EP 326 Alex Ebert on New Age, Manifestation, and Collective Hallucination

Jim talks with Nate Soares about the ideas in his and Eliezer Yudkowsky's book If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. They discuss the book's claim that mitigating existential AI risk should be a top global priority, the idea that LLMs are grown, the opacity of deep learning networks, the Golden Gate activation vector, whether our understanding of deep learning networks might improve enough to prevent catastrophe, goodness as a narrow target, the alignment problem, the problem of pointing minds, whether LLMs are just stochastic parrots, why predicting a corpus often requires more mental machinery than creating a corpus, depth & generalization of skills, wanting as an effective strategy, goal orientation, limitations of training goal pursuit, transient limitations of current AI, protein folding and AlphaFold, the riskiness of automating alignment research, the correlation between capability and more coherent drives, why the authors anchored their argument on transformers & LLMs, the inversion of Moravec's paradox, the geopolitical multipolar trap, making world leaders aware of the issues, a treaty to ban the race to superintelligence, the specific terms of the proposed treaty, a comparison with banning uranium enrichment, why Jim tentatively thinks this proposal is a mistake, a priesthood of the power supply, whether attention is a zero-sum game, and much more. Episode Transcript If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares "Psyop or Insanity or ...? Peter Thiel, the Antichrist, and Our Collapsing Epistemic Commons," by Jim Rutt "On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback," by Marcus Williams et al. Attention Sinks and Compression Valleys in LLMs are Two Sides of the Same Coin," by Enrique Queipo-de-Llano et al. JRS EP 217 - Ben Goertzel on a New Framework for AGI "A Tentative Draft of a Treaty, With Annotations" Nate Soares is the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He has been working in the field for over a decade, after previous experience at Microsoft and Google. Soares is the author of a large body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, including foundational work on value learning, decision theory, and power-seeking incentives in smarter-than-human AIs.

Jim talks with Alex Ebert about the ideas in his Substack essay "New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality." They discuss the meanings of New Age and religion, the New Thought movement, the law of attraction, manifesting, Trump's artifacts of manifestation, the unmooring from concrete artifacts, individual and collective hallucinations, intersubjective verification of the interobjective, the subjective-first perspective, epistemic asymmetry as the cool, New Ageism's constant reference to quantum physics, manifesting as a way to negate social responsibility, the odd coincidence of leaving the gold standard and New Ageism, spiritual bypassing, a global derealization, new retribalized collective delusions, the Faustian bargain of AI, rationality as a virus, the noble lie, indeterminacy as a sign of emergence, nostalgia as a sales pitch, regaining the sense of hypocrisy, localized retribalizations, GameB as a series of membranes, and much more. Episode Transcript "New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality," by Alex Ebert Bad Guru (Alex's Substack) Jim Rutt's Substack "Unclear Thinking About Philosophical Zombies and Quantum Measurement," by Jim Rutt The Century of the Self (documentary by Adam Curtis) Alex Ebert is a platinum-selling musician (Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros), Golden Globe-winning film composer, cultural critic and philosopher living in New Orleans. His philosophical project, FreQ Theory, as well as his cultural analyses, can be followed on his Substack.

Jim talks with Joe Edelman about the ideas in the Meaning Alignment Institute's recent paper "Full Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value." They discuss pluralism as a core principle in designing social systems, the informational basis for alignment, how preferential models fail to capture what people truly care about, the limitations of markets and voting as preference-based systems, critiques of text-based approaches in LLMs, thick models of value, values as attentional policies, AI assistants as potential vectors for manipulation, the need for reputation systems and factual grounding, the "super negotiator" project for better contract negotiation, multipolar traps, moral graph elicitation, starting with membranes, Moloch-free zones, unintended consequences and lessons from early Internet optimism, concentration of power as a key danger, co-optation risks, and much more. Episode Transcript "A Minimum Viable Metaphysics," by Jim Rutt (Substack) Jim's Substack JRS Currents 080: Joe Edelman and Ellie Hain on Rebuilding Meaning Meaning Alignment Institute If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares "Full Stack Alignment: Co-aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value," by Joe Edelman et al. "What Are Human Values and How Do We Align AI to Them?" by Oliver Klingefjord, Ryan Lowe, and Joe Edelman Joe Edelman has spent much of his life trying to understand how ML systems and markets could change, retaining their many benefits but avoiding their characteristic problems: of atomization, and of servicing shallow desires over deeper needs. Along the way this led him to formulate theories of human meaning and values (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10636) and study models of societal transformation (https://www.full-stack-alignment.ai/paper) as well as inventing the meaning-based metrics used at CouchSurfing, Facebook, and Apple, co-founding the Center for Humane Technology and the Meaning Alignment Institute, and inventing new democratic systems (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10636). He’s currently one of the PIs leading the Full-Stack Alignment program at the Meaning Alignment Institute, with a network of more than 50 researchers at universities and corporate labs working on these issues.

