Julia Galef

Julia Galef

President of the Center for Applied Rationality, and Author “The Scout Mindset”

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Julia Galef is a New York-based writer and public speaker specializing in science, rationality, and design. She serves on the board of directors of the New York City Skeptics; co-hosts their official podcast, Rationally Speaking; and co-writes the blog Rationally Speaking along with philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci. She has moderated panel discussions at The Amazing Meeting and the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism and gives frequent public lectures to organizations, including the Center for Inquiry and the Secular Student Alliance. Julia received her B.A. in statistics from Columbia in 2005.

She is the author of The Scout Mindset, published in April 2021. The book is about the skill of looking at things honestly and objectively, why that’s so valuable, why it doesn’t come naturally to humans, and how we can get better at it.

7 min
How to maximize wins and minimize losses, explained by four experts on game theory.
A sequence of human silhouettes in shades of blue and green shows progressive motion of a person walking from left to right.
4 min
Think via Bayes’ rule to become more rational and less brainwashed.
John Templeton Foundation
There’s a danger to learning about cognitive biases and logical fallacies and so on which is that you end up with this tool kit of ways to reject other people’s arguments.
Why do we systematically underestimate the amount of time or money we are going to spend on a given project? 
Don’t stop at the first explanation that occurs to you, ask your inner rivals what competing explanations they can come up with.
It's important to challenge "good enough" explanations.
3 min
Bayes’ Rule is a formalization of how to change your mind when you learn new information about the world or have new experiences.