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

by Julia Galef

our judgment isn’t limited by knowledge nearly as much as it’s limited by attitude.

There’s an equanimity that results from understanding risk and coming to terms with the odds you’re facing.

The best description of motivated reasoning I’ve ever seen comes from psychologist Tom Gilovich. When we want something to be true, he said, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe this?,” searching for an excuse to accept it. When we don’t want something to be true, we instead ask ourselves, “Must I believe this?,” searching for an excuse to reject it.4

In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs. If you find out you were wrong about something, great—you’ve improved your map, and that can only help you.

One person’s “My partner is coldly ignoring me” can be another person’s “I’m respectfully giving him space.” One person’s “authentic” can be another person’s “rude.” To be willing to consider other interpretations—to even believe that there could be other reasonable interpretations besides your own—requires scout mindset.

I try to abide by the rule that when you advocate changing something, you should make sure you understand why it is the way it is in the first place. This rule is known as Chesterton’s fence,

we often use soldier mindset to protect our egos by finding flattering narratives for unflattering facts.

When we need to persuade other people of something, we become motivated to believe it ourselves, and seek out arguments and evidence we could use in its defense.

As Johnson used to say: “What convinces is conviction.”16

We use motivated reasoning not because we don’t know any better, but because we’re trying to protect things that are vitally important to us—our ability to feel good about our lives and ourselves, our motivation to try hard things and stick with them, our ability to look good and persuade, and our acceptance in our communities.

We trade off between judgment and morale. When you come up with a plan, focusing only on its positives (“This is such a great idea!”) can help you work up enthusiasm and motivation to carry it out. On the other hand, if you scrutinize your plan for flaws (“What are the downsides? How might this fail?”), you’re more likely to notice if there’s a better plan you should switch to instead.

Are we good at intuitively weighing the costs and benefits of knowing the truth, in a given situation, against the costs and benefits of believing a lie?

A rationally irrational person would deny problems only when the comfort of denial is sufficiently high and their chance of fixing the problem is sufficiently low.

As Francis Bacon said, “Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper.”

When you wake up in the morning and head to the gym, the benefit of that choice isn’t just in the calories you burn or the muscle tone you develop that day. The benefit also lies in the fact that you’re reinforcing valuable skills and habits. That includes the habit of going to the gym, obviously, but also the broader skill of doing hard things, and the broader habit of following through on your promises to yourself.

Every time you say, “Oh, that’s a good point, I hadn’t thought of that,” it gets a little bit easier for you to acknowledge good points in general.

And being able to explain a position “rationally,” as he put it—by which people usually mean that they can make a compelling argument in favor of their position—doesn’t mean the position is fair.

The point is simply that as people become better informed, they should start to converge on the truth, wherever it happens to be. Instead, we see the opposite pattern—as people get better informed, they diverge.

A high IQ and an advanced degree might give you an advantage in ideologically neutral domains like solving math problems or figuring out where to invest your money. But they won’t protect you from bias on ideologically charged questions.

when I want to test how much of “my” opinion is actually my own. If I find myself agreeing with someone else’s viewpoint, I do a conformity test: Imagine this person told me that they no longer held this view. Would I still hold it? Would I feel comfortable defending it to them?

Imagine your current situation was no longer the status quo. Would you then actively choose it?

Catching your brain in the act of motivated reasoning—noticing when an experiment’s previously invisible flaws jump out at you, or noticing that your preferences change as you switch around supposedly irrelevant details of a scenario—breaks down the illusion that your initial judgment is the objective truth.

A scout treats their degree of certainty as a prediction of their likelihood of being right.

Quantifying your uncertainty, getting calibrated, and coming up with hypothetical bets are all valuable skills in their own right. But having the self-awareness to be able to tell whether you’re describing reality honestly, to the best of your abilities, is even more valuable still.

