Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Dark chocolate or vanilla chocolate? Rick Rosner: Dark. Vanilla chocolate isn't even fucking chocolate. Jacobsen: Yes. Yes. Try telling that to a horse girl. Sweet stuff. Rosner: The darker, the better, up to some ridiculous point, like 85%. Jacobsen: Yes. I'm good to comfortably, regularly, 70%. Rosner: Yes. 70 is there. 70 …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1147: Vanilla or Dark Chocolate?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I am house-sitting. I'm taking care of two dogs. I should specify—I love animals after taking care of these dogs, but I think I prefer being without them, except maybe a cat or two. So, my thought about this is that I like animals. I enjoy living with dogs, but their …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 1146: House-Sitting for a Neighbourino
Rick Rosner: In the Spike Jonze movie Her, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his phone’s operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Spoiler alert, but the movie is already nine years old? I believe it was released in 2015. One of the factors leading to their separation is that the operating system becomes increasingly frustrated with …
Rick Rosner: So I watched all the episodes of America’s Sweethearts, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is it about? Rosner: It’s part of that team. It messes you up physically. They looked at one young woman who had to get a hip replacement after three or four years of being on the …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 973: Dallas Cheerleaders and Centaurs
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: All right, so today I saw the term integrated cognition pop up. I looked it up, and I don't know how common a term it is, but it refers to AI, and it's what we call multimodal. It's kind of the way we think, which is we have inputs from a number …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 972: Analytic Systems and Integration of Cognition
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How has the landscape of bullshitting evolved in the early 21st century? It’s been about a quarter century. How has it changed? Rick Rosner: In general, in American culture, the main change in bullshitting is that about a quarter of American adults have been broken. It’s no secret. For political reasons and …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 971: The Landscape of Bullshitting
Rick Rosner: I like making political bets because I feel like I can find odds that are askew in politics, where I can't find them in sports. I'm not good enough to find that stuff in sports. Most people aren't. I found online odds on who's going to win the presidential debate. Biden and Trump …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 970: Betting on Biden or Trump
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The mind of God, informational cosmology, and what if the universe is processing information, but it's not actually creating anything associated with a mind? It's not really consciousness-associated, it's just information processing on a large scale, like information shuttling without any explicit purpose. Rick Rosner: I doubt that's the case, though it's …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 969: The Mind of God, a mind of a god, and not quite
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have been arguing that an informational universe can be taken as, in the final analysis, deriving the universe reflected as the process of some mind. That mind or its processes reflect some armature, which is its framework. Regardless, the fundamental idea is that the universe has a mind. You are more inclined …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 968: Rick is Tired, also The Universe
Rick Rosner: When interviewing you about your work, I wanted to apologize for a couple of things. One is that I went off on a tangent about quantum mechanics because I thought you had started this Canadian quantum mechanics institute. You don’t have a graduate degree in quantum mechanics. So, I had many questions about how …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 967: Ask Scott Anything, Session 5
Rick Rosner 