The Curve of the End of Your Map

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I feel like a lot of my brain is currently screaming whenever I go on Twitter that the sky is falling in the US right now. So if you're looking at Twitter, like what are the thoughts and feelings that you're having about the sky falling? I don't know. My body thinks like I'm in a burning building and I should bolt or something. Is this sort of a deep visceral sense? I'm not 100% sure where it comes from. And I also have the sense that we're in this extremely strange time where things are different than they were.

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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