The trait that saved Callahan wasn’t an invulnerability to fear or depression. Like anyone else in a dire situation, he struggled to keep despair at bay. The trait that saved him was his commitment to finding ways of keeping despair at bay without distorting his map of reality.

When a negative emotion strikes, it’s as if we hurriedly reach into the bucket to grab something, anything, to make ourselves feel better. We don’t pay much attention to the kind of coping strategy we pull out, and whether it involves self-deception or not. As long as it makes us feel better, and it’s halfway plausible, it’ll do.

It’s striking how much the urge to conclude “That’s not true” diminishes once you feel like you have a concrete plan for what you would do if the thing were true. It doesn’t have to be elaborate.

century philosopher William James. In his most famous essay, “The Will to Believe,”

You’re doing yourself a disservice if you throw yourself into the pursuit of a goal without asking: “Is this goal worth pursuing, compared to other things I could do instead?”

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

To calculate a bet’s expected value, multiply the probability of each outcome by its value and then add up those results.

Building that variance into your expectations has the nice side effect of giving you equanimity. Instead of being elated when your bets pay off, and crushed when they don’t, your emotions will be tied to the trend line underneath the variance.

People working on hard projects who are conscious of their high risk of failure generally aren’t dwelling on that risk on a day-to-day basis.

We tend to conflate epistemic confidence and social confidence, treating them as if they’re a package deal.

Franklin’s and Lincoln’s experiences suggest that when it comes to the impression you make on other people, being self-assured is more important than expressing certainty—and research agrees.

When people claim that “admitting uncertainty” makes you look bad, they’re invariably conflating these two very different kinds of uncertainty: uncertainty “in you,” caused by your own ignorance or lack of experience, and uncertainty “in the world,” caused by the fact that reality is messy and unpredictable.

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.

There are lots of ways to change the game board you’re playing on so that you end up with better choices, instead of simply resigning yourself to picking the least-bad choice currently in front of you.

Changing your mind frequently, especially about important beliefs, might sound mentally and emotionally taxing. But, in a way, it’s less stressful than the alternative.

But “knowing” a principle, in the sense that you read it and say, “Yes, I know that,” is different from having internalized it in a way that actually changes how you think.

Knowing that you’re fallible doesn’t magically prevent you from being wrong. But it does allow you to set expectations early and often, which can make it easier to accept when you are wrong.

This chapter is about how to resist the urge to dismiss details that don’t fit your theories, and instead, allow yourself to be confused and intrigued by them, to see them as puzzles to be solved,

As Darwin was researching On the Origin of Species, he followed up on every observation he could find that contradicted his theory, puzzling over them and revising his theory in response.

If you want to become better at predicting people’s behavior, then shrugging off the times when they violate your expectations is exactly the wrong response.

The instinct to judge other people’s behavior as stupid, irrational, or crazy is very common, and it’s also a sign that there’s something you’re missing.

Chris Voss used to be the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. In his bestselling book on negotiation, Never Split the Difference

All too often, we assume the only two possibilities are “I’m right” or “The other guy is right”—and since the latter seems absurd, we default to the former. But in many cases, there’s an unknown unknown, a hidden “option C,” that enriches our picture of the world in a way we wouldn’t have been able to anticipate.

The rule for paradigm shifts in life is the same as it is in science. Acknowledge anomalies, even if you don’t yet know how to explain them, and even if the old paradigm still seems correct overall. Maybe they’ll add up to nothing in particular. Maybe they just mean that reality is messy. But maybe they’re laying the groundwork for a big change of view.

because they were explaining away one single anomaly at a time, their confusion never got the chance to build up sufficiently.

It’s a tricky skill. It forces you to act without clarity, to operate under one paradigm while being aware of its flaws and inconsistencies, knowing that it might be wrong and that you might end up abandoning it. You have to resist the temptation to resolve inconsistency prematurely by forcing all of your observations into one paradigm, and instead be willing to remain confused—for days, weeks, or even years.