Jim Rutt

Jim Rutt Show network culture, human systems, #GameB Bio:

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

Jim talked with @doctorow — sci-fi and nonfiction author, journalist, activist, EFF special adviser, and author of *Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It* — about how structural forces degraded the internet, and what citizens (not consumers) can actually do about it.

They discussed:

- The origin of “enshittification”—Cory’s January 2023 blog post, its viral spread, and its naming as Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society
- Two-sided markets & the persistence of intermediaries
- Crad Kilodney as a self-publishing illustration, and why platform middlemen survive even when they shouldn’t
- Monopsony vs. monopoly
- The real statistics of Amazon’s dominance of book sales
- The three-stage enshittification life cycle, using Facebook as the case study
- The brittle equilibrium of late-stage enshittification—the thin line between “I hate this but can’t leave” and mass exodus
- The metaverse as Facebook’s terminal pivot—Zuckerberg’s “legless, sexless, low-polygon” avatar world stolen from a 25-year-old cyberpunk novel, and why it still served him by forestalling investor sell-offs
- Zuckerberg as Rich Uncle Pennybags, not Willy Wonka
- Amazon’s early history & Bezos’s “your margin is my opportunity” mantra
- Amazon’s junk fees (now 50–60% and rising) and the $80 billion/year advertising payola business
- The consumer welfare doctrine—Robert Bork’s antitrust theory that monopoly is efficient, and why allowing monopsonies inevitably produces monopolies
- Jim’s personal experience with the Thomson-West legal publishing merger
- Tech workers as a structural check on enshittification
- The convergence enabling enshittification: merger to monopoly → regulatory capture → loss of worker leverage → DMCA blocking entrants → abuse
- The moral decay of business culture—from “we won’t do profitable things we think are wrong,” to “do whatever’s arguably legal,” to “do whatever’s illegal if the fine is less than the benefit”
- Google’s $20 billion/year payment to Apple to stay off the search market
- Why predatory pricing cases went unenforced
- What citizens (not consumers) can do
- The death of federal antitrust enforcement and international ripple effects
- State-level antitrust action as a remaining avenue
- The right to repair as an easy entry point
- Trump’s ���Liberation Day” tariffs as a paradoxical opportunity
- Tech as geopolitical weapon—Microsoft accounts bricked for a Brazilian judge who sentenced Bolsonaro; the ICC chief prosecutor’s accounts shut down after the Netanyahu arrest warrant
- The vision for open, auditable, sovereign digital public goods to replace the enshittified American Internet—run internationally, controlled locally

… and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

Jim talked with Tyson Yunkaporta—Indigenous Australian scholar and author of Sand Talk, one of Jim’s top ten favorite books—about his metaphysics and worldview, the ecology of sex and creation, and how to wear rationalist and traditional knowledge frameworks simultaneously.

They discussed:

- Jim’s editorial endorsement of Sand Talk—"one of the top 10 best books I have ever read"

- Tyson’s trilogy of books

- Humans as a custodial species—sacred carers embedded in nature

- Who Tyson is when he wakes from deep sleep

- Tyson’s experience under general anesthesia—ten thousand years of deep dark oblivion

- How Jim shifted Tyson toward rationality and evidence-based thinking

- Tyson’s reassessment of peer review and collective scientific inquiry as similar to Indigenous processes of collective knowledge-building

- Tyson’s late initiation into the Apalech clan

- The distinction between “knowledge systems” and “knowledge of systems”

- Color blindness as a biological advantage in traditional systems knowledge

- What’s missing in people who haven’t gone through full initiation

- Men’s “belly spirit” (nenwi) and “spirit womb” in the Apalech tradition

- Images and ghosts—the shadow spirit as ego, and how infinite self-replication on social media drains the spirit

- Tyson’s cousin Eric becoming a viral meme and TikTok phenomenon

- Forager social operating systems and mechanisms to prevent dominant individuals

- Aboriginal law’s three core rights

- Sex as the center of everything

- Tyson’s response to Plato’s Cave

- Dreamtime and songlines as mistranslations

- Dreamtime as not an altered state but a continuous orientation

- The irony of mutual influence—Tyson becoming a rationalist skeptic partly through Jim; Jim becoming more open to spirit partly through Tyson

- The 3D glasses metaphor for wearing Indigenous and rationalist-materialist lenses simultaneously

… and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @lisabettingerb1 — veteran HR leader at Vialto Partners, US Soccer, Lincoln Financial, and Thomson — about how the LLM era is reshaping hiring and job architecture, and how companies and workers can roll with the changes.

