Bhut: To what extent did we evolve to solve logic puzzles? And the answer is, we did. Bhut: One pattern of reasoning i see a lot in communities like this is never trying to disconfirm that a hypothesis and only looking for con confirmatory examples em. But at the same time, there's also a lot of cases where we'd still fall into the trap of only searching for confirming examples.
When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. We have what Julia Galef calls a “soldier” mindset: a drive to defend the ideas we most want to believe — and shoot down those we don’t. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a “scout” mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout’s goal isn’t to defend one side over the other. It’s to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what’s actually true. In The Scout Mindset, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.