How Much Do These Experiments Really Show Irrationality?

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Cuanon: To what extent humans are rational or not? Cuanon: We're actually pretty good at reasoning our way through things. The counter argument, since you went through ll this stuff in your book, well, maybe we're not that irrational. Maybe you wth a bounded rationality or uncertain when problems are presented in a certain way,. cosmedes and evolutionary psychology, that this is bounded rationality. And abstract probabilities were very modern thing that we encountered in our ancestral environment.

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.