We discussed:

- Lisa's and my shared history in natural language processing labs thirty years ago—and the contrast with today, where “everybody can be an AI expert”

- The kind of people to hire in the age of LLMs: intellectual curiosity, learning agility, and willingness to work differently

- “Trust the machine, but always validate”—the principle of embracing AI while maintaining human oversight

- COVID as an accelerant of technology adoption

- Workforce adoption realities at Vialto—evangelists, pessimists, and the change management challenge

- Shark Tank-style internal AI contests as a model for engaging employees with new tools

- Why the “future of work” is dead

- Programmers and product managers merging roles; job architectures flattening into skills-based, fluid inventories

- AI’s historical weight—”as pivotal as electricity”—and the limits of anyone’s ability to predict machine learning’s trajectory

- My “what, when” framework and the twin failure modes of AI projects

- “Test and learn” as the right posture toward AI transformation, and whose responsibility “what, when” actually is—CEO, CTO, and sales as a coalition

- The productivity multiplier for programmers—7–10x gains—and my argument that demand for software could actually increase total programmer headcount

- Why sales jobs are probably not highly “AI-able” anytime soon, and what salespeople need to communicate to retain relevance

- Lisa’s personal use of Claude and Copilot 365

- The leveling effect of AI for non-STEM people

- My argument (since November 2022) that top liberal arts graduates are the most natural prompt engineers

- Lisa’s 1999 Georgetown thesis—"Are liberal arts majors the answer to the .com era worker shortage?"—and its uncanny parallel to the 2026 humanities debate

- The education paradox: how Lisa’s son was banned from using AI in class but required to be an AI expert for his summer internship

- The calculator analogy, and whether AI in education follows the same arc

- Resistance to the AI voice in writing

- My technique for capturing stylistic tendencies with AI

- The rising costs of frictional bureaucracy and the unreasonable effectiveness of small teams

- What Lisa saw on a recent safari about what AI can’t replace, and the choice between evolving and being overtaken

- Learning agility as the core HR question—how to handle employees who cannot or will not embrace AI

- The shifting meaning of “owning your work”

… and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

"Joint attention—the fact that we all collectively know that we all know something—is super important in terms of building and maintaining the intersubjective infrastructure of a community, a tribe, a society, a nation. And we allowed that to just get shotgunned."

- @pwang on the real problem of fragmented attention

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @pwang — AI officer, cofounder and CEO of Anaconda, board member of the Center for Humane Technology, and founder of the Austin STEM Center — about Robert Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality, how modernity encourages defection, and a secular conception of the sacred.

We discussed:

- Peter’s self-description as “the music in a violin that can kind of hear itself”

- The “Peter Wang-shaped hole in the universe” thought experiment

- Subject-object Cartesian dualism as a false alienation

- Minimum viable metaphysics & atheistic agnosticism

- Religion as an evolutionary emergent coherence mechanism for human collectives

- Figure and ground as a metaphysical lens—the anonymous soil that allows religion to sprout

- The Unix fortune “Man was invented by water to carry itself uphill” & Peter’s teleology origin story

- Process metaphysics & presentism—”we’re not going anywhere, we’re becoming someone”

- Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality & the four strata of static patterns of value

- The intellectual plane vs. the social plane & Ken Wilber’s pre-trans fallacy

- Defection within collaborative groups as the dynamic all human social systems try to constrain

- “Death from a Distance”—throwing, beta coalitions & the emergence of a middle class of power

