The Importance of Coherence in Human Behavior

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The law has to decide what do we officially call illegal? What do we not? That's right. The ability to have sort of concepts like this that we can cohere around which ones are good and bad has been really important. And at the same time, it's also true that all of these concepts involve washing some details under the rug so that sometimes a person will run afoul of one of these concepts because yeah, their blood was slightly over the alcohol limit while they were driving their car a few blocks. Although actually that particular person was perhaps a much safer driver with that alcohol level than many people who would have been on the other side of the line or whatever.

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.

Staff