#julia galef

[rickmctumbleface]

Excellent Article

Why you think you’re right, even when you’re wrong

Are you a soldier or a scout? Your answer to this question, says decision-making expert Julia Galef, might determine how clearly you see the

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https://youtu.be/vpnxd31y0Fo

Julia Galef   Big Think   September 25, 2013

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 to see your past investment go to waste.

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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.

TRANSCRIPT: So I want to introduce you to a concept known as the sunk cost fallacy.  Imagine that you’re going to the store and you’re halfway there when you realize, “Oh wait, the store is actually closed today.”  But you figure, “Well, I’ve already come ten blocks.  I might as well just go all the way to the store, you know, so that my ten blocks of walking won’t have been wasted.  Well, this is a transparently silly way to reason and I doubt that any of us would actually go all the way to a store that we knew was closed just because we’d already gone ten blocks.

But this pattern of thinking is actually surprisingly common in scenarios that are a little bit less obvious than the store example.  So, say you’re in a career and it’s becoming more and more clear to you that this isn’t actually a fulfilling career for you.  You’d probably be happier somewhere else.  But you figure I’ll just stick with it because I don’t want my past ten years of effort and time and money to have been wasted.  So the time and money and effort and whatever else you’ve already spent is what we call the sunk cost.  It’s gone no matter what you do going forward.  And now you’re just trying to decide given that I’ve already spent that money or time or whatever, what choice is going to produce the best outcome for my future.

And the sunk cost fallacy then 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 to see your past investment go to waste.

Once you start paying attention to the sunk cost fallacy you’ll probably notice at least a few things that you would like to be doing differently.  And maybe those will be small scale things like, in my case, I now am much more willing to just abandon a book if a hundred pages in I conclude that I’m not enjoying it and I’m, you know, not getting any value out of it rather than trudging through the remaining 200-300 pages of the book just because I don’t want, you know, my past investment of a hundred pages, the time that I spent reading those hundred pages to go to waste.

And you might notice some large things, too.  For example, I was in a Ph.D. program and started realizing, “Gee, this really isn’t the field for me.”  And you know, it’s a shame that I have spent the last several years preparing for and working in this Ph.D. program but I genuinely predict going forward that I’d be happier if I switched to another field.  And sometimes it really does take time to fully acknowledge to yourself that you don’t have any good reason to stick with the job or Ph.D. or project that you’ve been working on so long because sunk costs are painful.  But at least having the sunk cost fallacy on your radar means that you have the opportunity at least to push past that and make the choice that instead will lead to the better outcomes for your future.

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… the answer is emotional. So, just as soldier mindset is rooted in emotions like defensiveness or tribalism, scout mindset is, too. It's just rooted in different emotions. For example, scouts are curious. They're more likely to say they feel pleasure when they learn new information or an itch to solve a puzzle. They're more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations. Scouts also have different values. They're more likely to say they think it's virtuous to test your own beliefs, and they're less likely to say that someone who changes his mind seems weak. And above all, scouts are grounded, which means their self-worth as a person isn't tied to how right or wrong they are about any particular topic. So they can believe that capital punishment works. If studies come out showing that it doesn't, they can say, "Huh. Looks like I might be wrong. Doesn't mean I'm bad or stupid."  This cluster of traits is what researchers have found -- and I've also found anecdotally -- predicts good judgment. And the key takeaway I want to leave you with about those traits is that they're primarily not about how smart you are or about how much you know. In fact, they don't correlate very much with IQ at all. They're about how you feel. There's a quote that I keep coming back to, by Saint-Exupéry. He's the author of "The Little Prince." He said, "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up your men to collect wood and give orders and distribute the work. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."  In other words, I claim, if we really want to improve our judgment as individuals and as societies, what we need most is not more instruction in logic or rhetoric or probability or economics, even though those things are quite valuable. But what we most need to use those principles well is scout mindset. We need to change the way we feel. We need to learn how to feel proud instead of ashamed when we notice we might have been wrong about something. We need to learn how to feel intrigued instead of defensive when we encounter some information that contradicts our beliefs.

Julia Galef, Why you think you’re right - even if you’re wrong

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Julia Galef at the beginning of her video ‘How should we handle moral disagreements?’

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😂😂😂

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In other words, I claim, if we really want to improve our judgment as individuals and as societies, what we need most is not more instruction in logic or rhetoric or probability or economics, even though those things are quite valuable. But what we most need to use those principles well is scout mindset. We need to change the way we feel. We need to learn how to feel proud instead of ashamed when we notice we might have been wrong about something. We need to learn how to feel intrigued instead of defensive when we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs.

- Julia Galef

[arundelo]

Seaside Canon (for Douglas Hofstadter)

The ocean was still. In an empty sky, two gulls turned lazy arcs, and their keening cries echoed off the cliff and disappeared into the sea. When the child, scrambling up the rocks, slipped out of her parents’ reach, they called to her. She was already so high, but those distant peaks beyond — they called to her. She was already out of her parents’ reach when the child, scrambling up the rocks, slipped off the cliff and disappeared into the sea. Their keening cries echoed in an empty sky. Two gulls turned lazy arcs, and the ocean was still.

[This poem by Julia Galef is also “a line-level palindrome that tells a linear story, that is, a story in which a series of non-repeating events occur”.]

[dipnotski]

Julia Galef – İzci Gibi Düşünmek (2023)

Hayat gelişine yaşanmayacak kadar kıymetli bir serüven. Bu serüven boyunca akıntıya kapılmamak ve hataya az düşmek ise herkesin dileği. Peki ama nasıl? Julia Galef’e göre işin sırrı izci gibi düşünmekte saklı. İzci sahayı inceler, havayı koklar, gerçeği arar. İzci tehlikeleri öngörür, atacağı adımı bilir. Üstelik izci olmak için üstün zekaya ya da yılların birikimine gerek yoktur. Genellikle bir…

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