How to Organize Your Life on a Small Scale

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There's a whole pile of these things that help me organize my life on a small scale. There's larger scale, like on the country scale, right? There's all these words and all these words sort of sweep little details under the rug,. Like America's Great, don't talk about the Native Americans or whatever. You can find these weird edge cases that are designed to sort of troll a concept such that it's confusing whether you're going to just double down on the concept or no, racism is bad.

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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