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

[Steve Smith]

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.
>>
>