![]() ![]() Since she and her fiancé left their San Francisco studio this past July, they’ve been doing the digital-nomad thing. When we speak over Zoom, Galef is in Franklin, North Carolina, her face evenly lit by the ring lamp she travels with. “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. ![]() Within a few years, he had figured out the beginnings of a compelling answer.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. How could it possibly be consistent with natural selection? Therefore, even though the peacock’s tail made him anxious, Darwin couldn’t stop puzzling over it. whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. He followed what he called a “golden rule” to fight against motivated reasoning: Ever since he could remember, he had been driven to make sense of the world around him. Nevertheless, Darwin felt that he made up for those shortcomings with a crucial strength: his urge to figure out how reality worked. His memory was poor, and he couldn’t follow long mathematical arguments. “Darwin didn’t consider himself a quick or highly analytical thinker. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't If you find out you were wrong about something, great-you’ve improved your map, and that can only help you.” In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs. And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. Of course, all maps are imperfect simplifications of reality, as a scout well knows. Being in scout mindset means wanting your “map”-your perception of yourself and the world-to be as accurate as possible. But above all, he wants to learn what’s really there, not fool himself into drawing a bridge on his map where there isn’t one in real life. A scout might hope to learn that the path is safe, that the other side is weak, or that there’s a bridge conveniently located where his forces need to cross the river. ![]()
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