Jim talks with Joy Hirsch about the findings in her paper "Separable Processes for Live 'In-Person' and Live 'Zoom-like' Faces," which explores how humans respond at the neural level to Zoom calls versus in-person interactions. They discuss the advantages of near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) & how it works, the speed of imaging, brain imaging for social interactions, what fNIRS can do that fMRI can't, previous work on face processing, the design of the experiment, controlling for distance, angl...
Nov 30, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 212
Jim talks with recurring guest Ben Goertzel about the ideas in his paper "Generative AI vs. AGI: The Cognitive Strengths and Weaknesses of Modern LLMs." They discuss the exponential acceleration of AI development, why LLMs by themselves won't lead to AGI, OpenAI's integrative system, skyhooking, why LLMs may be useful for achieving AGI, solving LLM hallucinations, why Google hasn't replicated GPT-4, LLM-tuning lore, what differentiates AGI from other forms of AI, conceptualizing general intellig...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 211
Jim talks with Frank Lantz about the ideas in his new book, The Beauty of Games. They discuss Frank's analysis of Benjamin Soule's arcade game Serpentes, reflecting on the enjoyment of games, panicking & choking, levels of understanding, Jim and his wife's experience playing Othello, Hanabi, partnership games, games as an aesthetic form, art vs aesthetics, playing for its own sake, thinking & doing, fulfilling the desire to be a coherent agent in the world, the performance of desire, games as sy...
Nov 20, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 210
Jim talks with C. Owen Paepke in part three of a mini-series on the No Labels potential third-party presidential campaign. They discuss Owen's early chemistry career, being without a political party, the situation of voting against instead of for candidates, the distribution of conservatism between parties over time, the Ross Perot 1992 campaign, the nomination of Antonin Scalia, primaries as the root of all partisan evil, the 2022 elections, the percentage of voters who want neither Biden nor T...
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 209
Jim talks with Jack Visnjic, aka Lantern Jack, about Polybius's theory of anacyclosis and cyclical history. They discuss the origins of the name Lantern Jack, cyclical patterns in history, a one-minute history of the first millennium B.C., public gain vs private gain, Polybius's concept of anacyclosis, great man theory vs processes & institutions, examples of anacyclosis, whether Rome was ever a democracy, critiques of anacyclosis, corruption & collective reaction, imperialistic growth, the Glor...
Nov 02, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 208
Jim talks with Paul Watson about his recent book Hit Man for the Kindness Club: High Seas Escapades and Heroic Adventures of an Eco-Activist. They discuss an early friendship with a family of beavers, cruelty to animals, the Kindness Club, moral commitments, rescuing cattle from a slaughterhouse, less cow farts & more whale poop, the 3 laws of ecology, the issue of eating animals, the growth of the vegetarian/vegan movement, an occupation at Stanley Park, co-founding Greenpeace, the strategy of ...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 207
Jim talks with Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels, in the second of a 3-part series exploring different aspects of the No Labels possible third-party presidential campaign. They discuss the origins & history of the campaign, the idea of an independent unity presidential ticket, increasing polarization, realistic energy policy, avoiding a second Trump term, an open process for nomination to the ticket, proper environmental conditions for running, the problem with fixing democracy by ...
Oct 26, 2023•44 min•Season 1Ep. 206
Jim talks with Matthew Pirkowski about the ideas in a recent tweet thread on time preference and its relationship with cooperation. They discuss the definition of time preference, defining parasitism, asymmetrical relationships, mutualism, commensalism, the increase in short-term thinking, a decrease in qualitative change, realization & potential, an increase in uncertainty, the interruption of attentional loops, a gossip protocol, the complexity catastrophe, the maximum number of daily interrup...
