[FRIAM] Alien Crash Site, Complexity, Future Fossils and Jim Rutt Podcasts

[Steve Smith]

Man...   I finally read through all of the 4 articles linked from the 
digest issue you (glen) sent.

I can't begin to provide the kind of incisive analysis you usually do, 
but there are a number of threads of subtly disturbing things woven 
through those articles...   a lot of "soft" false equivalences is my 
best description I suppose.

I think they opened some very good questions and offered some good 
perspectives but I felt at it's root, this body of work (the whole 
Project?) is part of a long con, even if I can't quite figure out what 
they are up to, I definitely feel like their "mark"... me and anyone 
else reading them without exercising more than a little Pyrrhonian 
skepticism.  Maybe I'm just tired...  but they sounded like a much 
smarter/more-sophisticated PragerU to me by the time I got done.

If you find them to be more righteous than I'm intuiting, I look forward 
to hearing more from you about their arguments.

On 2/16/22 5:55 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> I'm glad you brought up the Consilience Project again.   I have not 
> hardly but scratched their "veneer" and have my own warning signals, 
> including how smooth some of their stuff goes down *my* gullet. Almost 
> as if it were crafted for the likes of me?  And given the topic of 
> their discussion (all I've read so far is their "End of Propoganda" 
> and some meta-info about them), it feels a little too reflexive?    I 
> am interested if not intrigued and very resistant to being "hooked" by 
> what seems like pretty sophisticated arguments.    The MIU pedigree is 
> a little disturbing... I have a couple of links back into them, one 
> that when taken with the right amount of salt is somewhat supportive 
> while the other makes me want to run for the hills.   "fevered gaze of 
> zealotry" fits the latter.
>
> I haven't extracted enough of their examples of "human sovereignty" to 
> know if it is actually an anthropocentric arrogance or not, but I'm 
> looking for it.   I think the one place I saw it, I would have 
> expected something more like "toxicly deluded individualism" as a 
> judgement, but I really haven't given this work a fraction of what you 
> apparently have.
>
> Like many of the frayed threads that is FriAM, I wonder who else is 
> following this and not chiming in with some useful parallax?
>
> I wanted to read your "my Pyrrhonian tendencies" as "Pyrrhic" but 
> nevertheless, thanks for a new word!
>
>
>> My jury is still out. But this is similar to my evaluation of the 
>> Consilience Project, in particular this concept of "human sovereignty":
>>
>> https://consilienceproject.org/the-digest-issue-9/
>> https://consilienceproject.org/the-digest-issue-9/
>> https://highexistence.com/jordan-greenhall-humanity-global-collapse-survive/ 
>>
>>
>> And I can't put my finger on precisely what's unsettling about it. It 
>> is similar to Rogan's dissonance, where with so much Rogan "content", 
>> you can easily cherry pick both good and bad stuff. But at least with 
>> Rogan, in spite of frequent bouts of arrogance, he's really just some 
>> dude yapping with people. Stein, Hall, Shmachtenberger, et al [⥀] 
>> have something akin to the fevered gaze of zealotry. I get this 
>> feeling from all the Eastern mystic-friendly people (present company 
>> excluded of course, Dave & Kim). What started my worry was 
>> Shmachtenberger's (apparent) alma mater: https://www.miu.edu/.
>>
>> But backing out of my Pyrrhonian tendencies, my real worry is their 
>> idealism, seemingly fueled by eschatological thinking. Putting so 
>> much emphasis on concepts like "human sovereignty" seems 
>> anthropocentric and a bit arrogant to me. It's directly in the 
>> transhumanist tradition, I guess, but more utopian and less Blade 
>> Runner/Neuromancer. The stylistic difference coheres a little bit 
>> when comparing their feverish narrative(s) with posts by Robin Hanson 
>> or Eliezer Yudkowski.
>>
>> I don't know. I'd appreciate any opinions offered here.
>>
>>
>> [⥀] Rutt is of a different category. His affinity for anti-Woke 
>> rhetoric, constant F-bombs, and Weinstein-style alt-right ideas makes 
>> me worry there's also an affinity with the right's obsession with the 
>> anti-vaxx "bodily sovereignty" and maybe even the whackadoodle 
>> "sovereign citizens" thing. Both Rutt and Weinstein are listed as 
>> advisors: https://consilienceproject.org/team/ But I'm obviously OK 
>> with cafeteria style idea farming. Even a broken clock's right twice 
>> per day, right? [[⥁]]
>>
>>
>> [[⥁]] Of course NOT! Clocks are mechanisms, maybe even the canonical 
>> mechanism. And, as a mechanism, a stopped clock cannot be a clock at 
>> all. So "stopped clock" is self-contradictory ... from which, 
>> classicaly, we can derive any theorem at all. So stopped clocks are 
>> either always right or never right, which means they can't be right 2 
>> times per day. Pffft.
>>
>> On 2/16/22 10:32, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>
>>> I kinda gave up on Rutt...  he's not exactly Joe Rogan, but there 
>>> was something in his PlanB stuff that left me feeling like he was 
>>> snookering me (all of us), even if he himself didn't know it? Maybe 
>>> reading too much Rebecca Solnitt has made me hypersensitive to 
>>> (other's not my own) mansplaining.
>>>
>>
>
>
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