skepticon panel julia galef relationships

Skepticon panel julia galef relationships how to#

The sort who says things like ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation’ or ‘it seems like you are projecting’ or ‘can we stick to the facts and leave the ad hominen attacks at the door’. Surely we have all met one of these people in our travels. Aristotle liked to talk of the ‘golden mean’ – his rational position between two extremes – and this book certainly plays that idea for all that it is worth – but actually, I sometimes feel that the centre can be just as extreme as any of the ‘ends’.

But I’ve started thinking that perhaps the geometric figure that most accurately describes ideas is the triangle. Then I thought of this continuum as being more like a circle, where the far left and far right end up virtually touching – something the current pandemic has made particularly clear to me as I’ve watched as some Marxists have started sounding much more like Q-Anon supporters. I used to think of political beliefs as existing on a continuum running from left to right. There is a kind of smug, self-satisfaction to books like this that invariably make me feel, regardless of how useful parts of them might prove to be, uncomfortable.

Skepticon panel julia galef relationships how to#

With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world-which anyone can learn. In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe-and shoot down those we don't.īut if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a scout mindset. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a soldier mindset. When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see.