The Evil Twin and the Evil Twin

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Imagine two people who are sort of evil twins of each other like who have the faculties in reverse orders and they're trying to play together. And it starts out maybe a fine day and they're kind of getting along. But then one of the parties begins to feel suspicious, like there's something weird happening. They sort of clamp down and as the other parties throwing something to their backseat, they're like,No, no, no, I can't do that. Throw it to my front seat like a normal, decent person. So you can see the spiraling out of control. Totally. To me, it's a pretty good model of what sort of mutual triggering often is where

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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