Jim talks with John Preston about his book 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World's #2 Business Series, which is designed to be read during bathroom breaks. They discuss breaking free from being a one-person show, hiring self-guided employees, the importance of business owner support networks, clarity on business goals & personal objectives, the five-gear growth machine business metrics model, marketing fundamentals & investment levels, understanding the customer journey, social media pitfalls, customer inquiry response strategies, complaint management, CEO time management & delegation, working capital needs, lifestyle creep, measuring business metrics, gross profit vs net profit, building high-trust company cultures, transparency with employees, marketing strategies & customer acquisition, hiring & retention strategies, and much more. Episode Transcript 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World's #2 Business Series, by John Preston Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek The JP Business Academy John Preston is a Hall of Fame sales and business coach who transforms complex concepts into actionable insights for entrepreneurs and sales teams, drawing from his 22+ years as a television news reporter and producer. As the creator of JP Business Academy, he specializes in making business education accessible through live, engaging training sessions and online teaching. He can be reached by email at john@thejpbusinessacademy.

Jim talks with Pablos Holman about the ideas in his new book Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters. They discuss deep tech versus shallow tech, computational modeling and simulation for real-world problems, the hacker mindset, the role of inventors, nuclear power and renewable energy solutions, population growth, development challenges, space-based solar power, the likelihood of fusion power, mistakes in German energy policy, energy storage limitations, the transformation of the apparel industry through automation, and much more. Episode Transcript Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters, by Pablos Holman Deep Future (company) Intellectual Ventures Lab Pablos is a hacker, inventor, and bestselling author of Deep Future: Creating Technology that Matters, the indispensable guide to deep tech. Now Managing Partner at Deep Future, investing in technologies to solve the world’s biggest problems. Previously, Pablos worked on spaceships at Blue Origin and helped build The Intellectual Ventures Lab to invent a wide variety of breakthroughs including a brain surgery tool, a machine to suppress hurricanes, 3D food printers, and a laser that can shoot down mosquitos—part of an impact invention effort to eradicate malaria with Bill Gates. Pablos hosts the Deep Future Podcast and is a top public speaker—his talks have over 30 million views.

Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about the ideas in his book Psyche and Symbolic Learning, volume 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series. We discussed hierarchical complexity, stage theories of development, constructivism & realism, dynamic skill theory, the Lectical Scale, ego development & consciousness, meaning systems & worldviews, cross-cultural developmental patterns, statistical distributions of developmental stages, the relationship between semantic richness & structural complexity, justification systems theory & cultural evolution, and much more. Episode Transcript A Universal Learning Process, by Brendan Graham Dempsey (Volume 1) Emergentism, by Brendan Graham Dempsey In Over Our Heads, by Robert Kegan "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", by Thomas Nagel EP 172 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Emergentism EP 293 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Cosmic Teleology and Emergence Vectors Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer, researcher, organic farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to “promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most.” He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in religious studies and classical civilizations from the University of Vermont and earned his master’s from Yale University, where he studied religion and culture. He is the author of Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics and host of the Metamodern Spirituality Podcast. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.