- Modernity’s shrinking locus of care & the collapse of embedded social context

- The agglomeration of defectors & how fluid capital enables sociopathic hoarding

- Money-on-money return as today’s dominant pruning rule

- Joint attention as a scarce collective resource & social media’s perforation of shared intersubjective infrastructure

- Human agency & “micro-abdications” as the aggregate source of Moloch / Game A

- The augmented currency thought experiment—metering human thriving alongside financial returns

- Broken collective sense-making & the search for dynamic, adaptable values

- Peter’s secular conception of the sacred—the “eternal golden braid of humanity”

- “Ofness”—holding both distinctness and belonging to the world

… and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @pwang — AI officer, cofounder and CEO of Anaconda, board member of the Center for Humane Technology, and founder of the Austin STEM Center — about Robert Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality, how modernity encourages defection, and a secular conception of the sacred.

We discussed:

- Peter’s self-description as “the music in a violin that can kind of hear itself”

- The “Peter Wang-shaped hole in the universe” thought experiment

- Subject-object Cartesian dualism as a false alienation

- Minimum viable metaphysics & atheistic agnosticism

- Religion as an evolutionary emergent coherence mechanism for human collectives

- Figure and ground as a metaphysical lens—the anonymous soil that allows religion to sprout

- The Unix fortune “Man was invented by water to carry itself uphill” & Peter’s teleology origin story

- Process metaphysics & presentism—”we’re not going anywhere, we’re becoming someone���

- Pirsig’s metaphysics of quality & the four strata of static patterns of value

- The intellectual plane vs. the social plane & Ken Wilber’s pre-trans fallacy

- Defection within collaborative groups as the dynamic all human social systems try to constrain

- “Death from a Distance”—throwing, beta coalitions & the emergence of a middle class of power

- Modernity’s shrinking locus of care & the collapse of embedded social context

- The agglomeration of defectors & how fluid capital enables sociopathic hoarding

- Money-on-money return as today’s dominant pruning rule

- Joint attention as a scarce collective resource & social media’s perforation of shared intersubjective infrastructure

- Human agency & “micro-abdications” as the aggregate source of Moloch / Game A

- The augmented currency thought experiment—metering human thriving alongside financial returns

- Broken collective sense-making & the search for dynamic, adaptable values

- Peter’s secular conception of the sacred—the “eternal golden braid of humanity”

- “Ofness”—holding both distinctness and belonging to the world

… and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

@shiftynick @aquavoice I can't get it to work at all. what does right alt key mean?

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

@aquavoice just installed and doesn't seem to work at all. pressed the right hand alt key - nothing. alt and right arrow key (what does alt-right mean?) screwy. Even less intuitive than whiprflow. yikes

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

"The version of me that engages that question from the point of view of confidence says the likelihood is diminishingly small. But the version of me that observes that question from the point of view of certainty is absolutely certain that we're going to make it."

- @jgreenhall on making choices by evidentiary analysis versus a deeper certainty

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @jgreenhall about the scaffolding of his worldview.

We discussed the waking-up scenario as a window into consciousness and personal identity, Jordan’s phenomenology of waking and the “latent potential of all possible memory,” the soul as the binding of finite and infinite, my counter-framing of consciousness as a fusion of perception, interoception, and unconscious memory, the infinite as genuinely real, the Platonic triangle as a concrete example of transcendentals that have no particular location in the causal field, Forrest Landry’s distinction between being and existence, knowing with confidence vs. knowing with certainty, Jordan’s basic ontological commitment to realism, the incoherence of simulation theory, my “Minimum Viable Metaphysics,” the incoherence of unmediated access as the meaning of the word reality, Father Stephen DeYoung’s critique of Western substantive essentialism, Bonitta Roy’s idea that reality is shareable and participatory, Michael Levin’s pragmatic epistemology, how purpose collapses reality to a tractable slice, “begottenness” in Christian metaphysics and the generativity of relationships, Jordan’s onto-epistemology as the register before ontology and epistemology are distinguishable, Jordan’s recent adoption of “smorthodox” Christianity, the phenomenology of waking as evidence that space-time is secondary, prioritizing meaningfulness over causation as a metaphysical commitment, Updike as “still alive” in the realization of his work, the Greek preoccupation with legacy and honor after death, Eric Weinstein’s desire for Einsteinian legacy as a category error, love as the real currency of legacy, the Mark Twain reading as an example of a soul genuinely present in a room, my father as an ongoing example of realization twenty-six years after his death, noticing a parent’s turn of phrase in oneself, the sweetness of impermanence, the good vs. abusive father and different relationships to a parent’s memory, values and virtues as real, the distinction between courage and bravery, culture as the progressive discovery and embodiment of virtue space, the crab-in-the-bucket problem, fallenness as local optimization, and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @jgreenhall about the scaffolding of his worldview.

