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Julia Galef

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67
first
2016-02-20
most recent
2016-02-20
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Clearly, the thing you're doing now is not the best choice. If the best choice is staying at your job, then it means staying at your job and finding a way to make it actually fulfilling and to make yourself actually succeed at it. The best choice is not doing a half-ass job at your current job. Can kind of eliminate your current strategy, or it sounds silly, but that is in fact the way a lot of us make our decisions by default.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “It's low hanging fruit, I think. I mean, so often in my work at CFAR, I guess I didn't get to fully finish explaining what we do, but the short rest of the explanation is that we, in addition to sort of doing some of our own research on these topics, we run workshops where we run training sessions teaching people some of the more promising techniques that we've been developing to help overcome some of these biases and make better decisions. And so often I find myself in this situation where someone is kind of, they're at some crossroads, you know, they're at their job and they don't really like it and they're not motivated. They're not really doing good work at all, but they don't really know what they should be doing instead. And they're having a lot of trouble figuring out what the best choice is. And so usually my answer in that case is, okay, I don't know what the best choice is. I don't think you have any way to know what the best choice is.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Well, it's an interesting theoretical question. I suppose if you had access, if you had perfect information about the world, there might be one optimal choice that was slightly better than all the other choices in terms of its probability. But this is all very abstract. In practice, in practice, it's not helpful to think about there being one very best choice that you can know for certain. But you can, with some careful reasoning and using some good heuristics or rules of thumb, you can sort of rule out some obviously bad choices and try to make an educated guess among the set of plausible best choices.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Type of rationality. So the second type is instrumental rationality, and that's about making choices that given the best information you have at your disposal are most likely to achieve your goals. And I know the word goals kind of has associations for most people with like career goals and being productive and I don't know, maybe getting an award or getting something published. But in this context, it could really mean anything, anything you want or value, it could mean having friends, it could mean being happy, it could mean helping the world, whatever it is you care about, instrumental rationality is making choices that sort of you can systematically expect are most likely to achieve those goals as efficiently as possible.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Of top experts on a topic or looking at randomized controlled trials or something like that. And that's kind of an oversimplified description, but I'm just trying to sketch out what the spectrum of epistemic rationality looks like. Should I go on to the second version? Kevin, please.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah, so sometimes we talk about two types of rationality. On the one hand, we have epistemic rationality. And sorry, these aren't just CFR's terms. These are terms in cognitive science and philosophy. Right. So epistemic rationality is about using processes, processes for reasoning or processing information that systematically get you closer to an accurate model of how the world works. We can never be 100% confident and get the perfectly correct answer about everything about how the world works because we just have limited information and time and there's a lot of uncertainty. But some reasoning processes are just more reliable than others. So, I mean, to take a dumb example, making stuff up or believing what a random person on the street tells you will be a less reliable process for having an accurate model of the world than synthesizing the opinion.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Oof, how many hours do you have? It's hard. There's a sort of simple definition you could give that doesn't capture that much, and then there are increasingly complex definitions you can give that, you know, sacrifice parsimony for depth.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Academic research had sort of been building up for the last 50 years kind of culminating in Daniel Kahneman's research Nobel Award, Nobel Prize Award. And then the public interest in the topic had been growing over the past 10 years or so with books like Thinking Fast and Slow, but before that, Dan Arieli's predictably irrational nudge, lots of other books on behavioral economics and cognitive science. The thing was there was all this research on how the brain is irrational, what kinds of systematic reasoning and decision-making errors humans make, leading them to sort of systematically get the wrong answer to questions or systems.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “So, our mission is to develop strategies to improve on the default human processes for reasoning and making decisions and to educate people in those improved reasoning and decision-making strategies, and particularly with an eye towards having a positive impact on the world. The timing of founding the center for applied rationality, which we call CFAR, is basically we had noticed that the science on human rationality, or more precisely human irrationality, had kind of hit this peak over the last few decades. If you've heard of Daniel Kahneman, who wrote the bestseller thinking fast and slow, he won a Nobel Prize for his work on human irrationality and inspired a lot more work on similar topics. And there was just, you know, the”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Awesome is one way to put it. So yeah, I mean, there's a neat story there about how that helped me be skeptical, but I don't know. It's really hard to draw causal connections.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Voice, and eventually, you know, he would make me realize he was fibbing, but it was much more satisfying if I could figure it out myself, if I could learn to notice those little bells in my head of, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense before he gave it up”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Like that. So I think that was part of it. Well, the last thing I can think of in that space is I don't know if I'm joking about this, but my dad, well, sorry, the facts are true. I don't know. Can't tell if I'm serious about them, contributing to my interest and rationality, but the facts are that my dad has kind of a trickster spirit at the core of him. And sometimes, especially if he didn't know the answer to a question, he would just make up an answer. You know, if you've ever read Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin's dad is like, is the example, the poster child for this. So, you know, how does the radio play music? Well, little people inside the radio that have been, you know, shrunk and hired and hired to play whenever you turn on the switch, that sort of thing. And he would say it was this perfectly straight face, his very serious, you know, professorly tone of”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “And he rarely just gave me the answer. He would more often sort of lead me through a reasoning process in kind of a Socratic type way. And usually I couldn't actually reason my way from first principles as a seven-year-old to figuring out why the sky is blue. But I could sort of come up with some guesses and maybe I could sort of notice, oh, maybe that guess doesn't make sense, et cetera. So when I finally got the answer, it was sort of more satisfying because I had tried, you know how when you try to solve a puzzle and someone tells you the answer, it's much more satisfying and it sticks with you more than if they just tell you the puzzle and then tell you the answer straight away.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I think so. That's less of a vivid memory in my mind, but if I had to guess, I would say yes. I mean, my dad's, well, both of my parents, but my dad has more of a background in science. My mom's background is in math and statistics, actually. So my dad was the one I would more often ask questions about, you know, why is the sky blue, that kind of question about the world?”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Which I was interested in because it asks questions like how can we know things with any confidence about the world? How much evidence is enough to sort of change someone's position on something or should be enough? And through it all, I carried this memory of my parents as sort of an ideal in the back of my mind in terms of how to react when you encounter new evidence or good arguments.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “You know, the way that kids do about rules or what was fair or what's good behavior, etc. And sometimes, not usually, but some of the time my parents would come back later and say, you know, Julia, we thought about it, and we think you're right. We think this was unfair, or whatever. And I just, I remember feeling so, well, grateful for one that, you know, they had listened to me and taken me seriously, but also I felt admiration for them, you know, because they didn't have to change their minds. There was no, you know, no one was going to hold them accountable. I couldn't do anything about it. But they clearly wanted to, if I was right, they wanted to realize that I was right. So that kind of stuck with me, and I got pretty interested in good arguments, what counts as good evidence. I ended up majoring in statistics in college.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Well, people ask me that sometimes, and I don't have a great answer for it. I've sort of been interested in, I mean, before I knew the word rationality, I've been interested in what that word refers to as long as I can remember, basically. One of my guesses as to the origins of my interest is my parents. They're both very intellectually curious, smart for sure, but also intellectually curious people who like to inquire about the world and encourage me in my brother to be curious about the world. And more than that, they were also unusually good at changing their minds when presented with a good argument or when they encountered new facts that should change their mind. So I just have these vivid memories from when I was, oh, I couldn't have been more than six or seven, I think. And I would have these arguments with my parents.”

    2016-02-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #8 Julia Galef: The Art of Changing Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT