The Outsider Test

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The outsider test is one of a set of am thought experiments that ia about in the book as ways to kind of, am test your your judgments. And so the outsider test is essentially just imagining that am that some one else is in the situation tha you're in and then noticing how you would evaluate their actions if it was some one else and not you. So i like thought experiments, partly just on the object level, like they can help me think more clearly about a particular thing, but also because they, you know, doing thought experiments helps drive home to me that my brain is really good at picking and choosing criteria or principles depending on the outcome that i want to get. That

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.