The Importance of Trust

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Not everyone can be an expert in everything, right? They're focused on making money to support their family or what have you. And if people don't know who to trust, then I don't know how we keep things stable whereby things like the electrical grid that gives us electricity and the firefighting service are there. It's really creeping me out because I'll see situations where everyone will say like, well, clearly we should believe this but it's just completely out of sync with 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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