurasia. They discuss Putin's view of Russia as neglected & ignored, Russians' difficulty making ethnic distinctions between Ukrainian & Russians, Putin's unintentional unification of Ukraine & NATO, what Putin & most analysts got wrong about the military balance, Putin's misplaced faith in superior firepower, the ethnic makeup of the Russian military, why the backlash from the West was stronger than Putin expected, the West's unprecedented non-kinetic response to the invasion, effects & non-effects of the Western sanction regime, Russia's infosphere & increasingly closed internet, why Russian anti-war sentiment will increase, challenging bets against a continued Ukrainian resistance, Ukrainian resistance to the Soviet Red Army in 1945-1955, high effectiveness of low-tech resistance, Putin's coming claim of victory & why it would be Pyrrhic, what Putin would do in reaction to violence against him, the likelihood that NATO's increased coherence will continue, why China will probably not move on Taiwan in the near term, and much more.

Currents 054: Samo Burja on the Russia-Ukraine War Mar 01, 2022

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Jim has a timely talk with Samo Burja about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what it might mean moving forward. They discuss the consequences of a (likely) Russian victory, Russia's bet on new arctic ports & liquid natural gas, a final decoupling of Russia from Europe, the stalemate scenario, Ukraine's dearth of young men, its remarkable job so far at maintaining morale, the likelihood of escalation of mass artillery & casualties, incompatibility between atomized individualism & willingness to resist, rational & less rational reasons why Russia hasn't taken out Ukraine's hospitals, power plants, and internet, a scenario in which Russia settles for Luhansk and Dinetzk, what a true Russian defeat would look like, significance of the Russian advance through Crimea, Samo's main critique of the Ukrainian government, the key fact that Russia has not yet used a third of their forces, the ineffectual negotations in Belarus, the always-looming risk of nuclear escalation & whether the nuclear taboo will hold, an unlikely escalation path via Polish involvement, why a strong German military would be bad for the EU, how a Russian victory would embolden China to invade Taiwan & China's tacit support of the Russian invasion, a bet between Jim & Samo on whether China invades Taiwan within the next 3 years, and much more.

Currents 053: Matthew Pirkowski on Grammars of Emergence Feb 28, 2022

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Jim talks with Matthew Pirkowski about new frameworks in the study of emergence. They discuss the concept's roots in the work of J.S. Mill, 19th-century tensions between reductionism & vitalism, Terrence Deacon's ententional properties, ententionality as a result of constraints, giving reality status to relations, pruning rules as key to emergence, possibility space as unconstrained, chirality, spin glasses, viewing the Ukraine-Russia conflict in terms of preference regimes, communication speeds & emergence in the French Revolution, viscosity in political systems, Ilya Prigogine's dissipative structures, using waste as energy, emergence without emergencies, complexity catastrophe & viscosity, social media platforms as memetic reactors, race-to-the-bottom dynamics in social media, the possibility of non-trivial positivity within volatile online spaces, knowing communities by their fruits, grammars of differentiation vs grammars of integration, the project of synthesizing hyper-specialized languages, and much more.

Currents 052: John Robb on War in Ukraine Feb 25, 2022

Show notes

Jim has a forward-looking talk with recurring guest John Robb about the meaning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They discuss the likelihood that the event is a major historical hinge, Russia & China's different rule set, costs & benefits of strong national cohesion, Putin's hard-power intentions, short-term unfolding of the Russian campaign, likely effects on China's relations with Taiwan, whether modern societies are willing to engage in insurgency, Putin's legacy drive, Russia's trajectory going forward, and much more.

Currents 051: Douglas Rushkoff on the Once and Future Internet Feb 24, 2022

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Jim talks with Douglas Rushkoff about where the internet came from, where it might go, & how to move from dystopian despair to productive engagement. Loosely following the syllabus for (Re-)Designing the Internet, a course Douglas co-teaches at CUNY with Jeff Jarvis, they discuss the internet as a read-write medium, reclaiming control of attention, journalism's move to Substack, language as VR, the Sixties dream of a thriving unimind, Allan Kaprow's creation of happenings, the DIY pre-internet, the shift from shareware to for-profit tech, John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," how net libertarianism created a free zone for corporate capture, the move from helping people find exploits to finding exploits in people, tuning interfaces for or against reactivity, the early internet as a place where people sounded smarter than in real life, the meaning of human-centered design, the value of viscosity in political & communication systems, denaturalizing design choices, the increasing evidence that the kids aren't alright, Facebook's Meta pivot as an act of desperation, how web 3.0 & blockchain technologies reify predatory speculation, Canadian banks' recent suspension of truckers' accounts, distributed tech's discovery problem, certain web communities as "Graeberian prisons of structural violence," the potential for affirming the best in one another, and much more.