We discussed the waking-up scenario as a window into consciousness and personal identity, Jordan’s phenomenology of waking and the “latent potential of all possible memory,” the soul as the binding of finite and infinite, my counter-framing of consciousness as a fusion of perception, interoception, and unconscious memory, the infinite as genuinely real, the Platonic triangle as a concrete example of transcendentals that have no particular location in the causal field, Forrest Landry’s distinction between being and existence, knowing with confidence vs. knowing with certainty, Jordan’s basic ontological commitment to realism, the incoherence of simulation theory, my “Minimum Viable Metaphysics,” the incoherence of unmediated access as the meaning of the word reality, Father Stephen DeYoung’s critique of Western substantive essentialism, Bonitta Roy’s idea that reality is shareable and participatory, Michael Levin’s pragmatic epistemology, how purpose collapses reality to a tractable slice, “begottenness” in Christian metaphysics and the generativity of relationships, Jordan’s onto-epistemology as the register before ontology and epistemology are distinguishable, Jordan’s recent adoption of “smorthodox” Christianity, the phenomenology of waking as evidence that space-time is secondary, prioritizing meaningfulness over causation as a metaphysical commitment, Updike as “still alive” in the realization of his work, the Greek preoccupation with legacy and honor after death, Eric Weinstein’s desire for Einsteinian legacy as a category error, love as the real currency of legacy, the Mark Twain reading as an example of a soul genuinely present in a room, my father as an ongoing example of realization twenty-six years after his death, noticing a parent’s turn of phrase in oneself, the sweetness of impermanence, the good vs. abusive father and different relationships to a parent’s memory, values and virtues as real, the distinction between courage and bravery, culture as the progressive discovery and embodiment of virtue space, the crab-in-the-bucket problem, fallenness as local optimization, and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

@Plinz @bizindargi Ritual and belief are two seperate things. We can have ritual and practices without absurd metaphysics.

https://t.co/1cVOQjxNVq

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

https://t.co/jS7uj8AirC

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

As we look at existential risk through the lens of the Fermi Paradox the stakes become cosmic.

See link in first comment

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @bonnittaroy, interdisciplinary thinker and founder of The Pop-Up School and the Divinity School, about her worldview, the deep foundations of her work, and an upcoming conference in Cambridge.

