BOOK REVIEW // THE SCOUT MINDSET
Seeking Higher Ground
Confronting new challenges? Be a scout, not a soldier
by Walter Foley
Steve Callahan’s ship capsized in a remote area of the Atlantic Ocean during a solo voyage in 1981. He survived on a raft for weeks, sometimes circled by sharks while cautiously rationing his supplies and examining the tradeoffs inherent to his situation: Should he take a chance and light one of his few flares now, or save them all in case a ship appears within eyesight? Should he fish today for food, or conserve his energy for tomorrow? Should he stay up late in hopes of spotting something in the distance, or rest now so that he can strategize better in the morning?
“I have often hidden things from myself. I have sometimes fooled other people. But Nature is not such a dolt,” Callahan would write in his memoir. “I may be lucky enough to be forgiven some mistakes, the ones that don’t matter, but I can’t count on luck.”
In her book The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef uses this story and others to make the case that facing reality is, on a technical and practical level, the right thing to do. It’s a message of optimism, that “whatever your goal, there’s probably a way to get it that doesn’t require you to believe false things.”
When you confront the messiness and uncertainty of the world on its own terms, Galef argues, new possibilities emerge for solving your problems: “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.”
Callahan accepted the circumstance as it was, and modified his survival strategy moment by moment as obstacles and opportunities presented themselves.
“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,” Galef writes. “The trait that saved him was his commitment to finding ways of keeping despair at bay without distorting his map of reality.”
Her book was written in part to tie together some of the concepts made in popular science publications within the past two decades, which detail the sorts of tricks our brains play on us, such as the infamously corrosive effects of confirmation bias. Galef’s primary observation here is that it isn’t enough for us to merely memorize lists of cognitive biases and argumentative fallacies. In order to bring techniques of clear thinking into practice, we’ll have to examine what motivates us.
Scouts wanted. Soldiers need not apply
The Scout Mindset is presented as an alternative for a stilted style of thinking that Galef presents with the metaphor of a soldier: This is when we are motivated to defend what we already believe, rather than to open up to the possibility that our beliefs might be wrong. The formal term for this type of thinking is directionally motivated reasoning, described by psychologist Tom Gilovich: When confronted with a claim that we hope is true, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe this?” and search for reasons to accept it. When confronted with a claim that we hope is untrue, we ask ourselves, “Must I believe this?” and search for reasons to reject it.
A soldier mindset comes with the assumption that we already know how the world is—and even how it ought to be—and that we should focus on defending our worldview from challengers. This style of thinking is tempting in that it often feels better and is less emotionally taxing; it’s useful in pumping up morale, and it can quickly raise our status within our peer group. It offers great short-term benefits.
By contrast, accuracy motivated reasoning—the scout in Galef’s metaphor—hinges on seeing our situation as realistically as possible and moving forward from there. We regularly shift between these two broad strategies, depending on the topic, and nobody is fully scout or soldier 24/7. Galef argues that in the long term, however—and in most situations generally—we are better served by the scout. Our increasingly complex world—where more people than at any point in history experience novel options regarding career path, religious devotion, diet, political affiliation, and dating—tends to reward those who default toward curiosity rather than defensiveness.
Rationality in the real world
The physical nature of Galef’s metaphor is intentional. She wants people to pay attention to how they feel when they encounter new information and make important choices. Though her book is rooted in long lines of abstract theorizing from many separate academic fields, her goal is to help the average person think more clearly on practical matters, to awaken a sense of discovery when we consider friendship, business, health, love, values.
Galef launched the Center for Applied Rationality in 2009 and has been a major figure in what’s alternately referred to as “the rationalist movement,” “Rat,” or “Bay Area rationality,” a style of decision-making that grew out of debates on message boards and blogs such as LessWrong, OvercomingBias, and SlateStarCodex. Its contributors have been influential among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tech developers, and some of their insights have been adopted into online etiquette among Marxists, monarchists, transhumanists, localists, and classical liberals in their respective enclaves.
This online space has split into a number of factions since establishing itself in the mid-2000s, with some moving politically left, and others moving right. Its more compelling thinkers tend to argue that the left/right dichotomy is less and less useful in the 2020s, and instead put their focus on finding the best mental tools for staying clear headed in an age of too much information. They draw heavily from the Nobel Prize-winning research about bias detection from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and can often name and define dozens of technical terms for the ways people are prone to self-deception.
One recurring criticism of this movement—and one that Galef seems to have taken to heart—is that it tends to promote a habit of merely memorizing and identifying fallacies and biases with no framework to apply it to life, a practice sometimes derided as “insight porn.” It also runs the risk of instilling a naive sense of epistemic confidence, of convincing people that because they’ve learned about human irrationality, that they’re now immune to irrationality themselves.
“At first, I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life,” she writes about her early years at the Center for Applied Rationality. “But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn’t the cure-all I thought it was.”
Galef understands that intelligence and knowledge aren’t necessarily correlated with logic and rationality. And so, clear thinking really is a skill to be practiced, rather than a straightforward computing task to be punched in. This book is a condensed presentation of the best tools thus far explored by Bay Area rationalists, merged with an emphasis on embodiment and practicality so that it isn’t all confined inside the head.
She details a few clever thought experiments, which she advocates taking seriously and committing to habit in order to bring to fruition. One example, the selective skeptic test, asks, “If this evidence supported the other side, how credible would you judge it to be?”
She writes in the book about utilizing this test on herself when investigating flawed methodology within papers that challenged her thesis, papers cited as evidence that overconfidence or even self-deception are conducive to success. It turned out that some of the papers that supported her thesis turned out to be similarly flawed, and thus she decided to exclude those as well. Galef does appeal to formal academic research in some parts of the book, but in general relies more on straightforward arguments, analogies, historical examples, and stories from her own experience that readers are likely to relate to. She writes that one of the best ways to check our beliefs against reality is to invite critique from those outside of our worldview, and looks to a number of online debating platforms for productive ways of making this happen.
Another means by which people can bring clear thinking out of the theoretical realm and deeper into their day-to-day lives is by removing some of the emotional sting that accompanies the realization that they’ve been mistaken about something.
“Most of the time, being wrong doesn’t mean you did something wrong,” Galef writes. “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.”
And changing one’s mind isn’t a binary process, anyway, according to Galef’s model. In order to “think in shades of gray instead of black and white,” she advocates using a simplified, colloquial version of Bayesian probability when discussing truth claims: For example, rather than stating, “I believe a college degree in my field is valuable,” a person should instead think in terms of a gradient of probability, as in: “I have about 80% confidence in the value of a college degree in my field.” From that initial estimate, a person can then update their confidence level upward or downward based on new information, without feeling the need to commit to a “side” in a debate over the value of a college degree.
“You don’t necessarily need to speak this way. But if you at least start to think in terms of ‘updating’ instead of ‘admitting you were wrong,’ you may find that it takes a lot of friction out of the process,” writes Galef. “An update is routine. Low-key,” she says. “It’s the opposite of an overwrought confession of sin. An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure.”
When we face an unforeseen challenge—like Callahan did when his ship capsized—it’s in our best interest to snap into a scout mindset as quickly as possible, and to not spend time judging what came before or what that means to our identity. If we practice being open to what the world is presenting to us, we may even see unforeseen opportunities. //
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