Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.

Jim talks with Robin Hanson about the ideas in his essay "Beware Cultural Drift: Thoughts on modernity's monoculture mistake." They discuss drift in fundamental cultural values, the current unprecedented rate of change, boutique multiculturalism, weak selection pressures, drift without selection, understanding small cultures, agency risk, comparing corporate cultures with macro-cultures, the decrease in macro-cultures, the convergence of global elite culture, worldwide norms vs cultural sphere norms, fertility habits & falling fertility, fertility decline as a symptom, 2 kinds of stories cultural elites tell, context-dependent vs learning-based drivers, the connection between deeper goals & subgoals, turning the ship vs getting on lifeboats, joining the opposition, differential reproduction & the fall of Rome, conservatism, totalitarianism, deep multiculturalism, coherent pluralism, getting to the stars, artificial minds, why Robin is pro-cult, pressure to collapse into red-blue tribalism, rates of innovation, and much more.

 	Episode Transcript
 	"Beware Cultural Drift," by Robin Hanson
 	JRS EP2 - Robin Hanson – Decision Making and “The Age of Em”
 	JRS Extra: On COVID-19 Strategies with Robin Hanson
 	JRS Currents 011: Robin Hanson on RightTalkism
 	JRS EP 213 - Robin Hanson on Declining Fertility Rates
 	Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by Robert Nozick

Robin Hanson is an Associate Professor of Economics, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech. He joined George Mason’s economics faculty in 1999 after completing a two-year post-doc at U.C Berkely. His major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory.

The Jim Rutt Show

EP 235 Robin Hanson on Beware Cultural Drift

Jim talks with Richard Bartlett about the ideas in his essay "What we learned from a 3-month co-living experiment." They discuss Jim's visit to a co-living house, community & its recent decline, starting small & iterating, the co-living experiment in Andalusia, pre-registration, co-living plus events, finding the right place, the importance of landscape, the vibe, finances, membrane design, organizing transit, events, the emergent TPOT network, paying community organizers what they're worth, weaving weak links & strong links, social transitivity, curation, selection criteria, containment vs ejection, a pluralistic attitude toward respect, assuming good faith, focusing on what you want to see more of, systems for participation & coordination, the danger of oversystematizing, resentment minimization, just-in-time system design, increasing capacity for hosting, the arrival process, mastering hospitality, biasing toward small-group participation, unscheduled time, what's next, GameB finance, and much more.

 	Episode Transcript
 	Rich Debels (website)
 	JRS EP51 - Richard Bartlett on Self-Organizing Collaboration
 	"What we learned from a 3-month co-living experiment," by Richard Bartlett 

 	
@visakanv on Twitter

Richard Bartlett helps people grow high-trust communities and decentralised organizations. He is a co-founder of the tech co-op Loomio, the community building network Microsolidarity, and the non-hierarchical management consultancy The Hum, as well as director of the social impact collective Enspiral.

EP 234 Richard Bartlett on an Experiment in Co-Living

Jim talks with Robert Conan Ryan about seven ethical perspectives and why everyone should know them. They discuss why understanding ethical stances is valuable, a horseshoe spectrum, pragmatism, virtue ethics, consequentialism, deontology, elitist power, deification, social justice, stacking up ethical stances, Aristotle's golden mean, sociopaths in the military, running the polis, coherent pluralism, the multi-perspectival lens, Cornel West's positional complexity, paideia, DEI (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion), liberal universal humanism, pragmatism vs neo-pragmatism, the long run vs the short run, the transaction cost theory of ethics, inclusive entrepreneurship, the Main Street problem, and much more.

 	Episode Transcript
 	JRS EP54 - Robert Conan Ryan on Boom & Bust Cycles
 	"On making meanings: Curators, social assembly, and mashups," by Barry M. Mitnick & Robert C. Ryan
 	The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper
 	Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, by Saul Alinsky
 	Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, by John McWhorter


Robert Conan Ryan is a professor of business administration and emerging public intellectual. His current scholarly projects include work with a diverse roster of world-leading strategists, economists, and futurists such as Jordan Hall, Michel Bauwens, Ravi Madhavan, Barry Mitnick, Matthew McCaffrey, and Michael Rectenwald. His current papers tackle competitive industry dynamics; grey market economics; the history of technology; Neo-Schumpeterian economics; artificial vs. natural cognition; paradigmatic strategic design; and, how sensemaking systems evolve and change.

EP 233 Robert Conan Ryan on Seven Ethical Perspectives

Jim talks with Matthew David Segall about the ideas in his and Bruce Damer's new essay, "The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis." They discuss the "philosophy as footnotes to Plato" idea, the hot springs origin of life hypothesis, closing the gap between chemistry & life, Whitehead's idea of concrescence, metaphysics in philosophy, minimum viable metaphysics, why physical law doesn't imply biological organisms, process-relational philosophy, deep-seated cosmic habits, the hero's answer, the type 1a supernova, rigorous speculation, the incalculability of the adjacent possible, the nature of matter, autocatalysis, the tension between the actual & possible, the rate of evolution, getting past the error catastrophe, Prigogine's ideas about dissipative systems, teleology & the second law of thermodynamics, why DNA is not a blueprint, the Fermi paradox, bringing the universe to life, social implications of the origin of life, panpsychism & panexperientialism, integrated information theory, why matter & energy must have an endogenous telos, prehension, life wanting to live better, necessity & openness, questioning falsifiability, and much more.


 	Episode Transcript
 	"The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis," by Matthew David Segall & Bruce Damer
 	Footnotes2Plato (Substack)
 	JRS EP 167 - Bruce Damer on the Origins of Life
 	JRS EP 171 - Bruce Damer Part 2: The Origins of Life – Implications
 	Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland
 	JRS EP 5 - Lee Smolin – Quantum Foundations and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution
 	JRS EP 227 - Stuart Kauffman on the Emergence of Life
 	JRS EP 157 - Terrence Deacon on Mind’s Emergence From Matter
 	JRS EP 40 - Eric Smith on the Physics of Living Systems
 	JRS EP 105 - Christof Koch on Consciousness
 	JRS EP 178 - Anil Seth on A New Science of Consciousness
 	JRS EP 17 - Bonnitta Roy on Process Thinking and Complexity
 	Process Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)


Matthew David Segall, Phd, is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, teacher, and philosopher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences, as well as to the study of consciousness. He is Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and the Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute.

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