The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Michael Shermer about his worldview and his new book, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. They discuss Michael's self-identification as a monist and realist who believes in a physical objective world, the concept of fallibilism, intersubjective verification of the interobjective, reliance on authorities and institutions, the battle between the book of authority versus the book of nature, balancing rationality with empiricism, the dependence of mathematical truths on axioms, January 6 as an example of people acting rationally on false beliefs, Shermer's journey from born-again Christian to atheist and Jim's opposite journey from Catholicism to atheism, treating religious literature like great literature with deeper truths, the study of consciousness and the hard problem versus the easy problem, separating intelligence from consciousness, consciousness as a biological process like digestion, the question of machine sentience, a critique of Donald Hoffman's interface theory, evidence for veridical perception through mimicry in nature and animals climbing trees, skepticism about brain-in-a-vat and simulation scenarios, minimum viable metaphysics, Thomas Nagel's concept of one thought too many, Jonathan Rauch's constitution of knowledge, the replication crisis in psychology, the breakdown of trust in institutions due to COVID and the noble lie, the problem of scaling laws with followership, moral realism and the survival and flourishing of sentient beings, the principle of interchangeable perspectives, discovering moral values through problem-solving, the evolution of ethics and the expanding moral sphere, and much more. Episode Transcript Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, by Michael Shermer The Michael Shermer Show Why People Believe Weird Things, by Michael Shermer The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer Why Darwin Matters, by Michael Shermer The Science of Good and Evil, by Michael Shermer Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, by Michael Shermer "A Minimum Viable Metaphysics," by Jim Rutt JRS EP 287 - Jonathan Rauch on the Epistemic Crisis Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show. For 30 years he taught college and university courses in critical thinking, and for 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, Heavens on Earth, Giving the Devil His Due, and Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His new book is Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters. Follow him on X @michaelshermer.

In the inaugural episode of a new series, Jim talks with David Krakauer about his intellectual formation and worldview. They discuss what woke up as David this morning, his commitments to chance and pattern seeking, his epiphany about the idea of the idea at age 12 or 13, his perverse attraction to the arcane and difficult, evolution as integral to intelligence, the risk-averse character of scholars and the sociology of science, the Santa Fe Institute's attempt to maintain revolutionary science, the Ouroboros concept challenging foundationalism in epistemology, the standard model of physics as foundational versus the view that you can establish foundations anywhere, string theory as a slowly dying pseudoscience, whether beauty is a useful guide in science, emergence and broken symmetries, Phil Anderson's "More is Different" paper, the Wigner reversal and the shift from law to initial conditions, rejecting both weak and strong emergence, effective theories and causally justified concepts, downward causality, micrograining versus coarse graining, the distinction between abiotic and biotic systems, games and puzzles as model systems for complexity, combinatorial solution spaces, heuristics as dimensional reducers and potentially the golden road to AGI, Isaiah Berlin's influence on David's worldview, negative versus positive liberties, value pluralism and historicity, the Fermi paradox and the possibility of alien life, the rational versus the irrational in human life, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP 192 - David Krakauer on Science, Complexity and AI JRS EP10 - David Krakauer: Complexity Science The Complex World: An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science, by David Krakauer Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019, by David Krakauer History, Big History, & Metahistory, by David Krakauer "A Minimum Viable Metaphysics," by Jim Rutt "More Is Different," by P.W. Anderson The Emergence of Everything, by Harold Morowitz David Krakauer’s research explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social, and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties. President of the Santa Fe Institute since 2015, he served previously as the founding director of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the co-director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and professor of mathematical genetics, all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Jim talks with Nate Soares about the ideas in his and Eliezer Yudkowsky's book If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. They discuss the book's claim that mitigating existential AI risk should be a top global priority, the idea that LLMs are grown, the opacity of deep learning networks, the Golden Gate activation vector, whether our understanding of deep learning networks might improve enough to prevent catastrophe, goodness as a narrow target, the alignment problem, the problem of pointing minds, whether LLMs are just stochastic parrots, why predicting a corpus often requires more mental machinery than creating a corpus, depth & generalization of skills, wanting as an effective strategy, goal orientation, limitations of training goal pursuit, transient limitations of current AI, protein folding and AlphaFold, the riskiness of automating alignment research, the correlation between capability and more coherent drives, why the authors anchored their argument on transformers & LLMs, the inversion of Moravec's paradox, the geopolitical multipolar trap, making world leaders aware of the issues, a treaty to ban the race to superintelligence, the specific terms of the proposed treaty, a comparison with banning uranium enrichment, why Jim tentatively thinks this proposal is a mistake, a priesthood of the power supply, whether attention is a zero-sum game, and much more. Episode Transcript If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares "Psyop or Insanity or ...? Peter Thiel, the Antichrist, and Our Collapsing Epistemic Commons," by Jim Rutt "On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback," by Marcus Williams et al. Attention Sinks and Compression Valleys in LLMs are Two Sides of the Same Coin," by Enrique Queipo-de-Llano et al. JRS EP 217 - Ben Goertzel on a New Framework for AGI "A Tentative Draft of a Treaty, With Annotations" Nate Soares is the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He has been working in the field for over a decade, after previous experience at Microsoft and Google. Soares is the author of a large body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, including foundational work on value learning, decision theory, and power-seeking incentives in smarter-than-human AIs.

