The Importance of Defending the Good Side of Reality

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Some people are just going to like copy the party line and say no no that thing is good. And even group people within the group it kind of gives them an incentive to not look too carefully because if they do start to look carefully they'll actually realize that their group is wrong about that thing. It seems like that's a really important dynamic that I think is happening all over the darn place. That also leads to the need or desire to try to defend knock over the whole narrative that has been trying to swallow the wrong detail.

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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