We discussed the phenomenology of waking up and recomposing, life as a stream of participation, being nested in place through horses, pigeons, bees, and gardens, covariant motions as her process-philosophy term for embeddedness, the limits of computational rationalism, the bench scientist versus the metatheoretical interpreter, Michael Levin’s interpretive science and the standards it demands, McGilchrist’s left-brain dominance in late-stage Game A, early complexity theory’s assumption that enough compute could map all relations, the open future and retrofitted causal explanation, emergence and causality as co-resident trees, Bonnitta’s critique that emergence does insufficient explanatory work, continuous gradients beneath emergent thresholds, the traffic jam as a case study in laminar flow breakdown and downward causality, a 55-gallon drum of Jim Rutt chemicals, modularity as a post-hoc feature of development rather than its driver, where the impulse to get a beer actually comes from, the Buddhist thought experiment of cells covarying above and below thresholds, the evolutionary stack from amoeba to eukaryote to bone, white blood cells as ancient life forms living inside the body as habitat, the importance of precise definitions of consciousness, levels of simulation from New Caledonian crows to humans simulating a simulation into other people, the introspective nervous system’s first-person and always-running third-person modes, Anil Seth’s hallucination framing and Bonnitta’s belief that simulation is the better word, why calling biological visual adjustment a hallucination is irresponsible pedagogy, Kant and the grounded approximation of reality, cultural variation in color perception, complex potential states versus the adjacent possible, Elon Musk as an example of seeing past constraints to new potential states, Bonnitta’s critique of stage theory as pipeline-shaped rather than genuinely developmental, the Agile Manifesto generation acting their way into results without the formation stage theory assumes, David Bays’s mathematics book and culturally bound leaps in simulation capacity, egocentric versus allocentric modes in neurodynamics, the self-generative trap of inner development and parts work where parts have parts, the three-legged stool of self, other, and world, the egregore as a hugely powerful collective agent, the historical arc from Renaissance world-builders to postmodern distributed agency, the Divinity School’s question of how to lead free and willing participants, post-formal actor superpower types with powerful action logics but insufficient character, and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

Everyone's talking about Moloch. @Liv_Boeree argues we should be just as concerned about Norma.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @Liv_Boeree—science communicator, former professional poker player, and host of the Win-Win Podcast—about how she sees the world.

We discussed the nature of personal identity across sleep, the teleportation machine thought experiment, consciousness as a self-aware story-threading entity, the "attention as cursor of consciousness" framing, Jim's memory-competition theory of attention, Gerald Edelman and Daniel Dennett as proponents of competitive models, the Telepathy Tapes podcast and nonverbal autistic children, Donald Hoffman's view that consciousness is foundational, panpsychism and the "radio tuner" model, Liv's poker premonition story and a $1,700,000 tournament win, two flavors of consciousness and psychedelics as a way of dialing into different frequencies, poker as spanning pure luck to pure skill, the data revolution in poker and the rise of game-theory robots, poker as an egregore and the idea that "the game is playing me," probability at micro vs. macro scales, egregores defined as beings in meme space, Moloch as the personification of multipolar traps, Instagram face filters as a micro Moloch example, the Moloch mechanism of individually rational but collectively destructive action, Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch," the breakfast cereal Moloch as a case study, the three interlocked layers of the AI multipolar trap, Marc Andreessen's techno-accelerationism and its blind spots, introducing "Norma" as the second negative attractor state representing centralization and authoritarianism, Moloch and Norma feeding into each other, psychopaths as first movers in Molochian races, the obligate psychopath concept, Elinor Ostrom's work on managing the commons, zero-knowledge proofs as a win-win third path, Descartes' philosophical origin of Western indifference to animal suffering, expanding the moral circle, the conditions of factory-farmed pigs and the economics of gestation crates, the health and environmental consequences of factory farming, cultivated meat as the win-win solution, and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @Liv_Boeree—science communicator, former professional poker player, and host of the Win-Win Podcast—about how she sees the world.

We discussed the nature of personal identity across sleep, the teleportation machine thought experiment, consciousness as a self-aware story-threading entity, the "attention as cursor of consciousness" framing, Jim's memory-competition theory of attention, Gerald Edelman and Daniel Dennett as proponents of competitive models, the Telepathy Tapes podcast and nonverbal autistic children, Donald Hoffman's view that consciousness is foundational, panpsychism and the "radio tuner" model, Liv's poker premonition story and a $1,700,000 tournament win, two flavors of consciousness and psychedelics as a way of dialing into different frequencies, poker as spanning pure luck to pure skill, the data revolution in poker and the rise of game-theory robots, poker as an egregore and the idea that "the game is playing me," probability at micro vs. macro scales, egregores defined as beings in meme space, Moloch as the personification of multipolar traps, Instagram face filters as a micro Moloch example, the Moloch mechanism of individually rational but collectively destructive action, Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch," the breakfast cereal Moloch as a case study, the three interlocked layers of the AI multipolar trap, Marc Andreessen's techno-accelerationism and its blind spots, introducing "Norma" as the second negative attractor state representing centralization and authoritarianism, Moloch and Norma feeding into each other, psychopaths as first movers in Molochian races, the obligate psychopath concept, Elinor Ostrom's work on managing the commons, zero-knowledge proofs as a win-win third path, Descartes' philosophical origin of Western indifference to animal suffering, expanding the moral circle, the conditions of factory-farmed pigs and the economics of gestation crates, the health and environmental consequences of factory farming, cultivated meat as the win-win solution, and much more.

