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

"You could call it self-help, but it’s highly intellectual. It’s super geek self-help. So Julia Galef has a podcast called Rationally Speaking . She’s originally from East Coast US but now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s also a founding member and president of the Centre for Applied Rationality , which is a bit like one of these modern sceptics’ societies. She’s all about, ‘We mustn’t be swayed, we must get closer to the truth. We must cut through all this noise.’ She’s really focused on the post-truth problem, arguing that we’ve got to be rational. This book really distills her views on this, from all the work she’s been doing in this space for at least a decade. Her key idea is a metaphor that’s a bit similar to the one in my book about the lawyers and scientists. She uses the metaphor of a soldier as somebody who is defending a position, fighting for something that they stand for. That’s understandable in various circumstances, but that’s not how you get at the truth, for the reasons that we’ve been discussing in relation to Popper and Deutsch. You must not just go out to find good defences for your position, even if, as Mercier writes, that’s the natural thing for people to want to do. According to Julia Galef, you have to be a scout. In this military metaphor, a scout goes out to find out what’s going on on the ground, what the situation is. And then they come back and report. They say ‘there are troops over there’ or whatever the reality is. She’s basically saying that being a scout, not a soldier, is the right thing to do. That’s what leads us to truth and to understanding. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . After that, what’s really nice about this book is that it’s something like a self-help book. It’s very nonacademic, very practical. It gives tips on how you should take a step back from your immediate reactions to things. I was interviewed by Sean Carroll the other day, and he mentioned something Julia Galef said in a podcast interview with him which is an example of the kind of thing she talks about in the book. She said that if she reads in the newspaper that ‘someone admitted x y z’ she strikes it out and puts ‘said’ instead. This is very much the kind of thing I talk about in my book. The word ‘admitted’ is a framing word, isn’t it? If a person admitted something, it suggests they didn’t really want to say it. It’s somehow self-incriminating, a victory for everybody else. So the book is full of tips like that, very practical, stopping yourself, thinking. It’s about awareness and mindfulness. I use that term towards the end of my book: it’s about being mindful of your own cognitive biases, the foibles you’re constantly subjected to. She’s trying to give ways to overcome those and head them off. What I really like about this book is that it captures something that is really crucial in tackling the post-truth problem, which is that the only way we’re ever going to solve it is culturally, at the individual level. It’s about people choosing to practice the ethical use of language, the mindful use of language—not just in terms of being a good citizen, and what kind of language you serve up to others, but also when you hear things or read things being said in certain ways to be mindful. You imagine how else this could have been said. What ideas are being injected by the person who’s formulating the words? The book is self-help for individuals. It’s not saying, ‘Oh, here’s a top-down solution. We’re going to get Facebook to do this, that and the other, and we’re going to get Twitter to do this, that and the other.’ She doesn’t say that it doesn’t matter what they do, but she isn’t focused on whatever is happening in the infosphere, but on you. You’re in control of what happens when it gets into your head. You need that kind of mindfulness and that’s what the book offers. It’s an easy read, but it’s a really valuable read and it captures quite a lot of the other stuff we’ve been talking about. * Editor’s note: At Five Books we have our own, weird grammatical convention where single quote marks denote an approximation of someone’s view, and double quotation marks denote a direct, accurate quote. ** En français : “ Certainement, qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste “—Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles (1765)"

"I put The Scout Mindset on the list because the ability to reason very carefully and have a curious, truth-seeking attitude is of enormous importance. We can be pretty good at it for issues that are not very high stakes. If you’re learning about a topic in school and it doesn’t have to do with anything that’s really facing you, it’s easy to be impartial. Then, when you’re talking about very morally sensitive, high-stakes, life-or-death issues, it can be much harder to have what Julia Galef calls a ‘scout mindset.’ This is about seeing all the different views, deciding how much weight you should give to each, understanding other points of view. It’s much easier to get into a mindset where you say, ‘Look, lives are on the line, this is my cause, I want to defend this view at all costs.’ When it’s high stakes, it’s even more important to ensure that we keep this open mind because if you focus on the wrong priority, then you’ve done less good. Perhaps you’re helping 10 people, whereas you could have helped 100. Perhaps you’re saving lives of people who would otherwise die instead of preventing an enormous catastrophe that would in fact kill everybody. When it comes to the best ways to help, it’s so high stakes that we have to have correct views, even if that can feel uncomfortable. That’s why I’ve chosen this book. Yes, it can be easy to get into the mode of, ‘Look, here’s a person in front of me. I’m going to help them.’ This is the soldier mindset that Julia talks about. You want to defend them at all costs. That’s a very natural, very understandable reaction. However, if you want to do the most good, that requires your ability to reason, to take and channel those moral emotions, even in a way that can feel unintuitive."