The Whose Map Is Not the Territory Game

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There's a cousin of that technique that I want to introduce if that's okay. So I like to play a game which I call the whose map is not the territory game. In this game, I narrate my actions from outside and use an intonation pattern as I do so. By using this kind of intonation, you're basically pointing out to yourself that your beliefs are just like a approximation of what's actually true about reality. That gets you thinking about how well that actually maps under reality.

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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