[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is the Giga Society label legitimate? Or is it more aspirational? Rick Rosner: Not legitimate but is it a meaningful distinction which is a less loaded way of asking it. Jacobsen: I mean to me it sounds more aspirational but a serious effort. Rosner: So anyway what else can you …
Tag: flash-fiction
Ask A Genius 761: Mom’s Death
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, your mom died and there's been some rude things that have come across and some stress. Rick Rosner: Well, it was sad because we've redirected her mail to us, so we got her first batch of mail including two letters from a bank; she's gone from being Ruth Kahn …
Ask A Genius 760: Examples From History
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: We don't know but we can look at other examples from history. A brutally pessimistic and also optimistic example is Nazi Germany. Germany broke irretrievably under Hitler. All social and moral norms were violated and a dictatorial criminal government took over and devastated the country. And there was no recourse to …
Ask A Genius 759: Irretrievably Broken
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: The overall topic is what does irretrievably broken mean in terms of America. So we had a shooting; this 18 year old asshole gets in a fight with his grandma, shoots the grandma, starts driving, crashes his car, I think the gunman is dead. So I don't know if they'll ever …
Ask A Genius 758: Evolution and the End of Human Dominance
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: I've been thinking about evolution a lot lately and every solution under evolution is kind of necessarily half-assed. We're the product of four billion years of evolution roughly and that has led to a lot of deep efficiencies and elegant design, well not design because design implies intention, but elegant forms …
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Ask A Genius 757: “Evolution does not give a fuck.”
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Heading: ‘evolution does not give a fuck’. One of the hardest things, I think for people to avoid doing when thinking about evolution is thinking that evolution has any kind of morality or purpose or anything because evolution is just that the species that are successful at reproducing or the variations …
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Ask A Genius 756: Too Soon Comedy
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: I mean it is a weird thing because there's a too soon in comedy and mostly the too soon is a joke itself now, where you make a Hitler joke or a joke about something else that might be inappropriate, then you go too soon and then it's a joke on …
Ask A Genius 755: Why this last one percent of human history?
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: There’s a theme that some people like to emphasize that some great scientists including Einstein and Feynman said I'm just an everyday person who just thinks really hard, Crick or Watson also does that; brags about having a low IQ and stuff. That's fine up to a point but you got …
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Ask A Genius 754: Richard May Credit for John Brennan
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “I think some of the phenomenon we're going to be seeing and continues to be unexplained, and might in fact be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something we don’t yet understand” that's ex-CIA director, John Brennan. That was sent to me by Richard May, who's the …
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Ask A Genius 753: Cancel Culture
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Okay. There are also the various flavors of cancel culture where people who spend a lot of time on social media learn about a bunch of sensitivities, that I would consider largely legit. I might disagree with the degree to how much vehemence with which these sensitivities are applied but there's …
Rick Rosner 