Today's episode of Rationally Speaking is sponsored by Givewell, a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding charities and publishing their full analysis to help donors decide where to give. They do rigorous research to quantify how much good a given charity does, how many lives does it save, or how much does it reduce poverty per dollar donated? You can read all about their research or just check out their short list

of top recommended evidence-based charities to maximize the amount of good that your donations can do.

It's free and available to everyone online. Check them out at give well.org. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm here today with Cal Turnbull.

Cal is the founder of Change My View, a subreddit that is a forum on Reddit.com,

created to be a place for reasonable discussion, where basically what it says in the title.

People come with a view that they are interested in maybe changing in some way,

or having people show them aspects of their view where they might have been missing something

or where there might be more nuanced than they realized,

and other people on the subreddit point out those potential flaws in blind spots,

and often people come away with a changed version of their original view. It's a true

rarity on the internet. So we're going to talk today about how change my view works, what makes it

work, and how it came to be. Cal, welcome to the show. Hello, thank you for having me.

So how long ago did you start to change my view?

So just over five years now in January 2013. What were you doing at the time, you know, in your life?

So I was in my final year of secondary school, so high school. And basically I was I was coming towards

the end of that year I had my

grades I had my university offers and and so it was a bit of a weird time a bit of a

reflective time and and so yeah I just kind of it all came about in that moment and so

it's been around about five years. How big is it?

How many people use it? Yeah. So we have 549,000 subscribers at the moment. And yeah, it's growing

quite fast, really, maybe about 800 subscribers a day on average. So tell us how it works.

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