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

[glen]

Yes, that's exactly how I feel, like it might be a long con. But it's not fair to assume bad faith. Every single person involved may have good intentions. I suppose I'm focused on Daniel Shmachtenberger because he seems to have appeared out of nowhere in ~2017. If it's a con, he could be victim or perpetrator, perhaps an inscrutable hybrid as with Ben Shapiro <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/how-hollywood-invented-ben-shapiro>. If it's not a con, it could be the typical result of incessant ego-stroking of a plastic intelligence. I feel a bit sorry for seriously bright but naive people who land in a pool of fawning sycophants. Can you imagine being surrounded by people oohing and awing over your every carefully constructed sentence? Nobody could resist that stroking.

A friend of mine recently contacted me after a long ghosting. He laid into me ... like really flat out ... about how much of a jerk I am and how I'd intellectually bullied him over our entire relationship, etc. I was quite surprised he'd been stewing in these juices for so long because I'm quite clear about my adversarial stance and post-truth tendencies. So, after he was done venting, I reminded him of these things that I *thought* I'd made clear from the beginning. I then apologized for my assholery because clearly I had not done a good enough job explaining, not only *that* I'm fundamentally critical, but also *why* I'm fundamentally critical. (Turns out he later admitted I was a convenient scapegoat for a whole series of difficult shit he'd been through over the past few years. But the lesson remains.) He is, I'd argue, as brilliant as Schmachtenberger or anyone I've ever met. But my friend has cultivated a core of true, truly skeptical, truly honest, friends who are willing to dig into the ideas he bounces. And when kneading out a difficult to realize innovation like the company he's been building, that constant critical evaluation takes a psychological and emotional toll. That he's pushed through, however, means his success will be robust and have deep, intentional, impact.

I can't imagine what it must be like for someone who doesn't have that core group of curmudgeons keeping you honest with their constant [abusive|bullying|whatever] criticism or, worse yet, if they were fawning sycophants. What hell that must be.

Anyway, I'm not saying any of this has anything to do with Consilience Project. But it's a tangent that, by typing it out and submitting it for criticism here, may help me fine-grain my worry into a concrete criticism of them.

On 2/16/22 19:10, Steve Smith wrote:
> 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.
>>>>

-- 
glen
When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.