YouSaid · the spoken record

Julia Galef

lines on the record: 67
first: 2016-02-20
most recent: 2016-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Sort of the tip of the iceberg, but it's, I like it, it's inspiring, it's sort of a great example of rationality being used to make the world a better place”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's very understandable. It really taps into our emotions and motivates us, but that often has no connection to whether the charity is actually effective at helping people and saving lives and improving the quality of life. So effective altruism is, I mean, simply put, it's just the idea that for whatever level of money or time or effort or sacrifice you want to put into trying to help the world, and we all have different levels that we're comfortable with. But for whatever level, there are vastly better and worse ways to do it. They're literally like orders of magnitude difference in the effectiveness of different charities trying to do the same thing. So just by kind of stepping back from your automatic emotional reactions and asking yourself, okay, what does the evidence show? You can just do, you can save a hundred times more lives with the same amount of money that you're donating to charities over your lifetime if you choose your charities well.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's basically making applied philosophy. So the premise of the book is that the way that people instinctively kind of by default try to help the world is really ineffective and inefficient and it's driven by these kinds of system one sort of intuitive heuristics that aren't always that epistemically rational. So for example, people are more likely to give to a charity if they see a picture of a starving child on the cover of the brochure.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By a huge margin, all the other teams of forecasters and experts in politics and economics who are trying to make predictions about world events. And that's because FilteLux team was using these techniques. So it's a pretty inspiring story, plus being full of good data and examples And then I guess the last thing I want to recommend is it didn't really change my thinking just because I was already kind of immersed in this subject, but it's the kind of thing that would have changed my thinking and really inspired me if I'd read it a little earlier. It's a book by a friend of mine, Will McCaskell. It's called Doing Good Better.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, and Sildini's? I've already kind of answered your question, but I'll give you a couple more briefly. Oh, the other book about rationality that I would recommend is a new book by Phil Tetlock. It's called Super Forecasting. And the thing that I said towards the beginning of the podcast that the motivation for founding CFAR was that there really wasn't much research at all on how do we overcome these biases. Well, super forecasting is an exception to the rule. Phil Tetlock has been doing amazing work studying interventions to try to make people better at making predictions about things, better at evaluating arguments, that kind of thing. And this book explains what he did and gives some really pretty impressive results showing the effects of these interventions. Basically, Phil Tetlock's team of forecasters outperformed”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that's one. I would also, so obviously the work about human irrationality has been very influential to me. It's hard to pick a single book about that. I've already named Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow, which is...”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they're sort of too empty. There's this expression not even wrong. I'm not calling your paper claim wrong. It's not even wrong. It like doesn't even make enough sense to be wrong. And so a lot of people think that IR kind of went a little too far in his condemnation of philosophy. And I would agree. But I think it's still a very useful sort of bracing splash of ice water in your face and like a good sort of habit to have in the back of your mind when you're thinking about things and evaluating claims. And it's an easy read, as I said, very short. I think you can just get it online. Awesome.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, forcing myself to get really concrete to the point where my belief could potentially be disproven by evidence, or at least made less likely by evidence. And this, I think, came out of reading Eyer's Language Truth and Logic. He was basically annoyed at the way philosophers would debate these kinds of empty, meaningless questions And he was pointing out a lot of these questions could not be cashed out in terms of concrete.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is kind of, I was going to say it's a philosophy book for people who are kind of skeptical of philosophy, but I also would want people who aren't skeptical of philosophy to read it because I think it would be good for them. It's kind of, it's this short, clear, down-to-earth, almost manifesto talking about the importance of clear thinking and philosophy would be a sort of vague way to put it. It really had an influence on the way I think. I think I'm more likely now to do things like if I believe something, like let's say I believe so-and-so is unfair or biased or let's say I believe rationality works or whatever belief I have, I'm more likely to ask myself to make myself cash out that belief in terms of a concrete prediction. What do I expect to see differently in the world because this claim is true?”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the set of books that has had an impact on me is a little different from the set of books I'd recommend to other people. Just the particular path that I followed and the particular books that happened to be influential to me given the place I was at is somewhat idiosyncratic. But one book that really influenced me in college was by a philosopher named A.J. Eyer. It's called Language Truth and Logic.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good answer, right? Yeah, no, I really think it's really hard. And I think I'm not confident that there is a good way to do it while adhering perfectly to the standards of just using the best arguments and evidence. I think you probably have to also get charismatic spokespeople and you probably”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So hard. I mean, I might relax my constraints a little bit. What would I do? I don't know. It's really hard. I don't have a good answer to this.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you were Googling for the opposite, you could also have found probably a lot more studies showing no effect on health. So I don't know. I haven't actually looked at the studies on the Rothfood diet, but that's just an example.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you do enough studies, some of them will even just by chance and often by experiment or bias will turn out to show whatever you want. And so you can easily sort of selectively present the studies that support what you're claiming. And so even if you have a pretty skeptical, well-educated audience who knows, okay, I shouldn't believe things without a study, you can still kind of pull one over on them. And I think we do this to ourselves inadvertently all the time. We kind of suspect that something is true, like we suspect that the raw food diet is good for health. And so we Google around and we find a few papers that seem to show that. And we're like, ah, I found it scientific evidence.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't want to make any assumptions. I create uncertainty. I mean, well, I think it's quite easy to present what looks like a very compelling case for whatever you want to convince people of using studies, using quotes from experts, using even randomized controlled studies, which are sort of the gold standard, allegedly the gold standard in scientific research. The problem, like the reason that this is possible, and the reason this is all such a problem, is that there's so much scientific research that's done that it's quite possible to end up with a few studies that seem to support the claim that, I don't know, cigarettes aren't linked to cancer. I actually haven't looked that up to see if there are studies showing that, but, you know.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't expect people to change their minds based on facts and evidence because I know that's not a thing. And I don't know that I would endorse the moral should either. I don't think people are sort of morally wrong for not changing their minds in response to good arguments. It's just an unfortunate fact of the world and how our brains work. What I was trying to say was more like I personally feel kind of morally uncomfortable with changing people's minds without facts and evidence. It's kind of a constraint on my ability to change people's minds that I have to work, that I force myself to work within, essentially. And that doesn't mean I expect to succeed. It just means I don't want to succeed if I'm not following that constraint. Does that make sense?”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Adopt it or no. I definitely don't expect. So I wouldn't agree with that sentence if should means I expect people to adopt it. That's in fact one of the pillars of what I consider Stravulcanism to be. Because if you look at the quintessential Stravalkan, who's Spock himself, he is supposed to be the logical rational one, but he keeps making miscalculations because he expects other people to behave rationally and they don't. And he should know this because he's lived among humans for ages, and the fact that he still expects people to behave rationally is frankly quite irrational of him”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Social proof, trying to make them feel like other sort of high status people are doing this or believing this reciprocity when you give someone something like Hare Krishna is giving people a flower at the airport, they're much more likely to feel on some level, not consciously like they owe you something and so they're more likely to agree to a request or change their mind about something. So these are all kind of effective but insidious ways. Of changing people's minds. I personally am uncomfortable using methods of changing people's minds that don't ground out in sort of good argument or logic. So, you know, changing people's minds with facts is harder than changing their minds with a smile or a gift or a nice haircut.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he basically did all this research for years and then wrote a book classifying the different kinds of techniques that these companies like these use to persuade people. And some very clear and compelling and easy to read book, but very information dense. So there are five categories. I'm going to forget all of them, but they include things like scarcity, trying to make people feel like something is a rare opportunity.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some lobbyists, or maybe not lobbyists, but activists who are trying to get people to sign petitions, that kind of thing. And you know these industries have, there's a real profit incentive to try to find new and better ways of persuading people to do things. And so they've developed all these techniques, but they're not going to publish them because they're a competitive advantage for them.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All these insidious aspects of our psychology that we're not even aware of, there's a real opportunity there for people to exploit those things and use them to change other people's minds without actually making any good argument or presenting any evidence. And in fact, there's a good book about this I would recommend called Influence by Cialdini, who's a psychologist, I can't remember his university now. It's been out for a few decades. It's been a bestseller for a long time.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there are different strategies to take depending on how intellectually honest you want to be, right? So, you know, a lot of the research that's come out, the books that I've been referring to on irrationality that describe all of these hidden forces that affect our decisions that we're not even aware of, like how tall was the person making the claim? Was I holding a hot cup of coffee when the person asked, you know, made a request of me, that sort of thing.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of noticing my emotions, but they're more cognitive and less physical. So I think there's a lot of variation in what works for different people. But things like meditation, I guess, and to some extent martial arts, I think really do help a lot of people with this stuff. And that was an interesting discovery for me because I had never considered that there might be a link between or some overlap between meditation or martial arts and rationality.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a lot of interesting variation in the texture of your reactions that you can start to notice when you look for them. And different people have different ways that work well for them to develop this kind of self-awareness. One of the co-founders of CFAR has a background in Aikido. He's been doing it and teaching it for like two decades now. And he does a lot of meditation. And he's just very embodied, I guess is the right word, in a way that I totally am not. I really live in my head. And so Val, as his name is just really good at helping people detect the sort of physical, just what's going on with their body, like notice the tension, notice that they're not, you know, that they're like leaning forward with sort of aggression or they're like leaning backwards in anxiety or something like that. I just am not good at noticing these signs in my body. I have other ways of...”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, a fair amount of what we teach ends up being about just being much more self aware of those emotional reactions. And they don't always have to be defensiveness or aggressiveness or anything like that. They can often be sort of the subtle anxiety or concern in the background when your mind starts to go to a topic and then flinches away from it because it might turn out if I start going down that road, I might have to conclude that, shoot, I shouldn't have entered the PhD program in the first place or like, I really am going to have to break up with my partner. And these are unpleasant to think about. And so we automatically flinch away from them. But if you become more attuned to your emotional reactions, they can just be important clues as to what are the blind spots you're creating for yourself and where are they”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man, that's a big question. Well, I guess one thing we haven't really touched on is being attuned to your emotional reactions, which was a big thing that I don't think it was really on my radar so much before I started CFAR, but there's, so your emotions kind of are often in the background of your thinking. And so you become defensive, you don't even really notice that you're defensive. You just start having thoughts like, oh, this person is out to get me or like, oh, this isn't fair, or you start looking for things to criticize about them instead of, you know, trying to evaluate their criticism of you. And you're actually getting defensive. Your body's tensing up or your shoulders are sort of turning in. You can't see my shoulders. I'm doing it now.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and that was something I started trying to do intentionally, and now it happens automatically. And to be fair, it is still, there's still some extra steps there happening in my mind that I wouldn't be spending the effort on if I didn't do this at all, but at least the process happens kind of quickly and automatically. So that is the goal to try to get some of these explicit processes to eventually lodge themselves in your system one and your intuitive thinking. But I agree, there's a bit of an investment there. It's not quite as effortless and easy as just using your default thinking systems.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the other thing I would say is that the whole goal with habits is that they become automatic over time. So there are a lot of things that I find myself automatically doing now. Like when someone I dislike says something, I now sort of automatically, well, actually not all the time, but I sort of have an intuitive sense for when this would be a useful thing to do. I will automatically imagine that someone I like said the exact same thing. And I notice when my reaction be different. In other words, was I sort of unfairly dismissing this person's argument because I don't like them, that kind of thing.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there is a cost. You're absolutely right. There's a reason system one and system two are called respectively fast and slow thinking systems.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a lot of what CFAR ended up doing was just taking this sort of abstract advice like the open-minded and translating it into these sort of very concrete, almost algorithms that start with a Q, with a trigger. So a queue might be I read an article that I disagree with. That's like a trigger. And then the action that I can take then to try to manifest the principle of open-mindedness is look for evidence that actually agrees with the article. So this is sort of a counter to our general tendency to only look for evidence that supports what we believe. So in this sort of trigger action plan, we call these”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's unlikely to actually change their behavior because their dietary choices are made up of all of these little moment-to-moment choices about what to eat and how much to eat, you know, when to stop eating and just having this abstract commandment, eat healthy in the back of their mind usually doesn't translate into changing their actions on a moment-to-moment basis.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The skeptic movement, or you could call it a community, I don't know. a group of people who are promoting scientific and critical reasoning and go around sort of testing and sometimes debunking things that turn out to be pseudoscience or I don't know paranormal or magical claims So anyway, I used to read a lot of skeptic blogs and listened to some skeptic podcasts. And I think skeptics are pretty good at giving advice about the importance of changing your mind, but it tends to be at a very sort of high abstract level, like be open-minded. That's good advice. It's important, but it's not clear how to concretely implement that. It's sort of like telling someone, you know, eat healthy.