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

[Steve Smith]

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 appreciate this perspective, but I don't need to assume good or bad 
faith to continue to read and try to parse.  It makes it *easier* if I 
do...  a heavy pruning of the parse/possibility tree.

When I first started reading the first (earliest) article I was mildly 
taken in by the goals/ideas they were presenting.   I *wanted* it to be 
as "good faith" as it was articulate and aligned with my own hopes and 
fears.   Reporting only on my instincts/intuition after reading it all, 
I have a strong feeling there is a deep vein of "bad faith" in there 
somewhere...  your continued analysis about the role as a possible 
victim of yet-more-capable perpetrators and about the risk of 
sycophantic ego-stroking, etc.  leading to somewhat innocent 
perpetration of a long-con provides me with a useful balance to keep 
that intuition from becoming a flat assumption.

I myself have repeatedly been (and continue to be) a victim of 
structurally embedded bad faith.   Free Market Capitalism, Mutual 
Assured Destruction, CowboysvIndians, IsraelisvArabs, MegaScience, 
HyperRationality, Reaganism, Clintonism, Technophilia, Technocracy, 
RuggedIndividualism, etc.  have all captured me in their own ways at 
different times, only to prove to be flawed in obvious enough ways that 
when I see through it I realize that I myself have been complicit in 
their spread and *should have known better*.   Gawdess only knows which 
one of satan's horses I'm riding these days?

Meanwhile, I'm glad the Consilience folks opened the questions so 
(relatively) clearly, and look forward to hearing other *answers* and 
more importantly *discussion* that might spin off from there.    I have 
some thoughts growing on the topic but won't just dump them out here to 
pollute the forum further.

- Steve


> 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.
>>>>>
>