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

Moloch Comes to Virginia

Today Virginians vote on a constitutional amendment I would normally oppose on its merits. The mechanics are ugly: a mid-decade reapportionment of the state's congressional districts, drawn for transparent partisan advantage, pushed through by the party that happened to control both chambers of the General Assembly and the governorship when the opportunity appeared. Under ordinary conditions the answer is an easy no. These are not ordinary conditions.
Here is the board. Virginia currently sends a 6-5 Democratic congressional delegation to Washington, which tracks the state's political geography well enough: strong blue clusters in the north, strong red territory to the south and west, a slight statewide tilt toward blue. The bipartisan redistricting commission that voters approved in 2020 produced a map that, for all its imperfections, comes close to honest. The amendment on today's ballot replaces that map with one projected to yield ten Democrats and a single Republican.
Ten to one. In a state whose statewide partisan divide sits near 53-47. That is not a correction; that is a mugging dressed as a correction.
The game-theoretic context makes the vote difficult. The opening move came from Texas in the summer of 2025, when Republicans there pushed through a mid-decade redraw that would net the GOP roughly five seats. California answered with Proposition 50 in November, a constitutional amendment that passed with 64 percent of the vote and set up a roughly five-seat flip the other way. Missouri moved. Other states moved. Virginia is moving now.
This is Moloch in perfect form. A textbook multipolar trap, so clean I could teach from it.
Here is the structure. Every participant is making the locally correct move. A player who dislikes the norm-violation but refuses to match it gets strictly worse outcomes than a player who matches the norm making move. Unilateral restraint in a defection game does not produce a better world; it produces the same defected world with one fewer voice at the table. The prisoner who refuses to defect after the other prisoner already has is not nobler, just convicted. Each state legislature can correctly reason: "I would prefer a world where no one gerrymandered between censuses; given that someone already did, my choice is not between gerrymandering and clean maps but between gerrymandering and letting the other side gerrymander alone."
That reasoning is right. It is also how the worst equilibrium arrives. Every locally rational move adds up to a House of Representatives drawn by partisan operatives in state capitals rather than by anything resembling the population.
Virginia's proposed 10-1 map illustrates the second ugly property of these dynamics: the response need not be proportional, and typically isn't. California's gerrymander at least had the rough shape of a counterweight to Texas. Virginia's map has no such character. Once the norm against mid-decade partisan redistricting cracks, nothing constrains the scale of each response except the size of the ruling majority and the nerve of its members. This is the ratchet property of multipolar traps: each round resets the baseline, the baseline only moves in one direction, and the moves get bigger as participants learn what the game now permits.
How do multipolar traps actually get resolved? Exactly one way, historically. By agreement among the players. The form of the agreement varies: an informal norm maintained by reputational cost, a treaty, a domestic statute, a constitutional provision. The mechanism is always the same. The players bind themselves together to a rule that none of them can afford to follow alone. Nuclear non-proliferation, the Montreal Protocol, the medieval Peace and Truce of God, fisheries quotas that actually hold: the shape is recognizable across scales and centuries.
For congressional redistricting, the shape of a workable agreement is not mysterious. Federal legislation establishing that congressional maps may be redrawn only after a decennial census, absent court order, would dissolve the trap in a single stroke. So would a constitutional amendment to the same effect. Either requires cross-partisan cooperation of a kind not currently on offer. The trap will therefore continue, and the equilibrium will worsen, until the cost of the game exceeds the cost of coordinating. That crossover point is not close.
So today's vote is not a referendum on gerrymandering. The referendum on gerrymandering was lost in Austin last summer, and every subsequent state has been voting inside the wreckage. What remains on the ballot is whether to accept further decline in return for maintaining one's strategic position, or to absorb the cost of unilateral restraint and watch the other side collect the winnings. That is the choice a multipolar trap presents by design. It is the choice it will keep presenting until somebody changes the rules.
You could not ask for a cleaner demonstration. It is also not a demonstration I wanted to live inside.
Today I voted yes on the amendment, even though it is part of a bad pattern. That is the power of a multipolar trap: game theory forces us to do the wrong thing. Outlawing the move is the only way to release all of us from the trap.

