Galef, Julia

01. The Case for the Scout Mindset; 02. Developing Self-Awareness; 03. Thriving Without Illusions; 04. Changing Your Mind; 05. Rethinking Identity;

Two Types of Thinking Soldier Mindset Reasoning is like defensive combat. Finding out you’re wrong means suffering a defeat. Seeks out evidence to fortify and defend your beliefs. Directionally motivated reasoning. When we want something to be true, we ask, “Can I believe this?” When we don’t want something to be true, we ask, “Must I believe this?” Scout Mindset Reasoning is like mapmaking. Finding out you’re wrong means revising your map....

How Beliefs Become Identities Didn’t have priors on this. In retrospect, I could have asked: how can I differentiate between a belief and an identity? What are the consequences of a belief becoming an identity? Feeling under siege from a hostile world may crystallize a belief into an identity, e.g. formula-feeders feeling judged as bad mothers; evangelical christians feeling alienated by legal and cultural changes like legal abortion, gay marriage and sexualized content in the media....

How to Be Wrong found that experts were barely able to forecast better than random chance. However, a small subset of people (coined “superforecasters” ) were better. In a competition, they beat teams of top professors and CIA professional analysts. These superforecasters were not smarter than everyone else nor did they have more knowledge/experience, they were great at being wrong. Change your mind a little at a time. Seeing the world in shades of grey is less stressful, as the experience of encountering evidence against one of your beliefs is not high stakes....

Coping with Reality This chapter felt a bit vacuous with its use of anecdotes to advance points. Criticism of studies that argue that self-deception makes us happier: conflation of positive illusions and positive beliefs; unfounded definitions of what counts as self-deception; results that can be equally well-explained by something else. There are alternative coping strategies that don’t involve self-deception: making a hypothetical plan about some unpleasant and unavoidable thing; noticing silver linings but not to the point of sweet lemons; admitting that things could be worse....

Signs of a Scout These Don’t Make You a Scout Feeling objective. The more objective you feel, the more you trust your own intuitions and opinions as accurate representations of reality, and the less inclined you are to question them. Being smart and knowledgeable. It’s not a case of “if people were smarter and well-informed, they’d realize their errors”. For example, found that polarization (on political fronts) on anthropogenic climate change increases as scientific intelligence increases....