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the problem that I found when I read the pre-existing advice in, I don't know, skeptic blogs or do your listeners know what the skeptic movement is? Maybe I should just explain that very briefly.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, I guess I didn't quite answer how did we change our own minds question? I just answered the question, how do you become the kind of person who could go about changing their minds? Right, yeah.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the people I know. The other thing that I think can sometimes work even if you don't have the general motivation to change your mind is there's a particular goal that you need to achieve, like your startup is going to fail if you can't look at the data in a clear-eyed way and make the best decision you can about whether to pivot or not, that kind of thing. So sometimes these kind of immediate high stakes motivations can really make you want to see the world the way it as closely to the way it really is as possible and not see sort of a wishful thinking version of the world that you've created in your mind. It doesn't always work. Sometimes we still kind of try to distort or deny our perception of the world. But having that motivation can help. Did I answer your question? I can't remember what your question was.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And those people we gently turn away saying we don't think it's a good fit for them because the motivation really has to be I want to improve my own reasoning and notice my own blind spots. So my guess as to the things that cause someone to be not in that group of other focused people are my guess is that it's partly social, like the influence of the people around you because humans are primates and social creatures and the things that we're motivated to try to acquire or be tend to be very influenced by the culture in which we live. So if you're if your parents valued and rewarded changing your mind or if the people in your social circle value and reward changing your mind, I think that makes a huge difference. And that isn't just sort of an abstract a priori reasoning. I see that pattern just looking around.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of people just don't have that fundamental bottom layer. Like, they don't even want to be able to change their mind in particular situations. So I think it's like, I'm pretty pessimistic about the ability to get it to work in a particular situation. So I tend to focus on the bottom layer first. And to get that in place, again, I don't think it's the kind of thing you can sort of do to someone else. And when people, so we, you know, we have people go through an admissions process to come to our workshops just to make sure it's going to be a good fit for them because it's kind of an investment of time and money. We want to make sure it's a good fit. And so one of the questions we ask them in the admissions interview is why are you interested in coming? What are you hoping to get out of it? And sometimes occasionally we get someone who says, well, I want to learn how to explain rationality to the people around me so that they realize how irrational they are.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So I guess I have this mental model. It's sort of a two layer mental model where the bottom, the more fundamental layer is just abstractly, but sincerely wanting to be able to change your mind. And that doesn't mean that in any given situation, like if you read an article saying that caffeine, well, that's a bad example because nutrition data is not very reliable. But let's say you read a reliable article showing that a reliable study showing that caffeine was really bad for you, but you've cherished your morning cup of coffee or your three cups of coffee a day. That is going to be hard to hear. And the natural reaction is to find a reason to dismiss the study. And that's often going to happen even if you have that fundamental layer in place of believing in general that you would like to be the kind of person who changes your mind. The distinction I was trying to make with in my response to the closed-minded phrase is I think”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make better decisions for myself and for other people. I'll probably be able to avoid hurting other people if I have more accurate model of the world. And so the implication of that is I would like to change my mind when I encounter new evidence. In fact, I want to seek out new evidence that might cause me to change my mind, not just sort of passively accept it when it comes.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's less interesting to me, but I'll still give my best answer to it. So to change your own mind, I mean, the first step I would say is just believing that that's a desirable thing to do, which many or most people don't really either would explicitly say is a bad thing to do because changing your mind makes you kind of wishy-washy or weak or stupid, or they would explicitly claim it's a good thing to do, but they don't really believe it on a sort of gut level. And so, you know, they don't have the motivation to do it, and therefore they're not going to do it. So step one is actually believing, yes, I believe on a gut level that there's probably a bunch of things I'm wrong about that I'm not yet aware of just because that's true of everyone. And also that whatever it is I'm wrong about, I would like to know about that because I'll probably be able to”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that is the order in which I'm interested in the order of questions you asked is the order in which I'm interested in them. It's difficult because usually for other people the order is reversed. And when I want to talk about, okay, here's how to be better at changing your own mind. People often interrupt me and they're like, no, no, no. I want to change other people's minds. How do I convince my co-workers, my partner that they're wrong?”