The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't

by Julia Galef

scout mindset: the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.

Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn’t help you unless you’re willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking.

I have no doubt humans have been irritated and amused by each other’s motivated reasoning for many thousands of years before that.

when you tell a lie, it’s hard to predict exactly what you’ve committed your future self to.

In reality, other people aren’t thinking about you nearly as much as you intuitively think they are, and their opinions of you don’t have nearly as much impact on your life as it feels like they do.

When you start from the premise that you’re an objective thinker, you lend your conclusions an air of unimpeachability they usually don’t deserve.

A recent survey of social and personality psychologists found that the ratio of self-identified liberals to conservatives was almost 14 to 1.7

the theory that conservatives have more rigid personalities than liberals isn’t an empirical finding at all—it’s a tautology.

The test of scout mindset isn’t whether you see yourself as the kind of person who does these things. It’s whether you can point to concrete cases in which you did, in fact, do these things.

One study examined the autopsy results for patients who had been given diagnoses with “complete certainty,” and found that in 40 percent of those cases, the diagnosis was incorrect.

This research does not tell us much about self-deception . . . though it might tell us something about the researchers themselves.

even though the rhetoric around “following your dream” makes it sound like everyone has one and only one dream, most people have more than one thing they enjoy and are good at, or could at least become good at.

scouts aren’t motivated by the thought, “This is going to succeed.” They’re motivated by the thought, “This is a bet worth taking.”

the more positive expected value bets you make, the more confident you can be that you’ll end up ahead overall, even if each individual bet is far from a sure thing.

Showing that you’re well-informed and well prepared on a given topic doesn’t require you to overstate how much certainty is possible on that topic.

The superforecasters, armed only with Google, beat the CIA by 30 percent.

that would be missing one of the biggest benefits of noticing your errors: the opportunity to improve your judgment in general.

most of the time, being wrong doesn’t mean you did something wrong. It’s not something you need to apologize for, and the appropriate attitude to have about it is neither defensive nor humbly self-flagellating, but matter-of-fact.

Natural selection wasn’t the only force shaping evolution. Sexual selection was just as important.

Scouts view anomalies as puzzle pieces to collect as you go through the world. You probably won’t know what to do with them at first. But if you hang on to them, you may find that they add up to a richer picture of the world than you had before.

Even correct ideas often sound wrong when you first hear them. The thirty-second version of an explanation is inevitably simplistic, leaving out important clarifications and nuance.

two things that turn a belief into an identity: Feeling embattled, and feeling proud.

The problem with identity is that it wrecks your ability to think clearly.

this is an unusually optimistic book. Not “optimistic” in the unjustified sense, where you’re supposed to believe things are wonderful no matter what, but optimistic in the justified sense: I think an honest look at our situation shows that we have cause for cheer.

we’re a bunch of apes whose brains were optimized for defending ourselves and our tribes, not for doing unbiased evaluations of scientific evidence.