Jim talks with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber about the findings in their recent book Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance. They discuss the definition of microdosing, "subthreshold" vs "subperceptual," typical doses, current usage statistics & demographics, its legal status & classification history, LSD, psilocybin, why cannabis isn't suitable for microdosing, mechanisms of action, dosing protocols, anti-inflammatory effects, health applications, enhancement applications, contraindications & side effects, research methodologies & limitations, commercial potential, global adoption patterns, and much more. Episode Transcript Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance, by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, by James Fadiman Our Symphony of Selves, by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber JRS EP126 - Jordan Gruber & James Fadiman on Our Symphony of Selves Autism on Acid, by Aaron Paul Orsini Institute of Noetic Sciences James Fadiman, Ph.D., is a prominent figure in the field of psychedelic research, particularly known for his work on microdosing psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin. Often called the “father of microdosing,” Fadiman has a long history in the study of psychedelics dating back to the 1960s, when he worked on studies involving LSD and creativity while at Stanford University. After psychedelics were banned in the U.S., Fadiman shifted his focus but returned to psychedelic research decades later. His book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys, has become a key resource for safe psychedelic exploration. In recent years, he has pioneered research on microdosing, examining its potential benefits for mental health, cognitive enhancement, and overall well-being. Jordan Gruber, JD, MA, founded the early online Enlightenment.Com community. After practicing law at Cooley Godward and focusing on IP law at NASA’s Moffett Field, as well as working at GNOSIS Magazine, Jordan became “the Practical Wordsmith,” a writer, ghostwriter, editor, and writing coach speciliazing in transformational modalities and practices. Jordan has helped create cutting-edge works on everything from forensic audio and financial services to health, wellness, psychology, and spirituality. Recent editing credits include Cindy Lou Golin’s The Shadow Playbook (2023), Scott Rogers’s The Mindful Law Student (2022), and Lawrence Ford’s The Secrets of the Seasons (2020).

Jim talks with David Shapiro about how to use AI language models as research and writing tools. They discuss post-labor economics, the evolution of AI tools from GPT-2 through GPT-4, using AI as a learning companion vs. relying on it completely, David's AI tool stack, exploring new domains, using NotebookLM for document management & searching, AI writing and editing techniques, critique and perspectives through personas, the rapid adoption of AI tools across industries, understanding limitations, challenges for AI startups, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP 317 - David Shapiro on Post-Labor Economics David Shapiro is an American AI thought leader, author, YouTuber, and former IT infrastructure and automation engineer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. With over 16 years of experience in technology, including four years focused on artificial intelligence, Shapiro has emerged as a prominent voice in AI philosophy, cognitive architectures, and post-labor economics. His work centers on the societal and economic implications of AI, advocating for a future of post-scarcity and hyper-abundance where automation meets basic human needs at low cost.

Jim talks with Lawrence Cahoone about his book The Orders of Nature and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy. They discuss fallibilist & local metaphysics, objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Jim's materialism which grants emergence first-class existence, Wimsatt's notion of emergence & nonaggregativity, downward causation & pruning rules, natural complexes, Aristotle's four causes & the use of purpose in biology, the distinction between teleonomy & teleology, the five orders of nature (physical, material, biological, psychological & cultural), characteristic time scales in emergence theory, why particular disciplines coevolved in intellectual traditions, Erik Hoel's theory about emergence having the highest causal power, natural religion & the fine-tuned constants of the universe, the choice between multiverse explanations & a single ground of nature, Darwin's views on divine purpose, comparisons to deists like Spinoza & Einstein, and much more. Episode Transcript The Orders of Nature, by Lawrence Cahoone The Emergence of Value: Human Norms in a Natural World, by Lawrence Cahoone The Feynman Lectures on Physics, by Richard Feynman Lawrence Cahoone graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stony Brook University in 1985. Cahoone's areas of specialization are American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Metaphysics and Natural Science and Modernism and Postmodernism. Since 2000, Cahoone has taught at Holy Cross and is now currently an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Holy Cross. He has also written and published seven books in his career, including The Emergence of Value, The Orders of Nature, and Cultural Revolutions.

Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about humanity's rapidly changing relationship with AI and "thinking on demand." They discuss the GPT-5 release & pricing, open-source AI models, the three-dimensional framework of AI advancement (models & hardware & agent frameworks), the evolution of vibe coding, development tools, agent-based development, AI implementation strategies with humans in the loop, the Midnight Protocol project, Vendor Relationship Management versus CRM, automated negotiation systems, the trillion-dollar opportunity in improving the infosphere, enshittification risks, local AI processing on personal devices, the future of AI agents as personal representatives, and much more. Episode Transcript Speaking of Bitcoin! Podcast JRS EP 313 - Chris Colin on Why Customer Service Sucks JRS EP 316 - Ken Stanley on the AI Representation Problem The Intention Economy, by Doc Searls Midnight Protocol Adam B. Levine has spent over a decade pioneering disruptive technologies before they become mainstream. He launched one of the earliest Bitcoin podcasts, Let’s Talk Bitcoin! (2013), founded Tokenly (2014)—one of the earliest companies exploring what could be done with blockchain tokens—and served as CoinDesk’s first podcast editor (2019), hosting shows like Speaking of Bitcoin and Markets Daily. In 2021, he founded 330.ai, a startup building cutting-edge tools to boost creativity with AI.