The Elf in the Brain by Robin Hanson

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I think we all want to believe that there's a responsible adult adult in the room and like someone's looking after things right. It seems to me hard to look at what's happening now and have any sense that someone is in control agreed but yet people don't seem to be responding to that maybe they do but not not. I sort of hope we can figure out how to respond to that by like popping out of the collective delusion and just sort of looking around with common sense and common decency or whatever.

What does it mean to leave lines of retreat in social contexts? How can we make sense of the current state of the world? What happens when we run out of map? How does the book Elephant in the Brain apply to the above questions?

Anna Salamon does work with the Center for Applied Rationality and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. She studied math and great books in undergrad, and philosophy of science for a small bit of grad school before leaving to work on AI-related existential risk. Fav. books include: R:AZ; HPMOR; “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” and “The Closing of the American Mind” (as an intro to the practice of reading books from other places and times, not to evaluate the books, but to gain alternate hypotheses about ourselves by asking how the authors might perceive us). She blogs a bit at lesswrong.com.

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