#Julia galef how to

It turned out to be much harder than I’d realized.” “My vision was we’d come up with hypotheses about techniques, keep the ones that work, and discard the ones that don’t.

“Was it the classes or hanging out with like-minded people that makes the difference?” Conducting more tests would have been too expensive. “What was it about the workshop?” she says. They surveyed 40 participants, assessing their before-and-after answers to questions like “How together is your life?” and “How successful do you feel in your social life?” The study found that, one year after the workshop ended, participants showed decreased neuroticism and increased self-efficacy, but to Galef, the results weren’t sufficiently rigorous. Early on, they began conducting a controlled study to determine whether the workshops were demonstrably helpful. But for CFAR’s founders, it was the empirical confirmation of their work that mattered most. Over the next several years, as rationalism became not only the de facto brand of self-help in Silicon Valley but also an intellectual movement followed by pundits and executives alike, CFAR’s profile grew soon, the nonprofit was running workshops across the country and teaching classes at Facebook and the Thiel Fellowship. They did this through multiday workshops, where participants could learn to make better decisions using techniques like “goal factoring” (breaking a goal into smaller pieces) and “paired debugging” (in which two people help identify each other’s blind spots and distortions). Galef and her CFAR co-founders - mathematician Anna Salamon, research scientist Andrew Critch, and math and science educator Michael Smith - wanted to translate these principles to everyday life. It was the early days of the rationalist movement: a community formed on the internet whose adherents strove to strip their minds of cognitive biases and subject all spheres of life to the glare of scientific thought and probabilistic reasoning.

#Julia galef how to

With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.Available for purchase at:AmazonBarnes & NobleBooks A MillionBookshop.In 2012, Julia Galef, the host of a podcast called Rationally Speaking, moved from New York to Berkeley to help found a nonprofit called the Center for Applied Rationality. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world-which anyone can learn.

Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true.In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a 'scout' mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe-and shoot down those we don't.

In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a 'soldier' mindset. '.an engaging and enlightening account from which we all can benefit.'-The Wall Street Journal A better way to combat knee-jerk biases and make smarter decisions, from Julia Galef, the acclaimed expert on rational decision-making.When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see.