The Importance of Partially Understanding

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"I think it's in fact just, you know, actually the case that all people matter," he says. "If I'm in the middle of a conversation and I'm trying to like immediately respond as somebody sort of throws an example in my face, I'm not going to find the way to synthesize it." He adds: "It isn't about yanking things toward what I really want to steep down in my heart versus what the other party really wants to steep down?"

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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