Clearer Thinking module on Social Biases Released
Check out their latest learning module release here on social biases called "How Other People Can Make You Irrational".
Why do we support Spencer Greenberg and Clearer Thinking?
Spencer has for more than a decade been one of our society's most credible and tireless advocates for practical interventions to improve human wellbeing. His brand of authentic rationality tests its own assumptions and his organizations find the right balance of for-profit scale and effectiveness and non-profit collaboration and generosity. This is something worth celebrating and supporting.
Importantly for this project, their community has an active list of over 200k subscribers that can test new interventions and iterate!
Why add a Social Biases module - why are we supporting social biases research and tools?
Social biases aren't just an academic topic – understanding them is central to our ability to coordinate our species at every level from individual social belonging, to navigating racial and political differences, to international geopolitical disputes. These tribally evolved biases are so deep, that our social relationships even determine what we perceive as verifiable fact!
In a world of new capability unleashed by AI and biotechnology, and institutional upheaval triggered by the strain of aging societies, the coordination of humans reaching beyond their biases toward empathy becomes more important to study and learn about than ever.
What else does Clearer Thinking do?
Things they can help you do as an individual:
- They have a massive library of tools and mini-courses for personal growth.
- They have great write-ups of socially relevant research studies they performed.
- They created a new personality test that simultaneously gives you results for big five, enneagram and MBTI all in one test, that over 100,000 people have taken
- You can sign up for their newsletter or podcast or read more about their mission.
What's exceptional about their org:
- They have tools for teachers to help their students!
- Some of you may know about the replication crisis in social sciences (scientific knowledge from experiments that when you repeat them don't work!). Their transparent replications initiative aims to inexpensively reproduce important studies for the public interest.
- Guided Track - The tool they use to inexpensively build surveys, educational models, studies and explainers. You can use it too! We beta tested this early on and think its great.
Also Interesting: Clearer Thinking was launched by Spark Wave, which is an evidence-driven research lab and startup foundry applying social science, iterative experimentation, and careful analysis to create socially beneficial software companies. This is a similar to our Allied Strategy, which helped create Good Ancestor Foundation.
Other things they do which could help you (as an individual)
- Thought Saver - an app to help you build healthy daily habits and routines
- Mind Ease - an app that helps you overcome anxiety
- Ten Conditions for Change - a framework for creating positive behaviors
Other things they do, which could help you (as a scientist):
- Positly - Tool to efficiently recruit study participants
- Nimble - Python data science packages (open source)
- Personality Map - a map of over 1 million human correlations spanning personality, demographics, behaviors, and beliefs
For More
Spencer has over 250 essays plus video and podcast episodes you can sign up for https://www.spencergreenberg.com/
What you can do to help them: https://www.clearerthinking.org/support-us
Have an idea or org for us to assist? We are interested and seeking more opportunities in pragmatic research and interventions around In-Group Favoritism and decision dynamics. See our Civic, Social and Govtech Grantmaking or sign up to Volunteer with us.
If you liked Clearer Thinking
You may also be interested in some of our other grantees and assisted projects listed under Civic, Social and Govtech Grantmaking for example:
- Public Editor - A sense making tool released - a tool to inspect news for fallacies
- Ideas Beyond Borders - Ideas in the middle east - an organization that translates important enlightenment ideas to the middle east community
- Society Library - A digital library of arguments claim and views
If you're interested in reducing social biases in politics and civic society
You might like these grantees who focus on protecting our civilization and governments.
- Braver Angels - Jonathan Haidt's university program to bridge partisan divides
- More in Common - research based strategies combatting American political division
- Open to Debate - one of our favorite of the public debate initiatives
- Civilization Research Institute - The Consilience project - studying how understanding may emerge from the synergies between different viewpoints.
- Plurality Institute - work on voting guides and liquid democracy with social delegation
- Foresight Institute - Work on intelligent voluntary cooperation and book
- WeVote is using LLM's to summarize and search legislation and a verified voter website for direct communication between legislators and their real constituents about bills while they are being debated
- Harvard Council on Academic Freedom
If you're interested in tools you can use to reduce bias during conflicts in your local community
- Talk to the City - An open-source LLM tool to reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of collecting unbiased opinions from society - like pol.is
- Hand in Hand - Evidence based strategies for parent child interaction
- Our Tools that They Deserve - Evidenced based dispute resolution for schools
- Hylo - An open source tool for purpose built communities working to develop some features of group decision making to reduce leadership bias - similar to loomio