Scott Alexander’s original Moloch essay https://t.co/Cvm4bEpz6M

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

"There are all sorts of extraordinarily annoying versions of this.

'Oh, you know, I'm not very happy at the moment or very inspired, my dopamine levels must be low.'

'I'm in love with my child because oxytocin levels are high.'

This absurd correlating of a state with a molecule, but not realizing that the word that's doing all the work is something like 'love' or 'happy.'"

- @blamlab on the concept of "filler verbs"

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @blamlab—professor of neurology and neuroscience, director of the Center for Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at @JohnsHopkins, and external faculty at @sfiscience—about his 2017 paper "Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias."

We discussed defining behavior as ecologically valid goal-directed action within an animal's umwelt, behavioral decomposition being epistemically prior to neural investigation, bipedal running and Sherrington's spinalized cat experiments as illustrations of that decomposition, what a satisfying neural explanation should actually look like, emergence and neuroscientists' resistance to it, the concept of explanatory autonomy and the "wings don't fly, birds do" framing, downward causality and the traffic jam analogy, Sherrington's own epistemic humility about understanding thought, whether consciousness will eventually be explained the way life was or remain permanently fuzzy, the three traditions of studying the nervous system and their persistent tensions, the problem of double-dipping with coarse-grained behavioral language in neural data, "filler verbs" like "involves" and "underlies" that add surplus meaning to a correlation without doing extra explanatory work, everyday pseudo-explanations like dopamine for unhappiness and oxytocin for love, the identity fallacy, LLMs as scientific sparring partners and critical reviewers, Krakauer's vertigo at the current moment and the possibility of retiring if AI generates better intuitions, interpretable AI as a new subject for neuroscience and psychology, my own artificial consciousness project building a rudimentary white-tailed deer, distinguishing consciousness from cognition and sentience, separating the machinery of consciousness from its contents, Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and echolocation as conscious content, multiple realizability and its being pervasive and fatal to naive reductionism, the mereological fallacy and mirror neurons as ground zero for multiple fallacies, Marr's three levels and the direction of the scientific project from behavioral goal to algorithm to neural implementation, the bradykinesia paper finding that Parkinson's patients move slowly because they want to move more slowly, the C. elegans connectome and the limits of that knowledge, the Jonas and Kording microprocessor paper, and much more.

https://t.co/A8QQ6cjzUa

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @blamlab—professor of neurology and neuroscience, director of the Center for Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at @JohnsHopkins, and external faculty at @sfiscience—about his 2017 paper "Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias."