Oct 24, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 205
Jim talks with Matt Bennett about his arguments against the third-party political campaign No Labels. They discuss Matt's steelman of the campaign, being politically homeless, nuclear energy & the American left's unrealistic energy policies, the problem with No Labels' theory about moving candidates in their direction, the credibility of winning the election, two theories of preventing another Trump presidency, the 1992 Ross Perot campaign, candidates for the No Labels ticket, growing disgust wi...
Oct 19, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 204
Jim talks with Robert Sapolsky about the ideas in his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. They discuss what motivates his writing about the topic, turtles all the way down, closing off the escape valves, the general critique of determinism, 4 positions on free will, naturalism vs determinism, intent, free will vs agency, Phineas Gage's famous brain injury, disruption of cognitive abilities, the limitations of metacognition, Benjamin Libet's volition experiments, why consciousne...
Oct 17, 2023•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 203
Jim talks with Neil Howe about the ideas in his new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End. They discuss 3 ways humans have understood time, the break with cyclical time, how linear progress gives rise to social cycles, generational change, how phase of life alters the impact of events, coining the term Millennial, generational cycles, the meaning and nature of saecula, the Great Awakenings, Turnings & commonalities between t...
Oct 12, 2023•1 hr 39 min•Season 1Ep. 202
Jim talks with Tobias Dengel about the ideas in his book The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology. They discuss the idea that voice tech will be the biggest shift since mobile, the problem of public babble, positives & negatives of current voice tech, changing norms around speaking to devices, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), using LLMs through a voice interface, improving communication cycles for incapacitated people, smart speakers vs smart mics, problems with the voice-...
Oct 10, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 201
Jim talks with Brian Chau about recent advancements in AI and viewing AI's relationship to society and politics through a pluralistic lens. They discuss fixed frames on AI, the horseless carriage fallacy, AI as a million dumb people, how LLMs invert the film archetype, Jim's ScriptHelper project, intuitive recombination, creating a fake political party, why AI threatens the legacy press, the significance of house style, incentivizing pluralism, why AI could power the periphery, the information a...
Sep 28, 2023•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 200
Jim talks with Yascha Mounk about the ideas in his new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power. They discuss tribalism among progressives, universalism, the story of Kila Posey, how over-emphasizing ethnic identity fosters zero-sum racial conflicts, how identitarianism led to excess Covid deaths, Foucault's rejection of grand narratives, Edward Said's post-colonialism, Gayatri Spivak's strategic essentialism, being blind to race vs being blind to racism, critical race theory, Derrick ...
Sep 26, 2023•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 199
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 case of Diapers.com, the falling fortunes of tech workers, definin...
Sep 19, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 198
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 the idea of reason as an instrument of violence, why Hume doesn't b...
Sep 07, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 197
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 points of the Coalition's press release, certification of lineage, t...
Aug 24, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 196
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, revivals, how interconnectivity leads to fragility, the Bronze Ag...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 33 min•Season 1Ep. 195
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 governmental choke points, how to use Everest, the application stack, ...
Aug 17, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 194
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 processed food, unintentional communities, maximizing communal fre...
Jul 20, 2023•57 min•Season 1Ep. 193
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-Humean models, crossing the statistical uncanny valley, ultra-hi...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 192
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 comparison of consciousness with digestion, kinds of constraints, th...
Jul 13, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 191
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 overproduction of elites, relative vs absolute wage, the wealth pump, re...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 190
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, recursive deconstruction, distinguishing random & complex, Kolmogorov com...
Jul 05, 2023•1 hr 23 min
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 universities responded in the first wave, Covid as a warning sho...
Jun 27, 2023•1 hr 43 min
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 as an alternative to consumption, Jim's Script Helper program & o...
Jun 23, 2023•1 hr 18 min
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 & exploit, accounting for human nature, transmission of cultural ...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 189
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 randomness in favor of the player's instincts, learning from poker, whet...
Jun 20, 2023•1 hr 30 min
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 laws will present obstacles to model-building, fair use, licensing...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 188
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 links, restoration of the mesoscale, from the geographic polity to t...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 25 min
