How to Improve Reasoning and Decision Making

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I've been focused for the last 10, 15 years in my career and I guess just in my personal life as well on understanding how to improve reasoning and decision making. In 2012, I co-founded this educational nonprofit called the Center for Applied Rationality. And it's kind of obviously not true in retrospect that just knowing a lot about cognitive biases and logical fallacies will help you. It started to seem much more to me like the bottleneck for improving reasoning was not so much about knowing how to reason but instead about being motivated to use that reasoning in the service of figuring things out.

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What are "scout" and "soldier" mindsets? How can we have productive disagreements even when one person isn't in scout mindset? Is knowing about good rationality habits sufficient to reason well? When do we naturally tend to be in scout mindset or soldier mindset? When is each mindset beneficial or harmful? Are humans "rationally irrational"? What are the two different types of confidence? What are some practical strategies for shifting our mindset in the moment from soldier to scout?

Find out more about Julia at juliagalef.com.

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