The Importance of Leveraging Your Mind in Service of a Goal

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I think it's really interesting that you're very interested in being rational in the important ways. But unlike many people who are trying to bootstrap themselves there using like their analytical system all the time, you're trying to leverage all of your mind in service of that goal. The point is not to leverage them, but the point is that they're actually really useful. I mean, it reminds me of these memorization techniques where you can kind of hijack your visual mind in order to remember things that are not visual. By for example, if you want to visualize a deck of memorize a deck of cards, you can assign a like a visual image to each of the numbers and suits

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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