The Dismantling of Structures

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Anna: I think the world clearly either runs or used to run like there's some sort of process that gave us material abundance and a whole bunch of knowledge that people didn't have a few centuries ago so trying to figure out what that was or is seems really good. Spencer: We can see that things are breaking down we can see that these like you know shared truths are kind of like struggling to survive. Anna: If I had some buttons to push anyway though I guess I'd vote in favor of being conscious and helping other people be conscious as if structures even where it's we can't believe in the structure fully might allow us to honor the Sabbath without believing in the Jewish god etc.

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