Game A is over.

The internet led me to the Jim Rutt show a couple of years back. On my first take, I wasn’t sure what to make of Jim or the show.

As is often the case, if you arrive at a podcast, go and have a look at the site. I was suprised by the professionalism of the site. I looked at the archive and said Wow. The transcripts and said how?.

Jim was a successful computer dude, back in the day. Ran a little outfit called Network Solutions.

His bio on Santa Fe Institute refers to the path he took from cashing out of Dot Bomb through to scientific research around a central topic that we often label Sustainability.

So, he remains as gruff as the NYT’s label of “the Internet’s Bad Boy” and I know some folks will find it hard to get past this. This was a small-ish effort for me, as I can give him a pass for being a Country Boy with parallels to many I knew in the Genus of what we might call Tech.

Game B

Jim became one of several proponents of Game B upon my collision with the term. The name is based a proposal to design a replacement for Game A - the way Life is for Humans now.

Here’s a quote from the Game B Wiki

“Game B is notoriously difficult to think and talk about for the very good reason that if you were using the > conceptual structures that came out of Game A to do so, you may very well be poisoning the well.” – Jordan Hall.

Two outstanding interviews

This week, I caught up with Jim and Zak Stein, who I’ve known of since I did my Lectica Decision Making Assessment(https://dts.lectica.org/_about/showcase.php?instrument_id=LDMA) some years ago.

The topic is Information War and Propaganda

Early on, Jim points out that we are all subject to biases… worse still, the more educated and well read we are, the more susceptible we are to confirmation bias.

And there’s a problem with doing propaganda research, actually at a high level. And I fell into the rabbit hole myself. And I mentioned this in the first paper, which is that once you start to see information this way, and you start to realize the decades of history of sophisticated, psychologically manipulative information warfare, you start to be potentially suspicious of everything. -Zak

Back Soon!