We discussed defining behavior as ecologically valid goal-directed action within an animal's umwelt, behavioral decomposition being epistemically prior to neural investigation, bipedal running and Sherrington's spinalized cat experiments as illustrations of that decomposition, what a satisfying neural explanation should actually look like, emergence and neuroscientists' resistance to it, the concept of explanatory autonomy and the "wings don't fly, birds do" framing, downward causality and the traffic jam analogy, Sherrington's own epistemic humility about understanding thought, whether consciousness will eventually be explained the way life was or remain permanently fuzzy, the three traditions of studying the nervous system and their persistent tensions, the problem of double-dipping with coarse-grained behavioral language in neural data, "filler verbs" like "involves" and "underlies" that add surplus meaning to a correlation without doing extra explanatory work, everyday pseudo-explanations like dopamine for unhappiness and oxytocin for love, the identity fallacy, LLMs as scientific sparring partners and critical reviewers, Krakauer's vertigo at the current moment and the possibility of retiring if AI generates better intuitions, interpretable AI as a new subject for neuroscience and psychology, my own artificial consciousness project building a rudimentary white-tailed deer, distinguishing consciousness from cognition and sentience, separating the machinery of consciousness from its contents, Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and echolocation as conscious content, multiple realizability and its being pervasive and fatal to naive reductionism, the mereological fallacy and mirror neurons as ground zero for multiple fallacies, Marr's three levels and the direction of the scientific project from behavioral goal to algorithm to neural implementation, the bradykinesia paper finding that Parkinson's patients move slowly because they want to move more slowly, the C. elegans connectome and the limits of that knowledge, the Jonas and Kording microprocessor paper, and much more.

https://t.co/A8QQ6cjzUa

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

"Dionysian Futurism as I argue is an open invitation... that said, I want it to be positive. Not utopian, but positive. And I think there's a distinction between Dionysian energy that is live-giving... and numbness, degeneracy, and addiction."

- @jeffgiesea

[Jim Rutt @jim_rutt]

I talked with @jeffgiesea, entrepreneur, writer, and founder of @boydinst, about his essay "Dionysian Futurism" and the broader question of what's missing from our visions of the future.

We discussed Nietzsche's Apollo/Dionysus framework from The Birth of Tragedy, the critique that techno-optimist futures are lifeless and sterile, my extension of that critique to Game B and adjacent social change spaces, the distinction between positive Dionysian energy and mere degeneracy, my concept of decadence as wire-heading on dopamine traps and gambling apps, generational decline in conviviality, Gen Z statistics on less sex and fewer dates, the structural economic pressures of student debt and housing unaffordability, the shift in college freshman values away from meaningful philosophy of life toward financial success, the dinner party versus restaurant ratio and what's been lost, the vanished culture of Georgetown dinner salons and political hostesses like Pamela Harriman, the trade-off between women entering the workforce and the loss of socially maintained conviviality infrastructure, the call to bring back the host or hostess curating eight to twelve people around a topic, Jeff's "The Humanities Revolution Has Already Begun" essay and the Kairos Project's decentralized open-source great-books discussion groups, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and its relevance to AI and what it means to be human, the tent-revival quality of the new bottom-up humanities movement, Homer and the bards as evidence that great books were never meant only for scholars, Substack as Renaissance Florence, self-gatekeeping around the humanities and the call to read great books at any phase of life, my return to the Iliad and Odyssey and current reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, audiobooks and the opportunity to produce better audio versions of copyright-free great works, Foucault as a poisoner of two generations of scholars, the woke turn in university humanities departments and Jacob Savage's essay "The Lost Generation," three drivers of the humanities revolution in pushback against woke academia, digital technology, and AI, AI as a tool for reading difficult books versus the risk of delegating critical thinking, Pirsig's concept of quality as a North Star for deciding when to use AI, taste as the Silicon Valley word for quality, Jeff's "goddamn Boomers" trilogy on the Boomer reckoning and the long Boomer farewell, the Boomer paradox of holding society together while holding it back, the gerontocracy problem of spending six dollars on old people for every one dollar on young people, entitlement spending flowing to the wealthiest demographic, Social Security couples at the top receiving over a hundred thousand dollars a year, California's real estate tax caps and their effect on schools, the political power of older voters and the absence of an AARP for young people, Gen X's failure to produce a presidential contender, Don Draper in Mad Men as a hinge figure between Greatest Generation and Boomer values, Boomer narcissism versus Gen X grandiosity, my reframe of the core Boomer failing as hyper-individualism rather than narcissism, and much more.