Currents 050: Greg Lukianoff on Free Speech Feb 21, 2022

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Jim talks with Greg Lukianoff, president & CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind. They discuss FIRE's mission of non-partisan free speech advocacy, recent high-profile cases & repeat offenders in higher-ed censorship, the history of university speech codes, the concept of harm, problems of progress, lack of viewpoint diversity in higher ed, bad-faith uses of harm-claiming, understanding the scale of modern censorship, free speech as a foundational value of Western civilization, Georgetown professor Ilya Shapiro's recent controversial tweet, abuse of the white supremacy label, overemphasis in progressive circles on the morality of inoffensiveness, what the 1969 Barbara Papish case reveals about decreased support for free speech, lack of leadership among university presidents, the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, what parents can do to help children understand the importance of free speech, counterintuitiveness of free speech rights, and more.

EP 152 Gary Bengier on Hard-Science Futures Feb 07, 2022

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Jim talks with Gary Bengier about his science fiction novel Unfettered Journey, depicting a hard-science view of a possible world 140 or so years in the future. They discuss the need for sci-fi that addresses real problems & that is grounded in real science, the coming impact of bioscience, AI, & robotics, why robots may take longer to become ubiquitous than many think, Gary's sci-fi take on ubiquitous robots, a future of lots of stuff & not much human labor, what happens when robots make robots, capitalism's obsoletion point, neural chips, estimating AI progress, whether AGI is necessarily linked to consciousness, intentionality as the mark of mentality, the Fermi paradox, the novel's level-based social hierarchy, self-consciousness vs consciousness, symbol use, semantics (not syntax) as central to the human mind, the devil's offer of surveillance systems, reimagining the Adam & Eve story minus God, and much more.

Currents 049: Ashley Colby & Jason Snyder on Doomer Optimism Feb 04, 2022

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Jim talks with Ashley Colby & Jason Snyder about the growing movement of Doomer Optimism. They discuss Ashley's coinage of the term, doomer optimism as an open-source structure of feeling, avoiding pathologies of despair & naive optimism, balancing philosophy with action, cosmopolitan localism, healthy skepticism, theory-of-change pluralism, building local capacity toward the meso-scale, the social power of skill-building, Tucker Max's surprise embrace of the movement & what to do when movements take unexpected turns, doomer optimism's mainstream potential, recentering the hard-won knowledge of longtime homesteaders & builders, and much more.

EP 151 Daniel Mezick on Ritual and Hierarchy Jan 31, 2022

Show notes

Jim talks with Daniel Mezick about two books on leadership & social coherence, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's Rational Ritual and Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest. They discuss ritual as a mechanism for large-scale coordination, mimicry in beer choice and Super Bowl ads, fragmentation of audiences through microtargeting, the relationship between common knowledge & ritual, China's management of common knowledge, America's weak-sauce rituals, meetings as games, how egalitarianism increases group decision quality, role-based vs position-based leadership, anti-puffing-up mechanisms, social values of hunter-forager groups, how weapons may have enabled egalitarianism, personal sovereignty as careful authorizing, Jim's guest selection algorithm, authority information as social glue, rapid adaptability of informal authority systems, Graeber & Wengrow's critique of Boehm, egalitarianism as a game, making role-based leadership scalable, leadership invitation, and much more.

Currents 048: Welf von Hören on Potential Dec 27, 2021

Show notes

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Welf von Hören, co-founder of the recently beta-launched Potential app. (Listeners who download the app can use the invitation code "jimruttshow".) They discuss Potential's goal of upgrading the human capacity for omni-considerate choices, the co-evolutionary relationship between increasing individual capacity & improving institutions, the risk of creating "more efficient destroyers of the universe," GameB's three-part model of sovereignty, online as the primary conditioning environment, asymmetry between the human mind & AI-driven platforms, bridging the intention-action gap, the decision to be a public-benefit for-profit corporation, aligning the value proposition with the user's best interests, how the app actually works, a more monastic digital environment, enabling communities of practice, facing the moral challenges of data collection, and much more.

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