The speech of rationalists is heavy on the vernacular, often derived from programming language: “updating your priors” (keeping an open mind), “steel-manning” (arguing with the strongest version of whatever point your opponent is making), “double-cruxing” (trying to get to the root of a disagreement). Galef, however, is an amiable ambassador for the movement, adept at distilling its concepts in an accessible and plainspoken manner. And because of their devotion to hyperanalysis, some members of the community can present as arrogant and lacking in EQ. Slate Star Codex - recently renamed Astral Codex Ten - the most prominent rationalist blog, has caused controversy by countenancing free-flowing discussion of topics such as race science and female harassment of men. In opposition to mainstream online culture, which believes that certain arguments should be off-limits, the rationalsphere wants to be able to talk about anything. To the extent that the rationalist movement has been written about, its eccentricities have tended to get outsize attention: Some rationalists live in group houses with names like Event Horizon and Godric’s Hollow polyamory and a preoccupation with the existential risk posed by AI are both overrepresented. “We both work remotely” - he’s a program officer focused on artificial intelligence at the effective-altruism organization Open Philanthropy - “we’re both introverts, we’re both minimalists, and we both like novelty.” “It suits our personalities and lifestyle,” she says. Galef holds her laptop camera up to the window, revealing a burbling creek outside. Right now, they are near Great Smoky Mountains National Park in a golf-course Airbnb. 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. 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.
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