Julia Galef

Julia Galef

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

A woman with long brown hair, wearing a dark blazer, maroon top, and a beaded necklace, poses against a plain white background.

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.

3 min
The sunk cost fallacy means making a choice not based on what outcome you think is going to be the best going forward but instead based on a desire not […]
Think of an argument as a collaboration where the two sides are trying to find the right answer.
When you concede a point, what you're doing is making an investment in your ability to be taken seriously and listened to by people in the future.
You can take your competitive drive and use it to make you more receptive to changing your mind if the evidence warrants it. 
One widely useful mental habit that we teach in our class at the Center for Applied Rationality is called reference class forecasting, and it’s for the most part, in the literature, […]
A tool to help you consider an argument on its own merits instead of being tainted by your current feelings towards the person making it.
One of the most important things you can do is just accept your need for ego validation.