Jim talks with Joe Edelman about the ideas in the Meaning Alignment Institute's recent paper "Full Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value." They discuss pluralism as a core principle in designing social systems, the informational basis for alignment, how preferential models fail to capture what people truly care about, the limitations of markets and voting as preference-based systems, critiques of text-based approaches in LLMs, thick models of value, values as attentional policies, AI assistants as potential vectors for manipulation, the need for reputation systems and factual grounding, the "super negotiator" project for better contract negotiation, multipolar traps, moral graph elicitation, starting with membranes, Moloch-free zones, unintended consequences and lessons from early Internet optimism, concentration of power as a key danger, co-optation risks, and much more. Episode Transcript "A Minimum Viable Metaphysics," by Jim Rutt (Substack) Jim's Substack JRS Currents 080: Joe Edelman and Ellie Hain on Rebuilding Meaning Meaning Alignment Institute If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares "Full Stack Alignment: Co-aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value," by Joe Edelman et al. "What Are Human Values and How Do We Align AI to Them?" by Oliver Klingefjord, Ryan Lowe, and Joe Edelman Joe Edelman has spent much of his life trying to understand how ML systems and markets could change, retaining their many benefits but avoiding their characteristic problems: of atomization, and of servicing shallow desires over deeper needs. Along the way this led him to formulate theories of human meaning and values (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10636) and study models of societal transformation (https://www.full-stack-alignment.ai/paper) as well as inventing the meaning-based metrics used at CouchSurfing, Facebook, and Apple, co-founding the Center for Humane Technology and the Meaning Alignment Institute, and inventing new democratic systems (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10636). He’s currently one of the PIs leading the Full-Stack Alignment program at the Meaning Alignment Institute, with a network of more than 50 researchers at universities and corporate labs working on these issues.

Jim talks with Pablos Holman about the ideas in his new book Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters. They discuss deep tech versus shallow tech, computational modeling and simulation for real-world problems, the hacker mindset, the role of inventors, nuclear power and renewable energy solutions, population growth, development challenges, space-based solar power, the likelihood of fusion power, mistakes in German energy policy, energy storage limitations, the transformation of the apparel industry through automation, and much more. Episode Transcript Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters, by Pablos Holman Deep Future (company) Intellectual Ventures Lab Pablos is a hacker, inventor, and bestselling author of Deep Future: Creating Technology that Matters, the indispensable guide to deep tech. Now Managing Partner at Deep Future, investing in technologies to solve the world’s biggest problems. Previously, Pablos worked on spaceships at Blue Origin and helped build The Intellectual Ventures Lab to invent a wide variety of breakthroughs including a brain surgery tool, a machine to suppress hurricanes, 3D food printers, and a laser that can shoot down mosquitos—part of an impact invention effort to eradicate malaria with Bill Gates. Pablos hosts the Deep Future Podcast and is a top public speaker—his talks have over 30 million views.

Jim talks with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber about the findings in their recent book Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance. They discuss the definition of microdosing, "subthreshold" vs "subperceptual," typical doses, current usage statistics & demographics, its legal status & classification history, LSD, psilocybin, why cannabis isn't suitable for microdosing, mechanisms of action, dosing protocols, anti-inflammatory effects, health applications, enhancement applications, contraindications & side effects, research methodologies & limitations, commercial potential, global adoption patterns, and much more. Episode Transcript Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance, by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, by James Fadiman Our Symphony of Selves, by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber JRS EP126 - Jordan Gruber & James Fadiman on Our Symphony of Selves Autism on Acid, by Aaron Paul Orsini Institute of Noetic Sciences James Fadiman, Ph.D., is a prominent figure in the field of psychedelic research, particularly known for his work on microdosing psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin. Often called the “father of microdosing,” Fadiman has a long history in the study of psychedelics dating back to the 1960s, when he worked on studies involving LSD and creativity while at Stanford University. After psychedelics were banned in the U.S., Fadiman shifted his focus but returned to psychedelic research decades later. His book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys, has become a key resource for safe psychedelic exploration. In recent years, he has pioneered research on microdosing, examining its potential benefits for mental health, cognitive enhancement, and overall well-being. Jordan Gruber, JD, MA, founded the early online Enlightenment.Com community. After practicing law at Cooley Godward and focusing on IP law at NASA’s Moffett Field, as well as working at GNOSIS Magazine, Jordan became “the Practical Wordsmith,” a writer, ghostwriter, editor, and writing coach speciliazing in transformational modalities and practices. Jordan has helped create cutting-edge works on everything from forensic audio and financial services to health, wellness, psychology, and spirituality. Recent editing credits include Cindy Lou Golin’s The Shadow Playbook (2023), Scott Rogers’s The Mindful Law Student (2022), and Lawrence Ford’s The Secrets of the Seasons (2020).

Jim talks with Lawrence Cahoone about his book The Orders of Nature and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy. They discuss fallibilist & local metaphysics, objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Jim's materialism which grants emergence first-class existence, Wimsatt's notion of emergence & nonaggregativity, downward causation & pruning rules, natural complexes, Aristotle's four causes & the use of purpose in biology, the distinction between teleonomy & teleology, the five orders of nature (physical, material, biological, psychological & cultural), characteristic time scales in emergence theory, why particular disciplines coevolved in intellectual traditions, Erik Hoel's theory about emergence having the highest causal power, natural religion & the fine-tuned constants of the universe, the choice between multiverse explanations & a single ground of nature, Darwin's views on divine purpose, comparisons to deists like Spinoza & Einstein, and much more. Episode Transcript The Orders of Nature, by Lawrence Cahoone The Emergence of Value: Human Norms in a Natural World, by Lawrence Cahoone The Feynman Lectures on Physics, by Richard Feynman Lawrence Cahoone graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stony Brook University in 1985. Cahoone's areas of specialization are American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Metaphysics and Natural Science and Modernism and Postmodernism. Since 2000, Cahoone has taught at Holy Cross and is now currently an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Holy Cross. He has also written and published seven books in his career, including The Emergence of Value, The Orders of Nature, and Cultural Revolutions.