The Scout Mindset

Sometimes I read a book where the author’s blazing intelligence shines through and you just want to meet them. Richard Dawkins and John Stuart Mill make me feel this way. Julia Galef is another example. This is one of those rare books that is so well-written that the words flow like sweetened milk and no special effort is needed to understand them. It is also dense with facts and examples to make the case.

The central point is to introduce the scout mindset and contrast it to the soldier mindset most people are in most of the time. The soldier is interested in defense and offense. The scout is interested in finding out the truth. The soldier argues. The scout asks questions.

A scout updates his maps of the world continually as new information comes in, not even thinking of it as “changing his mind.” Facts that don’t fit are not forgotten, but are used to build an alternate map in case the first one is shown wrong. People, institutions, and systems are not rejected for getting one thing wrong, but are listened to in case they get something right. Rarely does someone get everything right all the time.

Self-deception is not necessary to emotionally cope with the world. There are ways to take risks and inspire others without clouding our minds to reality, making it harder to make sensible choices. Often, a risk can still be worth taking even when the risk of failure is high. Will good come of the failure for someone else? What is the loss? Is there a high upside if you succeed? Communicating honestly the inherent uncertainty in the world, while remaining confident in oneself is what can inspire others to invest in your business ventures. It’s worked before.

Motivated reasoning causes us to ask “Must I believe this?” and “Can I believe this?” Evidence puts limits on our beliefs, but leaves a lot open to preference. This is why increased education causes a divergence in strengths of opinions between opinion groups, rather than a convergence.

Many practical tests for motivated reasoning are described in the book. You can ask yourself if the scandalous revelation was about someone you liked rather than someone you disliked (or vice versa), would you feel the same? If everyone in the world reversed their opinions tomorrow, would you think the same way? If an outsider took your job, would they do the same thing you are doing? If you had already left the status quo, would you go back? Are the studies that support your argument as flawed as those that don’t? To better make predictions, ask yourself how much money you would be willing to bet on them. There is even information on how to set up bets to be mathematically equivalent, and a test of trivial knowledge to find out if your level of certainty is well-calibrated to how many questions you actually get right.

While I tested as well-calibrated, I got so many right with a high level of certainty that there weren’t enough wrong ones at the lower levels of certainty to be statistically valid. My score might be a result of chance. I’m still interested in what my real score might be. It’s possible that I’m highly educated but still terrible at estimating probabilities, which might be the more important skill.

Another subject covered in the book is how our group identities can cloud our judgment. To solve this set of problems, Galef suggests we adopt the identity of a scout, someone who is interested in the truth over all other concerns.

Of some interest to me was the tale of a friend of hers who was accused of never admitting he was wrong, to which he replied that he had just admitted he was wrong twice earlier that day. The reason it didn’t look that way was because it was considered nothing more than an “update” to his worldview that he moved on from quickly without apologizing or taking responsibility for. This makes me wonder if this is why I’ve been accused of the same thing. I continually update and refine my opinions as new information comes in without even noticing it. I don’t consider it my fault when I am misinformed because it isn’t. Why should I apologize? It never occurred to me that this is what others are after because I lack the imagination to be that perversely evil.

Of most interest to me, Galef reports having the same type of troubles I had reaching out to “the other side” when it comes to politics. She kept finding that those willing to speak with her more often than not confirmed her prejudices of how irrational they were rather than teaching her something new. My final conclusion after many years of study was that most voters are evil monsters that we are better off exterminating than talking to. Her final conclusion is that those most likely to talk with us are the least agreeable ones that thrive on conflict and that we still need to seek out the ones who don’t like talking politics – since they are more likely to be conciliatory and agree with some of our underlying assumptions. That might be true, but it still leaves open the issue of what to do with the argumentative ones – which were the ones I was most interested in. It only takes a few poison berries to spoil the whole pie.

Overall, a good book. It should be required reading in school alongside How To Lie With Statistics.

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