And so on to religion, pseudoscience, and all the other scourges of the intellectual world.īut she also learned that just telling people “Hey, avoid confirmation bias!” doesn’t work, even if you explain things very well and give lots of examples. This is the bias that explains why your political opponents continue to be your political opponents, instead of converting to your obviously superior beliefs. This last one is confirmation bias - our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds. Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. Reading between the lines, I think she learned pretty much the same thing a lot of the rest of us learned during the grim years of the last decade. Galef is their co-founder and former president, and Scout Mindset is an attempt to write down what she learned. To that end, they ran dozens of workshops over about a decade, testing various techniques and seeing which ones seemed to stick and make a difference. CFAR wanted to find a way to teach people about biases that actually stuck and improved decision-making. Like - a big part of why so many people - the kind of people who would have read Predictably Irrational in 2008 or commented on Overcoming Bias in 2010 - moved on was because just learning that biases existed didn’t really seem to help much. They founded a group called the Center For Applied Rationality (aka “CFAR”, yes, it’s a pun) to try to figure out how to actually make people more rational in the real world. But a few stuck around and tried to complete the original project. Some, like me, got distracted and wrote a few thousand blog posts on whatever shiny things happened to catch their eyes. Others went into effective altruism to try to revolutionize charity. Some of them went into AI to try to save the world. Around 2012, they mostly left to do different stuff. Back in ~2007, a bunch of people interested in biases and decision-making joined the “rationalist community” centered around the group blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. And that isn’t the least accurate description of Julia (you can watch her TED talk here ).īut Galef earned her celebrity status honestly, through long years of hard labor in the rationality mines. Nowadays “smiling TED-talk-circuit celebrity wants to help you improve your thinking!” is more likely to elicit groans than breathless anticipation. ![]() Books on rationality and overcoming cognitive biases were big ten years ago ( Thinking Fast And Slow, Predictably Irrational, The Black Swan, etc). Galef admits she’s a little behind the curve on this one. Yet without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts ? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t). ![]() You tried Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. You tried Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith.
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