The Jim Rutt Show

Latest Episodes:

EP111 Anatol Lieven on Climate & Nationalism Feb 11, 2021

Show notes

Anatol Lieven & Jim talk about his latest book, Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case. They cover motivating populations to take actions on climate change, the key role of nations & nationalism, the huge problem of residual elites, funding alternative energy, western government incompetence & political failures, individuality, Bernie & the green new deal, the carbon tax, nuclear power, natural gas, carbon removal & geoengineering, naive progressivism, the strangeness of the American culture wars, intelligent immigration, the importance of building social solidarity, getting clear on international priorities, global impacts of climate change, reducing air travel, Anatol's sensible approaches to climate change, and much more.

EP110 Brad Kershner on Education & Complexity Feb 08, 2021

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Brad Kershner talks to Jim about his book, Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership. They cover how Brad defines complexity, key contextual aspects of education, the four quadrants of Integral Theory & how he used them when observing schools, identifying & working with strange attractors, leadership, driving change in complexity, turbulence vs perturbation, position-based vs role-based leadership, complex vs complicated systems, mixed-age education, enabling creativity in teaching, and the importance of autonomy. They finish the episode by talking about theories of psychological development: Kegan levels, Integral Theory, hierarchical complexity, avoiding stage simplification, and much more.

Currents 026: Bill Ottman on Minds.com Feb 06, 2021

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In this currents episode, Bill Ottman & Jim have a wide-ranging talk on the state of social media and his open-source social platform (Minds.com). They talk about what makes Minds different than other social networks: open-source, community-owned, profit-shared, decentralized, free speech, privacy, decentralized reputation, moderation process, monetization & incentives, tokens, AWS & decentralizing the back-end, Ethereum, and more. They also chat about Jim's recent Facebook banning, GitHub censorship, Reddit's move away from open-source, power & corruption, radicalizing dynamics of censorship, doxing, Google’s demands on the Minds app, possible government platform regulation, the media influence on big tech, Twitter & Facebook opportunities, some relevant stories from Jim’s CEO days at Network Solutions, the GameStop short squeeze, and more.

EP109 Forrest Landry on Immanent Metaphysics: Part 2 Feb 04, 2021

Show notes

Forrest Landry & Jim build on the foundation they built in his last JRS episode to continue to flesh out Forrest's Immanent Metaphysics. They explore the self, subject/object relationship, perception, the nature of choice & process, causality & determinism, realism vs idealism, dualism, the foundational triplicate, the three modalities, statement & implications of Forrest's three axioms, their associated modalities, and much more.

EP108 Bernard Baars on Consciousness Feb 01, 2021

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Bernard Baars talks to Jim about some of the key ideas in his book, On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity. They start by covering some of the history of the scientific study of consciousness & its taboo reputation in science, the philosopher's zombie, and the limits of philosophy to study consciousness. They then go into some of the specifics of Bernards global workspace theory (GWT): limited capacity, conscious content & perceived objects, the aspects of the theater metaphor, dynamics of attention, animal consciousness, global access, contrastive analysis, unconscious & conscious interaction, upcoming integrated information theory (IIT) vs. GWT experimentation, and much more.

Currents 025: Ben Goertzel on Decentralizing Social Media Jan 29, 2021

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In this Currents episode, Ben Goertzel & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about the urgent need for decentralized tech platforms. They cover Jim's recent banning from Facebook & how it might have happened, the danger of kafkaesque algorithms & the challenge of building AI's that explain their decisions, the challenges around creating alternatives to big tech, politics power & corruption, game theory for today’s social platforms, Signal vs Telegram, moving Gameb off Facebook, alternative app frameworks, the David vs Goliath history of tech, the radicalization problem of alternative platforms & some possible solutions, generic vs specialized solutions, the role of AI in future platforms, and much more.

EP107 Tristan Harris on Our Social Dilemma Jan 28, 2021

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Tristan Harris talks to Jim about his hugely successful documentary, The Social Dilemma. They start by identifying the good aspects of social media, the obvious harms & exploitation tactics, AI-enabled race to the bottom dynamics, digital regulation approaches, the big tech oligarchs, combating cultish dynamics, AI-powered algorithmic influence, the conflict bias & its impact on our agency, establishing positive psychological habits, the unintuitive relationship between education & confirmation bias, and more. They finish the episode by speculating on the impacts of bold social media interventions like banning advertising, making them only legal for adults, or outlawing recommendation engines.

Currents 024: BJ Campbell on the Woke Religion Jan 27, 2021

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In this Currents episode, BJ Campbell has a wide-ranging talk with Jim about his article, "Social Justice is a Crowdsourced Religion": the history of the wokeism & how it can be seen as a religion, what makes religions efficacious, the falsification problem, woke scientific contradictions, protestant similarities, woke prevalence, its rapid ideological evolution, network-based self-organization, why wokeism should accept the religion title, the nature of mass movements & true believers, memetic tribes, the rapid growth of wokeism, its good initial intentions, and more.

EP106 Michael Strevens on the Irrational History of Science Jan 25, 2021

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Michael Stevens talks to Jim about some of the ideas & stories in his book, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science: what the great method debate is & how Popper & Kuhn added to the topic, falsification & scientific progress, the messy history of testing Einstein's theories, understanding the theoretical cohort, Michael's iron rule, science vs natural philosophy, Francis Bacon's view on science, scientific convergence, the Tychonic principal, theory vs experimentation, Newton's trendsetting approach to science, the war against beauty in science, why science was born in western Europe, and much more.

EP105 Christof Koch on Consciousness Jan 21, 2021

Show notes

Christof Koch and Jim have a wide-ranging conversation about the science of consciousness. They start by exploring some key topics brought up in his book, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread But Can't Be Computed: defining conscious experience, the importance of feeling, the historical value of Cartesian dualism, the challenge of materialism to explain mental phenomena, emergent consciousness, neural correlates of consciousness & enabling factors, ways of understanding qualia, and consciousness vs intelligence. They finish this episode by talking about integrated information theory (IIT): origins & dynamics, consciousness substrates & what it could mean for AI, small & large phi, uniting consciousnesses, IIT vs. global workspace theory (GWT) experimentation, panpsychism, and much more.

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