Rufus Pollock on the Jim Rutt Show: metacrisis, wisdom gap and Second Renaissance

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Life Itself co-founder @rufuspollock speaks on the latest episode of the Jim Rutt show about the metacrisis, the wisdom gap, and what a Second Renaissance might look like.

The Jim Rutt Show is a podcast series examining cutting-edge thinking in science and technology with regard to the future of our economy, our political systems, and our social systems. Jim Rutt is Chairman of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness (CIMC), where he leads efforts to develop testable theories of machine consciousness and build ethical frameworks for AI grounded in a deeper understanding of consciousness and a Distinguished Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

Listen to the conversation or read the transcript:

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Dear Rufus, Excellent conversation with Jim. He let you talk more without inserting his own views as much as he normally does. The conversation bought me here. However, you mentioned you code? Hitting the main site has links that go nowhere. To the average individual that just smacks of a collapsing community and you click away. I’m guessing that is not what you are after? Little more persistence and I’m here in your forum, so some bits work.

Claude Code and half an hour will audit and find all bits that aren’t working and fix them. I’m sure that is “teaching my grandmother how to suck eggs” if you are a coder. Thankfully for you it isn’t your livelihood because coding isn’t a thing anymore.

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First, glad you liked the show :slightly_smiling_face:

And big :+1: on reporting the issues. Will do more with AI to check. And it is a good prompt to fix more. We recently migrate the site and stuff may have broken – see [epic] LifeItself.org major website update for strategy v4 · Issue #1213 · life-itself/community · GitHub

If you can you flag the links that are broken that is helpful.

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Rather than tell you the instances where you have page not found 404 which only directs you to those I found I will “teach a man to fish”.

Use playwright, ask Claude Code to load it, and to do a complete site audit traversing every link possible and fix all issues it finds.

That will find them all and fix them within half an hour. It will prompt you to give it access and load the tools you need.

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Yes, i know that kind of thing already :wink:

It is a question of time and capacity at our end. We are a very small team :slightly_smiling_face:

Also it is one thing to get 404s it is another to fix them systematically (which may need some judgment).

Anyway really appreciate the prompt.

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So it is a catch 22 situation. Can’t fix no time because team is too small→potential team member abandons joining because systems don’t work.

I get that.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Good luck with your mission.

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Just to flag that these are getting gradually fixed :tada:

So it is a catch 22 situation. Can’t fix no time because team is too small→potential team member abandons joining because systems don’t work.

One comment on this: in my (now fairly extensive experience) i don’t think serious potential contributors opt out because of 404s :wink:

So i don’t think there is much of a feedback loop here …

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I hope you’re right. A small committed team is better.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Quite reasonable strategy. Keep the 404s :laughing:

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Just to comment: I wasn’t saying “keep the 404s” (was I?). I also wasn’t saying a small committed team was better (or not … – i wasn’t commenting one way or the other on that).

What i was suggesting was that the hypothesis that significant potential contributors opt out b/c of 404s on the website was a mistaken hypothesis :wink:

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Wholly untestable, but “I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex” (see The Big Chill):slightly_smiling_face:

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To me, rationalizing is a feature, not a bug. It has to do with taking shortcuts so we can get through the day without radical soul-exploding identity crises at every turn. As a shortcut, however, any rationalization is going to leave important things out, so in the dead of night we have dreams to process everything we pushed aside during the day …

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Jeff Goldblum knew a thing or two.

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