Julia Galef
Article
Julia Galef is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between September 29, 2021 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset”; “Julia Galef is extremely prepared for your trollish comments”; “Hey, this is Julia Galef - just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your t”. It most often appears alongside American, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Kahneman.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: September 29, 2021
- Last seen: May 30, 2025
Appears In
- Book Review: The Scout Mindset
- Highlights From The Comments On Health Care Systems
- What Are We Arguing About When We Argue About Rationality?
- Your Book Review: The Laws of Trading
- Bayes For Everyone
Related Pages
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- American (2 shared issues)
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- Eliezer Yudkowsky (2 shared issues)
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- Kahneman (2 shared issues)
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- LessWrong (2 shared issues)
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- Mark (2 shared issues)
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- rationalist community (2 shared issues)
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- Sam Bankman-Fried (2 shared issues)
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- Scott (2 shared issues)
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- scout mindset (2 shared issues)
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- Steven Pinker (2 shared issues)
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- The Scout Mindset (2 shared issues)
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- XKCD (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
You tried Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. Yet without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t).
Julia Galef is extremely prepared for your trollish comments to this effect. She avoids the “Scouts are better than Soldiers” dichotomy, instead, arguing that both these mindsets have their uses but right now we lean too hard in the direction of Soldier. She gives lots of evidence for this (including an evolutionary argument that Soldier was more useful in small bands facing generally simple problems). I’ll review a little of this; for the full story, read Chaper 3 of the book.
“Wow,” I thought. I admired both the fact that Luke didn’t change his mind in the face of strong pressure, and the fact that he did change his mind in response to strong arguments. I decided to message him and share my appreciation: “Hey, this is Julia Galef - just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your thoughtful writing! It feels like you actually care what’s true.”
DoTheMath now says he is “tentatively convinced” of GummyBearDoc’s claim (good for both of you! Julia Galef gives you shiny gold stars!)
Inline links: Julia Galef
A few weeks ago, when I posted my predictions for 2022, a commenter mentioned that various “rationalist” “celebrities” - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Julia Galef, maybe even Steven Pinker - should join in, and then we would find out who is most rational of all. I hope this post explains why I don’t think this would work. You can’t find the best economist by asking Keynes, Hayek, and Marx to all found companies and see which makes the most profit - that’s confusing money-making with the study of money-making. These two things might be correlated - I assume knowing things about supply and demand helps when starting a company, and Keynes did in fact make bank - but they’re not exactly the same. Likewise, I don’t think the best superforecasters are always the people with the most insight into rationality - they might be best at truth-seeking, but not necessarily at studying truth-seeking.
Inline links: Keynes did in fact make bank
Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed. With The Laws of Trading, Agustin Lebron has written something different: part love letter to trading, part philosophical treatise on epistemology and modeling the world around us, and part guide to applied decision-making. Lebron’s Laws are Laws of the Jungle, not Laws of Nature. He views financial markets as the most competitive Darwinian environment on Earth, where participants must adapt or die. According to Lebron, the book is for people working in finance and trading, as well as anyone in the business of making rational decisions. This explicitly rationalist bent is similar to Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset or Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. Where The Laws of Trading sets itself apart is with the best description of financial market dynamics that I’ve ever seen while diving deep into philosophical concepts. Why trust Lebron? He is an engineer, worked as a quantitative trader and researcher at Jane Street, and has a deep understanding of trading. He has what Taleb would describe as skin in the game. You and I may read Astral Codex Ten in our spare time, post on LessWrong, and navel gaze about our epistemic certainty, but at the end of the day most of us are pursuing rationality for fun, as a hobby. Traders like Lebron pursue rationality as a profession: Their livelihood depends on having a better model of the world than their competition. There are lessons to learn from them that apply to our daily lives. 1: Motivation Know why you are doing a trade before you trade. “What is trading about? Fundamentally, it’s about the relationship between you and the rest of the world.” Right now, you’re making a trade. You’re trading your time to read this book review. You have a cost: you could be spending time with your loved ones, exercising, working, sleeping. You might be hoping to learn something, to take away lessons that you can apply to your life, or simply to entertain yourself. Here, off the bat, are two key insights: We are all making trades, all of the time.
Inline links: The Laws of Trading
Over the years quite a few folks have attempted to explain it clearly. Eliezer wrote his famous essay back in 2003 (which Khalid Azad helpfully summarized in 2007), Scott’s written about it a number of times, Steven Pinker takes a whack at it in Rationality, Julia Galef speaks about it on BigThink, and so on and so forth. Recently, there’s even been a book explaining Bayes to babies. Bayesianism has become quite a racket!
Inline links: his famous essay back in 2003, helpfully summarized in 2007, http://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters/dp/0525561994, speaks about it on BigThink, a book explaining Bayes to babies
This, I think, is actually the deepest value of teaching kids Bayes: it’s a way to get them to converse with people whose views they think are stupid. And it’s only through actually doing that that we have any chance of helping people become rational. Such conversations (done with checking each other’s math) are the way to inculcate an openness to being wrong, a detached self-worth, comfort with uncertainty, and all the other aspects of what Julia Galef has so winsomely dubbed scout mindset. Approached this way, Bayes isn’t the weirdo, quant-y capstone to scout mindset — it’s the publicly-accessible front door.