The Munk Debates Podcast - Julia Galef Dialogue

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

Acclaimed author and popular podcaster Julia Galef joins us for a fascinating discussion about how embracing a scout's mindset, one that champions curiosity and truth-seeking over knee jerk reactions, will give us the tools we need to make smarter decisions.  QUOTES: JULIA GALEF “The scout's motivation is to go out, see things as clearly as possible and form as accurate a map of a situation or an issue as they can including all of the areas of uncertainty…as you learn more about the world, you're going to revise it and change your perspective” The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Reza DahyaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Thanks for listening to the Monk debates. This week, we're stepping away from our usual one-on-one debate format to bring you another monk dialogue, the fifth in our series on rationality. Today, a one-on-one conversation with best-selling author and podcaster, Julia Galev, on the importance of adopting a scout mindset to make better decisions. I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome back to this our spring 2020 talks on rationality. Why do we think the way we think?

How can we think in better ways that are in our own interests as individuals, but also as a society, as a community that's often struggling for coherent, struggling to break down the increasing tribalism that is affecting our ability to reason together. So we've been on this journey over a number of weeks now with some fascinating speakers, from Stephen Pinker to Dan Dennett, Lisa Feldman Barrett, you name it. We're covering the issue of rationality from a whole bunch of different perspectives. I'm really excited, though, for tonight's Monk Dialogue. We're going to have the opportunity to go deep with a thinker who's pondered rationality from a practical perspective. That's what we want to kind of dig into with you over the next hour.

Her name is Julia Galev, co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, host of the Rationality Speaking podcast, and the author of The Scout Mindset. You may have seen her on her TED Talks for million views and counting. Julia, great to be in dialogue with you today. Rudyard, hey? Great to be here. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. As I said, we've gone deep on rationality, on the philosophy of it, the neurology of it. the reason we selected you for these monk dialogues is you're someone who's attempted to think in

really practical down-to-earth ways about how we think and how we can think better individually and collectively. So let's just start by having you kind of position yourself. How did you kind of come to your own personal interest in the way you think and why you think that way? And why did you feel a kind of need, a desire to try to help other people think more clearly or more aligned with their own sense of who they are and what their purpose in life is? Yeah. You know, people have asked me before how I came to be so interested in and passionate about rationality and understanding it and teaching it. And it's a little hard for me to answer just because it's been part of who I am for so long, as long as I can remember, basically. I was trying to think of my earliest memory of being aware of sort of rationality and bias.

And I think it might be from the first grade when I was hanging out with my friend, who was also named Julie, who was a little confusing. But Julie was making fun of another girl in the class named Maria for being unable to make a cursive why. I guess we had just started learning cursive. And I said to Julie, you know, I don't know how to do a cursive why yet either. And Julie said, so, I'm making fun of Maria. And I remember being so indignant that she was applying a different standard to Maria versus to me and feeling, well, that's very inconsistent of her. She should be, you know, consistent in her mockery.

And so basically from then on, I've sort of always been really passionate about trying to be objective and fair-minded and, you know, consistent in the standards that we apply to the arguments and the evidence and the people that we judge, partly because I think it's better for society, but also because I think it's just better for us and, you know, our ability to see the world clearly, to see issues that matter to us, clearly. and to make better decisions. So I've been sort of focused on this topic professionally for the last, I guess, 12 years. And partly that's involved interviewing other experts about rationality on my podcast since 2010. It's also involved teaching classes on reasoning and decision making at the center that I co-founded, the Center for Applied Rationality, and just talking to as many people as I can about the subject. And what I increasingly started, to feel was lacking in the general discourse about rationality was a focus on the motivation behind our thinking. So what I mean by that is, you know, a lot of books and articles and discussions

of rationality focus on teaching principles of logic or teaching people lists of cognitive biases and things like that. So they're focused on giving people knowledge. And that is important and valuable. I don't want to disparage that. But what's just as valuable, if not more so, is the motivation that guides how you try to use that knowledge. And so I'm sure everyone in your audience is familiar with the kind of person who has memorized the lists of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, you know, and terms like ad hominem and modus tollens and things like that. But they only ever use that knowledge as kind of a cudgel with which to beat their opponents over the head with in online arguments. And they never.

actually turned that knowledge on themselves and ask themselves, am I making it out of howmanum argument or, you know, am I like ignoring relevant evidence that doesn't fit my theory or things like that? And so there's these kind of two independent pillars of being able to reason and see things clearly. One is your kind of raw intelligence and knowledge and the other is how you're motivated to use that intelligence and knowledge. And so I've been increasingly focused on this motivational component, what makes some people sometimes motivated to try to see things clearly instead of to try to defend, you know, one idea over another and to kind of shoot down challenges to what you already believe or to what you want to believe.

So let's talk a bit about this dichotomy because I think, you know, you put your thumb on something that I've thought about through these different conversations that we've had over the last few months is how do I take these powerful principles? Because I think they are powerful. And you can see the fallacies in your own reasoning. But how do you actually go about applying them? How do you go about working them into your ways of thinking and acting and being? Because, boy, it's challenging.

It's one thing to know some piece of axiomatic reasoning, but very different to understand when you need to kind of step out of yourself and apply that axiomatic reasoning to, you? I mean, what is more, in a sense, more fraught than, you know, trying to see your own self subjectively and objectively simultaneously to apply that insight to? How do you hack that, Julie? It seems, I mean, to me, often personally, it really is a problem. So I'd love your insights on this. Yeah, I mean, that is the question. It's much easier to notice inconsistency or bias or irrationality in other people than it is in yourself.