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal of pleasure. Lots of art is about pleasure. So I'm glad you asked the question, actually, because this is exactly the kind of thing that I think people neglect when they think about optimizing for their goals. And these are, in fact, very important goals that people miss when they don't have them, but somehow they don't really seem to come to mind when people think about, okay, now I'm going to try to be rational.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I just wanted to get that in. So, Ryan answered to your question about art and rationality. I mean, I would say the only obvious connection to me, I kind of think of art as being orthogonal, independent of rationality, the kinds of things that the artist is trying to do are mostly not trying to get the right answer to a question or achieve a goal. It's more of an expressive process. But in terms of appreciating art, I'd say for many people, maybe for most people, for some form of art, that's very important for their goals. And the kinds of goals in thinking of are indeed the kinds of goals that people usually don't think of when I say the word goals, but are still very important goals like the goal of feeling connected to other humans on the planet, the goal of, I don't know, feeling a sense of meaning or finding a sense of meaning.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So it just means to present this weak caricature of what your opponent is arguing and then knock that down because it's easier to knock down. And so the struggle can is like a weak caricature of rationality. It's not actual rationality, but it's like easier to sort of make fun of and knock down than real rationality.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. Oh, by the way, before I answer your question, I realize I forgot to give the name of that character. The name for that trope, that archetype is the straw Vulcan. It's a play on the expressions the straw man. Do you know the expression to straw man someone?”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time to be able to do this well and to just spit out a quick answer about how this person feels about me. So that's a long-winded way to say that system one intuition is indispensable. The couch is just that it's often fallible. And so rationality is less about ignoring or suppressing system one intuition and more about understanding the sort of respective strengths and weaknesses of the two systems and learning how to sort of get them to communicate with each other, so to speak, get your system two to listen to your system one and get your system one to listen to your system two and sort of update your emotional or intuitive impressions if they seem flawed in that situation.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very fast. And it's very good at processing lots of information that you've sort of picked up often unconsciously over the course of your life. So when you're, you know, forget about pens hitting foreheads, let's take a real example. If you're in a social situation, you can sort of pick up things, you can pick up social cues to varying extents. If you can detect whether someone is frustrated with you or bored or flirting with you or threatening you, you usually can't fully articulate what it is about their tone of voice or their facial expressions that's giving you that impression, but you're still pretty confident it's happening. And the reason you can't articulate it is that it's your system one, your intuition that's doing all of that processing. And it's doing it in this very black box kind of way. But this is what it's had practice over the many years of interacting in social situations. And so it's learned over.”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had, well, we're on opposite sides of the continent right now, I think, so you're safe, but if we meet in person someday and I throw a pen at your head and you are only able to choose what to do using your system too, it would be absurd, your system two would have to sort of reason through all the possible ways to react. It might say to itself, okay, well, first let's calculate the trajectory of the pen approaching my head and its velocity and I can estimate, okay, it'll probably approach, hit my forehead in half second. What are my choices I could stay still? I could try to dodge. Maybe I could try to catch the pen. Let's weigh the pros and cons of each option. And it would quickly be a moot point, right? The pen would have already hit your head. And this is sort of the drawback of your system too. It's sort of slow and laborious and effortful. Although it can do things that your system one can't do. Your system one is...”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or finding something beautiful, and that is not what we or cognitive scientists deem rationality. The actual scientific model, which I think is also pretty common sense when you think about it, is our brains, our minds are divided. We do have a more intuitive side of our mind, which cognitive scientists call system one. It's kind of a dull name. I apologize for that. And then we also have this more recently evolved part of our mind that allows us to do logical reasoning, way abstract trade-offs against each other, do math, long-term planning, that kind of thing. It's very roughly speaking, it's our”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so I know a common conception of rationality in the public, in the media, is that rationality means dismissing or suppressing your intuition. There's often this dichotomy set up of reason and rationality on the one hand and then intuition and emotion on the other hand. And so this sort of perceived dichotomy gives rise to characters in movies or TV shows that are sort of explicitly the rational one or the logical one. And what that means in practice for the characters' actions is that they're the one who goes around poo-pooing other people's thoughts and feelings and looking down their nose at people for having fun or falling in love or”
2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT