The Jim Rutt Show
Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.
Episodes
September 19, 2023 • 53 mins
Jim talks with Cory Doctorow about the ideas in his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. They discuss Cory's long affiliation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, destroying Big Tech instead of "fixing" it, why tech lords are not evil geniuses, how Big Tech consolidated, antitrust law, the felony contempt of business model, interoperability, the high-speed shell game of digital, the kill zone, the c...
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September 7, 2023 • 81 mins
Jim talks with Susan Neiman about the ideas in her latest book, Left Is Not Woke. They discuss the history & meaning of wokeness, the underlying reactionary assumptions of wokeness, making leftism & socialism acceptable terms, how the New Left of the Sixties set leftism back for a generation, disentangling left & woke, the right & tribalism, progressivism as a child of the Enlightenment, normative vs descriptive claims, refuting th...
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August 24, 2023 • 64 mins
Jim talks with Pamela Denise Long about the ideas in an open letter from the Coalition of Concerned Freedmen to college presidents, responding to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on race-based affirmative action. They discuss the organizational developmental consultancy Youthcentrix, the Coalition of Concerned Freedmen, the meaning of the freedmen moniker, the different types of manumission, the use of the term Negro, the four poi...
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August 22, 2023 • 92 mins
Jim talks with Michael R.J. Bonner about the ideas in his book In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present. They discuss the meaning of civilization, Gobekli Tepe, why technological change didn't bring about civilization, how civilization produces clarity, beauty, and order, why civilization is preferable to the alternatives, the limits of cities, the dynamics of collapse, Francis Fukuyama's end of history idea, ...
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August 17, 2023 • 72 mins
Jim talks with Bob Reid about identity verification and the financial stack behind his global financial platform Everest. They discuss decentralized user-owned identity, identity as a trillion-dollar opportunity, competing with customers, Know Your Customer, types of identity, the breakout fraud, biometric systems, building societal trust, India's Aadhar system, Justin Trudeau's freeze on protesters' bank accounts, preventing gover...
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July 20, 2023 • 57 mins
Jim talks with Aydan Connor about improving American food systems and reducing waste. They discuss Aydan's experience in the craft brewing industry, extremification of beer styles, wastefulness in beer production, how Aydan became interested in food systems, the obsession with consumer choice, how the current system prices in waste, food waste ratios in different countries, where in the chain food waste occurs, the requirement of p...
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July 18, 2023 • 95 mins
Jim has a wide-ranging talk with David Krakauer about the ideas in his forthcoming paper "The Structure of Complexity in Machine Learning Science" and how AI may alter the course of science. They discuss data-driven science vs theory-driven science, a bifurcation in science, the protein folding problem, brute force methods, the origin of induction in David Hume, the origin of neural networks in deductive thinking of the '40s, super...
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July 13, 2023 • 83 mins
Jim talks with Alicia Juarrero about her new book Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. They discuss Aristotle's four causes, applying them to complex dynamical systems, the overfocus on efficient cause, naive Newtonianism, nothing-but-ism, reconceptualizing causality in terms of constraints, mereology, constraint regimes, ascribing causal powers to emergent properties, the roots of panpsychism, Searle's com...
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July 6, 2023 • 75 mins
Jim talks with Peter Turchin about the field he founded, cliodynamics, which applies the scientific method to history. They discuss the meaning & origins of cliodynamics, distinguishing cliodynamics from previous approaches, regularizing historical data, the interface between models & data, average height as a proxy for biological well-being, the Seshat data collection project, observed patterns in collapsing societies, the overpro...
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July 5, 2023 • 83 mins
Jim talks with Sara Walker and Lee Cronin about the ideas in their Aeon essay "Time Is an Object." They discuss the history of the idea of time, Newton's clockwork universe, the capacity for things to happen, the impossibility of time travel, Einstein's block universe theory, making time testable, conceptions of the arrow of time, irreversibility as an emergent property, the core of assembly theory, measures of complexity, recursiv...
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June 27, 2023 • 103 mins
Jim talks with Samuel Scarpino about what we've learned from Covid-19 and how to apply those lessons to preparing for the next pandemic. They discuss takeaways from cross-national comparisons, the social misery index, the failure to control the spread in the U.S., the efficacy of border closure, the test-trace-isolate strategy, what the U.S. should be ready to do in the event of the Big One, capacity for rapid test development, how...
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June 23, 2023 • 78 mins
Jim talks with Damien Walter about science fiction and the mechanics of myth. They discuss the roles of pathos & ethos in science fiction, Damien's lifelong fascination with sci-fi, the symbolon of "science fiction," Star Trek vs Star Wars, categorizing Star Wars, Asimov's idea of psychohistory, The Lord of the Rings & the value of myth, the Inklings literary group, the metaphysics of Tolkien, fostering a creator culture, creating ...
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June 22, 2023 • 89 mins
Jim talks with recurring guest Forrest Landry about civilization design. They discuss the meaning of the concept, toolkits for problem-solving, why this work matters now, local hill-climbing, preconditions for sustainability, cultivating an epistemic commons, non-relativistic ethics, value ethics, grounding good choices in relationship, the endurance of cities, how metaphysics provides a foundation for ethics, going beyond explore ...
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June 20, 2023 • 89 mins
Jim talks with Frank Lantz, game designer and director of the Game Center at New York University, about Network Wars and the art of game-making. They discuss Frank's first reaction to Network Wars, how the game works, elegance in game design, the simplest possible expression of an idea, Frank's overall score record, high stochasticity in the combat results, the combination of high skill & high variance, the tendency to bend randomn...
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June 13, 2023 • 74 mins
Jim talks with Robert Tercek about the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike and intellectual property rights in the era of generative AI. They discuss Los Angeles as a union town, Jim's screenwriting helper software, likely impacts of AI on writers, the history of Hollywood union negotiations, the devaluation of human labor & humanity, motion picture companies of the future, the suit against Stable Diffusion, whether copyright l...
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June 6, 2023 • 85 mins
Jim has an extremely wide-ranging discussion with Michael Garfield. They discuss the upcoming book Michael is drafting in public, the exponential scaling of information production, Jurassic Park, mass distributed computation, a new topology for social connectivity, info agents, stereotyping & police violence, a dehumanizing pace of human interaction, Charles Stross's prophetic visions, heuristic induction, strong vs weak social lin...
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June 1, 2023 • 74 mins
Jim talks with Carlos Perez about the ideas in his new book A Pattern Language for Generative AI: A Self-Generating GPT-4 Blueprint. They discuss GPT-4's ability to introspect on its capabilities, Christopher Alexander's idea of a pattern language, pattern language design, Jim's script-writing program, moving beyond ChatGPT to the OpenAI API, managing the context window, chain of thought prompting, the skyhook effect, the value of ...
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May 24, 2023 • 60 mins
Jim talks with Charles Eisenstein about the environment and the ideas in his book Climate: A New Story. They discuss Charles's involvement with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s presidential campaign, his first encounter with the idea of global warming, the problems with carbon fundamentalism, environmental derangement, the importance of forests to the water cycle, a world of concrete & shit, escaping the mentality of domination, humans as ...
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May 9, 2023 • 61 mins
Jim talks with Matt Welsh about the ideas in his essay "The End of Programming," arguing that coding as we know it will soon be obsolete. They discuss ChatGPT's ability to perform logical reasoning, whether it thinks, its utility as a programming aid, skipping code entirely, using language models as computational engines, problem decomposition, streamlining the interface between models and databases, complex customer service, the a...
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May 4, 2023 • 109 mins
Jim talks with Matthew Pirkowski about the kinds of consensus mechanisms that can be used to secure blockchains. They discuss active inference, proof of work vs proof of stake & the relationship between them, auto-catalytic networks, proof of work in emergent nature, what consensus means & why it needs to be protected, integrity of the ledger, an analogy with clocks, accelerating entropy, photosynthesis, exploring vs exploiting ten...
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