The Importance of Trust in Institutions

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A lot of institutions rely on trust or rely on norms in order to function properly. Traditional societies will often like involve and if you are going to break this rule at least be ashamed of it and do it in private or whatever so that like you don't set a bad example. If we all decide all at once that the norm about police trying to be there in the interest of the community or whatever was fake then it's going to be harder for police departments to continue kind of like believing in keeping up that appearance as much as they can. I'm not talking about victories against nature versus by grabbing somebody else's pie I'm talking about ease within the human systems that are already here or something

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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