Learn To Improve Your Decision Making - Julia Galef - #332

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Julia Galef. She's the co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, a podcaster and an author. Boris Johnson's former chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, said that tens of thousands of COVID deaths could have been prevented if the government had read Julia's book. Why is it that he swears by this rationalist manifesto? Today, expect to learn what most people get wrong about confidence, the difference between a soldier and a scout mindset, why attitude is more important than knowledge for effective judgment, how to avoid being self-deceptive, what the rationality movement has got most wrong, and much more. I did not think that we'll be using Dominic Cummings as an example for an intro to this podcast, but here we are, it is 2021 Julia's awesome, her insights into the absolute cutting edge of what is effective human judgment and decision-making is phenomenal. She is one of the best voices coming out of the rationality movement, and I'm confident that you're going to take tons and tons away from today. But now it is time for the wise and wonderful Julia Galef.
Julia Galef, welcome to the show.

**Julia Galef** (1:31)
Thank you, good to be here, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (1:33)
Is being as rational as possible something that everyone should aim to do all the time?

**Julia Galef** (1:39)
Well, so like any philosophy nerd, I want to immediately define all of the terms that you just used in that sentence so we can understand how we're using different words. But I'll start with the idea of being rational. I think a lot of people hear that word and they think of being like Spock from Star Trek, where you're not allowed to have any emotion and you're only allowed to do things that you can justify in dollars and cents or in time efficiency or something like that. That's not actually, that's not how academics use the word rational. It's not how I'm used to thinking of the word rational. Rationality is just about forming beliefs that are as accurate as you can. That's one kind of rationality and another kind is just making decisions that help you achieve your goals, whatever those goals might be. Those goals could be helping people you care about or it could be enjoying life or succeeding at whatever you want. But the goal of being more rational is to just find more effective ways to get those goals for lower cost or sacrifice. So to find that way, I think it's harder to argue that being rational is not something we should strive for.
And so, yes, I think improving your, they're called epistemic and instrumental rationalities, is a really valuable goal. And I tend to argue that improving your ability to see things clearly and have accurate beliefs actually is a really good way to achieve your goals, to be more instrumentally rational. That there's a real synergy between those two kinds of rationality that I think people should be more aware of.

**Chris Williamson** (3:19)
The problem is that most people aren't aware of just how irrational they are being. Most people presume that the decisions that they're making are going to take them towards their goals, right? If they have goals, they don't purposefully make decisions that don't take them toward them. But it's kind of like the emperor has no clothes in a weird way. They don't know that the things that they're doing are irrational.

**Julia Galef** (3:39)
Yeah, I mean, I think in the moment, we never feel like, yes, I'm doing an irrational thing. But I do think that many people are able to kind of zoom out, take a step back and think, you know, okay, yes, I do sometimes do things that are like predictably bad for my goals. Like I do sometimes put off working on a project until the day before it's due. And I know from past experience that that tends to shoot me in the foot and I do a worse job. But I still do it anyway, because for various reasons, you know, there's always like a short-term temptation that can pull you into doing something that you know is bad for your goals. Or, you know, you might lash out in anger at someone, even though there's no real, there's no real expectation there that you're going to improve the situation by yelling at someone, but you just feel compelled to do it anyway. And so I think, I think people can often recognize that at least, you know, in the past, they have done things that they, now except we're not the most rational strategy for getting the things that they want. But in the moment, it's really hard to recognize that.