Julia Galef

juliagalef.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2017

Julia Galef writes about rational thinking, calibration, social norms, and public policy, and wrote The Scout Mindset.

What HN saysCommenters include it in lists of good blogs; one questions its 'wonderful' status over a post on unpopular ideas about social norms.
19HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
15stories submitted
453story points
11 months agolast shared
2017people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Unpopular ideas about social norms
    3 people · 34 points · first shared 2017 · 16 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Does Irrationality Fuel Innovation?
    2 people · 150 points · first shared 2017 · 41 comments on HN
  3. 3
    Should we build lots more housing in San Francisco?
    2 people · 71 points · first shared 2017 · 125 comments on HN
  4. 4
    A palindromic poem for Douglas Hofstadter
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  5. 5
    Julia Galef: The Scout Mindset
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    Brief thoughts on the “Google memo”
    1 people · 183 points · first shared 2017 · 179 comments on HN
  7. 7
    A taxonomy of ways books change your worldview
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    Unpopular ideas about politics and economics
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
    We need a new word for "lazy" (2018)
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
  10. 10
    Insightful articles on free speech and social justice
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
  11. 11
    Map of Bay Area memespace (2013/17)
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  12. 12
    When is overconfidence useful (if ever)?
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
  13. 13
  14. 14
    Calibration
    1 people · first shared 2023

What HN people wrote when they linked it

eneuman · 2023-08-07
Hi HN community, I'm excited to share a short and engaging exercise I've developed, designed to help refine and calibrate your confidence levels. The aim? To align your confident predictions more accurately with reality - your 55% confident claims become 55% accurate, and your 95% confident assertions, 95% accurate. This interactive adaptation is inspired by Julia Galef's Scouts Mindset, and it provides a fun, hands-on way to fine-tune your confidence calibration. You can explore the original concept at https://juliagalef.com/calibration/. I've launched this exercise on PayPerRun.com, a platform I'm currently developing and eager to gather your valuable feedback on. For those interested in knowing more about PayPerRun, you can check out a previous post of mine here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035262. The source code of the exercise is available here: https://payperrun.com/e-neuman/fun/confidence_calibration?display=deve… Also, I've documented the building process of this exercise for you to follow through here: https://payperrun.com/e-neuman/fun/confidence_calibration. Have fun with this!
ewjordan · 2017-10-26
Yes, but a lot of people, for various reasons, either believe that econ 101 arguments don't apply in this situation or that even if they do, the effects of building market rate housing are still undesirable. Their actual stated arguments tend to be delivered in unconvincing ways, but Julia Galef (who I gather does believe in the econ 101 take) took a stab at steelmanning that side in https://juliagalef.com/2017/07/13/should-we-build-lots-more-housing-in… and it's definitely worth a read. What I'd add to her points is a fourth, that while some people believe that either overall affordability or total number of below market rate units are the right metrics to measure success by, some people care more about the percentage of affordable units than the number. An extreme version of the argument says that having 100 affordable units out of 200 total is better than having 200 affordable units out of 1000 total, because the second scenario will mean a strong demographic shift in the neighborhood (a "whitening"), not to mention an increase in density that will change the feel of the area. This is not an economic argument, but one about values, so it's not going to be resolved by numbers.
photios · 2025-12-15
Wondering about that too. What are the "wonderfullness" criteria? For example, the first article I clicked on: https://juliagalef.com/2017/08/23/unpopular-ideas-about-social-norms/ has some pretty vile stuff: > Non-offending pedophiles should be more widely accepted by society. It’s unfair to ostracize someone for a desire they were born with, and integrating them into society makes them less likely to cause harm.
mkstowegnv · 2018-08-10
For a line level palindrome homage to Douglas Hofstadter's Crab Canon see https://juliagalef.com/2017/02/21/a-poem-for-douglas-hofstadter/

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