On a Friday (June 17th 2022) afternoon, despite the lovely weather inviting us to do many other things, we still managed to gather in the Stadtgarten for our Rationality Freiburg meetup in the hope of an excellent discussion and improvement at Rationality; we were not disappointed at all !!

We open our discussion with the blog-posts in the Fake Beliefs sequence, with some snacks and sparkling water. As rationalists, we must ask ourselves about a belief and what we expect to see to know whether the view holds the test or not. A better way to do it would be what we do not wish to see or what evidence would falsify the belief.

The sequence talks about ‘Belief in belief,’ we can relate it to our lives in many different scenarios, most notably religion. And it shows us a picture of the exhausting tribalism we see in modern-day politics by introducing a fascinating analogy such as Green vs. Blue.

Following the discussion, we played a game of double crux in pairs. It was a captivating experience to discuss an issue where we disagree and then try to identify the fundamental root cause of that disagreement. We collaborated to to find that crux that makes us differ in opinion.

As it is becoming customary and it is normal to feel hungry after two hours of mental exercise, we went for some dinner in the city center in a Mexican restaurant. Where our discussion on the double crux game continued, it is like once you start peeling the layers, we were able to find that some parts of a disagreement aren’t actually disagreements. In the end, we all agreed, with a bit of practice, that it can be a very instrumental tool for resolving conflicts.