The Power of Love and Racism

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There's this funny thing that seems to happen where, well, I think if press, a lot of people would admit that like, okay, a word like love or racism or any of these words, like it's not precisely defined. But because we have this, these very strong, affective responses to them, like, you know, love is good, racism is bad,. It sometimes feels as though whether something gets the official classification of love or racism, like actually changes whether things good or 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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