Galef points out that one’s beliefs can serve as a sort of fashion statement. But that confidence doesn’t help them persuade the judge… are significantly less likely to win the case-perhaps because they fail to consider and prepare for rebuttals to their arguments. … law students who are randomly assigned to one side of a moot court case become confident, after reading the case materials, that their side is morally and legally in the right.But note that this creates the risk that when others defer to our soldier mindset, they do so reluctantly, lacking our same conviction. Closing our minds to those alternatives may allow us to feel better about our choice, at least for a while.īeing firm in our beliefs can help us to get others to comply with our wishes. When we make a decision, considering alternatives may create anguish. For example, if we have trouble learning a foreign language, it is easier to insist that knowing foreign languages is unimportant than to undertake the effort needed to attain that skill. We are inclined to tune our beliefs in order to protect our self-esteem. Dismissing such challenges relieves the discomfort, at least for a while. Galef lists several psychological factors that make it appealing.įirst, challenges to our worldview make us uncomfortable. This raises the question of why the soldier mindset evolved in the first place. One is actually more persuasive to others, because people value honest assessment rather than overconfidence. One makes better predictions and decisions by seeking the truth. Scout mindset has a number of advantages. The solider fights contrary information as if to stave off defeat. The soldier uses reasoning to defend one’s map of reality. The scout welcomes contrary information as helping to correct this map. She contrasts this with what she calls the soldier mindset, which means ignoring or dismissing new information in order to keep your current outlook intact.Īccording to Galef, the intellectual scout uses reasoning to try to map reality. Galef favors what she terms the scout mindset, which means adjusting your outlook to take new information into account. Since then I’ve been working full time at CFAR - read more about us on my Projects page.When your views are challenged by a discordant observation or a person with a different opinion, should you treat this as an opportunity to reconsider or as a threat to fight off? Julia Galef argues for the former. After meeting with them a few times, they invited me to move out to Berkeley to co-found the organization with them, and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) was born in early 2012. In late 2011 I heard through the grapevine that several friends-of-friends of mine in Berkeley, CA, had secured funding to start a non-profit organization to figure out how to improve human rationality. And we should be developing mental technologies to overcome those biases. In particular, now that we have a clearer picture of human irrationality, we should be asking ourselves how our biases are affecting our judgment about critical problems like how to reduce suffering and how to estimate catastrophic risks. Going back to early civilizations you can see simple but powerful examples, like the Golden Rule, or the idea of trade. As our societies have progressed, we’ve developed more complex mental technologies - utilitarianism and other ethical frameworks, various iterations of the scientific method, the concept of randomized controlled trials, and so on.Īnd it increasingly seemed to me that developing better mental technologies was crucial to our future. I became especially interested in what you might call “mental technologies” - concepts, or ways of thinking, that help humanity improve our world. I wrote for a wide range of publications and blogs (like Slate, Scientific American, Metropolis, The Architect’s Newspaper, Rationally Speaking, and 3 Quarks Daily), and in 2010 I launched the Rationally Speaking Podcast with philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci. in statistics from Columbia University in 2005, I spent several years doing research with social science professors at Columbia, Harvard and MIT, including a year writing case studies on international economics for Harvard Business School. I began a PhD in economics, but soon decided I didn’t want to be in academia after all, left grad school, and moved back to New York to be a freelance journalist.
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