![]() We’re also advertising open positions for curriculum developers, executive assistants, a programmer, and some amount of consulting work, though at the moment we’re still in the launch stage and paying relative peanuts. We’re exercising the rationalist virtue of empiricism by testing our ideas on live audiences every Saturday, and iterating rapidly – we can never have enough test subjects. We are currently seeking test subjects for exercises under development, especially if you reside in the Bay Area if you haven’t read through the Sequences on LessWrong dot com, that’s fine, we need test subjects like that. News #3: The other reason I’ve been busy lately is that I’ve been working with Anna Salamon (also of my host research institute) and Julia Galef (of skeptic community fame) on launching a new nonprofit – tentatively titled the Center for Modern Rationality – to systematize cognitive-science-based how-to-think training at a much higher level than modern ‘critical thinking’ courses. Overwhelming thanks and kudos to Josh Larios aka RJL20 for programming, and Lightwave for design work. If you aren’t already signed up for email notifications, I strongly recommend doing that rather than repeatedly visiting the front page every day at 7pm until the pain becomes too much for you. As a result, all information previously in the author’s profile (fanart, translations, etc.) has been moved to, which now also offers one-click, no-login-required email subscription to future chapter updates. ![]() News #2: has disabled links in author’s profiles. ![]() I’m still writing faster than a lot of professional writers, and individual event-chapters will be published as soon as they’re finished. In any case it’s probably better if you treat future installments as novellas that arrive now and then, rather than chapters you expect on a weekly basis. (I actually was set up to update Friday before the move, and then somebody pointed out that this was the eve of the SAT in America which is pretty darned important as life events go then Saturday was the move but at least I’m squeaking in on the 11th, at the end of the promised period.) Being in Berkeley may or may not speed up my writing I make no promises, but it sure was tiring the other way. News #1: I’ve moved to Berkeley, a big change from commuting between Redwood City and Berkeley like for the last several months. Since then I’ve been working full time at CFAR - read more about us on my Projects page.I’ll update fan art along with the next chapter – I just don’t have time to do it right now. After meeting with them a few times, they invited me to move out to Berkeley to co-found the organization with them, and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) was born in early 2012. ![]() In late 2011 I heard through the grapevine that several friends-of-friends of mine in Berkeley, CA, had secured funding to start a non-profit organization to figure out how to improve human rationality. And we should be developing mental technologies to overcome those biases. In particular, now that we have a clearer picture of human irrationality, we should be asking ourselves how our biases are affecting our judgment about critical problems like how to reduce suffering and how to estimate catastrophic risks. Going back to early civilizations you can see simple but powerful examples, like the Golden Rule, or the idea of trade. As our societies have progressed, we’ve developed more complex mental technologies - utilitarianism and other ethical frameworks, various iterations of the scientific method, the concept of randomized controlled trials, and so on.Īnd it increasingly seemed to me that developing better mental technologies was crucial to our future. I became especially interested in what you might call “mental technologies” - concepts, or ways of thinking, that help humanity improve our world. I wrote for a wide range of publications and blogs (like Slate, Scientific American, Metropolis, The Architect’s Newspaper, Rationally Speaking, and 3 Quarks Daily), and in 2010 I launched the Rationally Speaking Podcast with philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci. in statistics from Columbia University in 2005, I spent several years doing research with social science professors at Columbia, Harvard and MIT, including a year writing case studies on international economics for Harvard Business School. I began a PhD in economics, but soon decided I didn’t want to be in academia after all, left grad school, and moved back to New York to be a freelance journalist.
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