“I take these ideas I think are great and try to explain them to a wider audience,” she says. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t is a fitting debut for someone who has considered herself a “populizer” of the rationalist movement. Instead, she began working on her first book, which, after five years, will be published by Penguin on April 13. In 2016, Galef left CFAR, unsatisfied with what she had been able to accomplish there. 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. Since then I’ve been working full time at CFAR - read more about us on my Projects page.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. After meeting with them a few times, they invited me to move out to Berkeley to co-found the organization with them, and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) was born in early 2012. In late 2011 I heard through the grapevine that several friends-of-friends of mine in Berkeley, CA, had secured funding to start a non-profit organization to figure out how to improve human rationality. And we should be developing mental technologies to overcome those biases. In particular, now that we have a clearer picture of human irrationality, we should be asking ourselves how our biases are affecting our judgment about critical problems like how to reduce suffering and how to estimate catastrophic risks. Going back to early civilizations you can see simple but powerful examples, like the Golden Rule, or the idea of trade. As our societies have progressed, we’ve developed more complex mental technologies - utilitarianism and other ethical frameworks, various iterations of the scientific method, the concept of randomized controlled trials, and so on.Īnd it increasingly seemed to me that developing better mental technologies was crucial to our future. I became especially interested in what you might call “mental technologies” - concepts, or ways of thinking, that help humanity improve our world. I wrote for a wide range of publications and blogs (like Slate, Scientific American, Metropolis, The Architect’s Newspaper, Rationally Speaking, and 3 Quarks Daily), and in 2010 I launched the Rationally Speaking Podcast with philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci. in statistics from Columbia University in 2005, I spent several years doing research with social science professors at Columbia, Harvard and MIT, including a year writing case studies on international economics for Harvard Business School. I began a PhD in economics, but soon decided I didn’t want to be in academia after all, left grad school, and moved back to New York to be a freelance journalist.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |