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Interactive Modules
Interactive Modules We Recommend
Open Mind: An Interactive Guide to Navigating Difficult Conversations
A free mini-course that teaches you how to navigate interactions around sensitive or controversial topics so you can avoid damaging arguments or uncomfortable silences.
The Evolution of Trust
Created by Nicky Case, this fun, interactive program explains the mechanics of interpersonal trust as originally theorized in Robert Axelrod's seminal 1984 book The Evolution Of Cooperation.
The Wisdom and Madness of Crowds
Created by Nicky Case, this fun, interactive program uses network science to explain why crowds sometimes behave more rationally than individuals and, at other times, behave far less rationally!
A Wizard’s Guide to Statistics
Created by Cassandra Xia, this interactive story-telling game teaches the basics of statistics, including independence, joint and conditional probabilities, expected value, p-values, and Bayes Rule!
Adventures in Cognitive Biases
Created by Cassandra Xia, this interactive story-telling game teaches the user about 13 cognitive biases - those patterns in our thinking that prevent us from seeing the world clearly - and explains how to overcome them.
Seeing Theory
Seeing Theory was created by Daniel Kunin while an undergraduate at Brown University. The goal of this website is to make statistics more accessible through interactive visualizations.
Podcasts We Recommend
Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg
Join our founder, Spencer, as he has conversations with brilliant people about ideas that truly matter, covering topics in psychology, philosophy, science, math, economics, self-help, mental health, and technology.
The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin
80,000 Hours is dedicated to helping people use their careers to improve the world. Their podcast features conversations about the world's most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them.
Rationally Speaking
Hosted by Julia Galef for New York City Skeptics, this podcast features engaging and questioning conversations with experts in science, politics, economics, and technology.
Effective Altruism: An Introduction
Ten curated episodes from the team behind The 80,000 Hours Podcast that summarize the central ideas of the effective altruism movement. Episode 4 features our founder, Spencer, explaining how to update our beliefs in the face of new information, among other things!
By the Book
Hosts Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer choose a different self-help book to live by for each episode of this podcast, following every rule down to the letter, to find out which advice might actually be life changing.
The Next Big Idea
Hosted by Rufus Griscom and featuring thought-leaders like Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink, each episode of this podcast is a deep dive into one big idea with the most interesting authors at work today.
The Happiness Lab
Join Yale professor Dr. Laurie Santos to learn about the latest scientific research on happiness that will alter the way you think about your well-being.
Podcasts
Books We Recommend
Books
The Scout Mindset
Written by Julia Galef (host of the Rationally Speaking podcast), this book explores two different modes of thinking that shape how we experience reality: the “soldier” mindset and the “scout” mindset.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
This book summarizes the behavioural science research of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, featuring famous insights into cognitive biases, the psychology of choice, and how our memory affects our happiness.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s famous book draws on decades of research and the results of a huge public forecasting tournament (the Good Judgement Project) to explain the secrets behind successfully predicting the future.
Decisive
In this book, Chip and Dan Heath explore the psychology behind decision-making biases and introduce a four-step process for counteracting these biases based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature.
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Drawing on psychology and behavioral economics experiments, this book explains how to avoid common biases and faulty heuristics in decision-making processes.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Focusing on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events, this book examines how humans tend to oversimplify the explanations for such events and what we should do instead.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
An instructional guide on how to change your behavior in small simple steps.
The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
Written by ethicist Peter Singer, this book uses thought-experiments and case studies to argue that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but ethically indefensible. It concludes with a seven-point plan to help readers solve this problem.
Centre for Applied Rationality Handbook
Written to accompany workshops at CFAR, this handbook provides definitions for many of the important terms used in applied rationality. It’s designed explicitly for those in attendance at CFAR workshops, but we think there’s a lot of valuable stuff to be gained from it even if you’ve never been to one.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
A popular Harry Potter fanfiction with the premise that Harry is an (almost) completely rational eleven year old boy about to embark on life in the wizarding world.
Note: To help fund the free decision-making tools and programs that we provide, ClearerThinking.org is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com). If you buy these books you'll be supporting ClearerThinking.org in its mission to make free tools that help the world make better decisions.
Other Resources We Recommend
Other Resources
Ten Conditions for Change: a framework for creating positive behaviors
Developed by the team at Spark Wave (who are responsible for founding ClearerThinking.org), this comprehensive behavior change resource breaks behavior change down into three actionable phases and provides hundreds of specific behavior change strategies that target each of the ten conditions for change.
80,000 Hours’ career planning course
A free, 8-week course for those who want to have a career that is both fulfilling and impactful. This in-depth program includes weekly tasks grounded in years of research into career-planning and is designed to help people develop a robust, meaningful career plan regardless of where they are in their working life.
Conceptually
A site that teaches you core concepts for understanding the world so that you can change it for the better. You can sign up to learn a new concept every week!
Mind Ease
Developed by the team at Spark Wave, this app is designed to help those with acute anxiety. It contains short, evidence-based exercises to help you reduce your stress-levels quickly.
Uplift
Developed by the team at Spark Wave, this app is designed to help you overcome depression. After completing the 12 sessions that the app provides, users report a 50% lasting increase in their mood.
GuidedTrack
Developed by the team at Spark Wave, this online, easy-to-learn software allows you to build your own web applications (accessible via a web browser or smartphone), which might include interactive educational materials, self-help programs, polls, surveys, and choose-your-own-adventure stories.
Positly
Developed by the team at Spark Wave, Positly is a participant recruitment service that allows researchers to source high-quality participants and manage complex studies and surveys.
Thought Saver
Developed by the team at Spark Wave, Thought Saver is built to help you more effectively learn, remember and take action on valuable information to produce better outcomes.
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