Assertion Not checkable as stated
Galef: Top charities can save 100 times more lives per dollar donated
“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? Yo…”
Insight
Galef: Overcoming Cognitive Biases Requires Practice on Real-Life Problems, Not Labs
“I would expect that to change ingrained habits of thought and behavior, you need more longer term practice on real life issues, not on toy problems, you know, in a lab.”
Insight
Galef: Purely rational arguments are likely insufficient to combat manufactured doubt
“Yeah, no, I really, I think it's really hard. And I think I'm not confident that there is a good way to do it while, while adhering, you know, perfectly to the standards of, you know, just using the best arguments and evidence. I think you probably have to als…”
Insight
Galef: Practical decision-making requires ruling out bad choices rather than seeking perfection
“In practice, it's not helpful to think about there being one very best choice that you can know for certain, but you can, you know, With some careful reasoning and using some good heuristics or rules of thumb, you can sort of rule out some obviously bad choice…”
Insight
Galef: Rationality Involves Integrating Intuition Rather Than Suppressing It
“Rationality is, it's 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 y…”
Insight
Galef: Appreciating art satisfies human goals often overlooked in rationality
“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 I'm thinking of Are indeed the kinds of goals that people usually don't think of when I say the…”
Insight
Galef: Changing your mind requires gut-level acceptance of your own blind spots
“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…”
Disclosure
Galef: CFAR rejects workshop applicants who want to fix others' irrationality
“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, like, learn how to explain rationality to the …”
Insight
Galef: Emotional reactions serve as clues to identifying cognitive blind spots
“If you become more attuned to the, to your emotional reactions they can just be important clues as to where you're, what are the blind spots you're creating for yourself, and where are they?”
Insight
Galef: Changing minds with facts is harder than using psychological cues
“Changing people's minds with facts is harder than changing their minds with a smile or a gift or a nice haircut.”
Insight
Galef: Expecting other people to behave rationally is itself fundamentally irrational
“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 peop…”
Disclosure
Galef: Constrains persuasion attempts strictly to facts and evidence
“I personally feel kind of morally uncomfortable with changing people's minds without facts and evidence. So 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 …”
Insight
Galef: Anyone can cherry-pick scientific studies to make a compelling case
“I think it's quite easy to present what looks like a very compelling case for whatever you want to convince people of. Using, using studies using quotes from experts, using even, even randomized controlled studies, which are sort of the gold standard allegedly…”
Insight
Galef: Beliefs must yield concrete predictions to be disproven by evidence
“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 beli…”
Assertion Supported
Galef: Tetlock's forecasters beat geopolitical and economic experts by a huge margin
“Basically, Phil Tetlock's team of forecasters outperformed by a huge margin, all the other teams of forecasters and like experts in, in politics and economics who are trying to make predictions about world events. And that's because Phil Tetlock's team was usi…”
Insight
Galef: Art creation is orthogonal to rationality because it is expressive
“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.”
Insight
Galef: Abstract advice fails to change moment-to-moment behavior
“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.”
Disclosure
Galef: CFAR translates abstract rationality advice into concrete trigger-action plans
“So a lot of what CFAR ended up doing was just taking this sort of abstract advice, like be open-minded, and translating it into these sort of very concrete almost algorithms that have, that start with a cue, with a trigger.”
Insight
Galef: Test your bias by imagining a friend making the opposing argument
“When someone I dislike says something, I now sort of automatically, well, actually not all the time, but it, 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 thi…”
Insight
Galef: Attempting to Solve a Problem First Makes the Solution Stick Better
“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.”
Julia Galef