Are You a Scout or a Soldier?

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The incentives that you face can shape whether you're more inclined toward scout minds, tet or soldier minds. In in most areas of pundatry, the incentive is not to be a scout. It's to say things that play to the the biases and the values of their listeners. And they're not going to get any particular kno benefit or reward from saying they were wrong about something,. A again, tad. Have you ought to that? I would say there are exceptions. There are some punnets like that, some public intellectuals i wican name Sary gone.

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.