I think someone wants to find cognitive biases or irrationality as the study of how other people think. So, yeah, I mean, challenge number one is just actually recognizing and really believing on a gut level that you too are subject to irrationality and bias. And then challenge two, which is even harder, is to not just acknowledge abstractly that, yes, I can be biased. but to be able to notice in the moment, oh, this particular issue is something that I am biased about. I can see the bias happening in my reasoning, you know, in real time. That's so much harder, even if you kind of abstractly want to be, you know, a better thinker and want to notice your own bias.

So that kind of practical application of these principles is something that I focus on a lot. And one sort of general category of technique that I really like is a thought, experiment. So I'm sure people are familiar with some examples of thought experiments. Let's say you're dealing with some personal problem and you think, there's a chance I might be, you know, rationalizing about this because I don't want to have that difficult conversation with my partner or because I, you know, don't want to put myself out there and risk getting rejected when I ask for a raise or something like that. So a thought experiment that you might have heard suggested in a situation like that is to imagine that a friend of yours is in the exact same situation you're in,

and then ask yourself, what would I think my friend should do in this situation? Or what would I advise her to do in this situation? And often the result of that thought experiment is to notice, oh, the advice I would give to someone else in this situation is very different from what I'm telling myself I should do. And what you're doing in a thought experiment like that is kind of stripping away the influence of, you know, the fear or the emotional baggage or the defensiveness that can color your own judgment. And that all goes away when you're thinking about it someone else in the same situation. And it can kind of highlight for you, oh, this, this is actually what I think is the best thing to do now that I've cleared away all, you know,

the influence of those things that were coloring in my motivation. So that's a personal example of a thought experiment. They're also invaluable in thinking about political or more kind of abstract or ideological topics. So a thought experiment in politics might be something like if a politician on your side of the aisle has done something that he's being pilloried for in the press and you find yourself thinking, ugh, the media is really overreacting, it wasn't that bad, give me a break. You could do a thought experiment where you imagine that a politician on the other side of the aisle had done the same thing and then ask yourself, what would my reaction be in that case? And you might find that your reaction in that thought experiment would be that's terrible. He should resign

immediately. And this act is proof that he's unfit to lead. And in fact, it reflects poorly on his entire political party. It just shows that they're all corrupt and incompetent or whatever. And, you know, I want to point out that when you do a thought experiment, it doesn't tell you what the right answer is. Like, it doesn't tell you what you should do in a given situation. It doesn't tell you what the quote unquote right reaction to a politician's misconduct is. It just highly for you a discrepancy between how you judge an issue, you know, when your motivations point one way versus how you would judge it when your motivations point the other way. And this is, it's kind of a nice way to highlight what I call soldier mindset, which is my metaphor for what cognoscientists

would call directionally motivated thinking, thinking that's kind of unconsciously aimed at defending one side over another or, you know, defending a particular idea against any evidence that might threaten it. And the way that directionally motivated cognition tends to work is that you're applying this different standard of rigor or different standard of evidence, depending on which side the, you know, particular idea supports. And so if you're evaluating something that you want to believe, you look at it through the lens of, can I accept this? So you're looking for any excuse to accept it. Whereas if you're evaluating an idea, you don't want to believe, you look at it instead through the lens of must I accept this and you're looking for any

excuse to reject it or dismiss it. And so what a thought experiment can do is just allow you to notice that you're applying this different standard to a situation or an issue depending on where your motivations lie. Well, let's peel back a bit your analogy here because it's one that you use quite effectively in your book, this soldier kind of minds out, which, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is often the default. for most of us in terms of how we reason. And in some ways, it's the kind of the trap that we're in. So talk to us a little bit again about the motivations of the soldier mindset,

because I think a lot of personally, and I guess just thinking about rationality and conversation with our different speakers in this series, a lot of the challenge of rationality is how we have identities and how we seek out information, that confirms our identities because our identities are kind of important. We generally like to have one, have a sense of ourselves, have in a sense of even a secure or strong set of beliefs to inform who we are and what we think and explain why we do what we do. So am I right to say that in some ways the challenge here is moving to really a different identity. You're having to reimagine your kind of interior self, maybe in ways that we don't often fully appreciate just how big a

shift it is to move off this soldier mindset onto another mindset, the name of your book, which we'll get to in a second. Yeah. So I do think it's important to recognize what soldier mindset does for us. Like, we're not idiots. We're not engaging in this kind of thinking just because we're stupid. We're doing it, again, unconsciously for the most part. But the reason that we seem to be kind of wired to unconsciously reach for soldier mindset so often is that it's serving a purpose for us. And identity is one way to kind of describe the purpose of soldier mindset. Another way to break it down is into two kind of categories of benefit, feeling good and looking good. And identity is kind of related to both. So that's why I like

to talk about both dichotomies. But in terms of feeling, good, soldier mindset can be invaluable for helping us reassure ourselves that we're, you know, good people and wise and virtuous and competent and whatever went wrong, it wasn't really our fault, whatever risks were worried about in our lives, we can, you know, use soldier mindset to dismiss any evidence that they're going to go badly and instead reassure ourselves that they're going to go well. And on the side of looking good, soldier mindset can help us. kind of portray ourselves the way we want to be seen by other people. Soldier mindset can help us kind of reinforce beliefs that we think will make us seem

like the right kind of person, you know, if my people around me believe something, you know, political that, you know, immigration is great or immigration is terrible, or climate change is real, or climate change is fake. Using soldier mindset is one way we can reinforce the beliefs that we want our peers to see us having to prove that we're, you know, smart and good people and we're part of the of the tribe, that we're on the right side of the aisle, et cetera. Or we might use soldier mindset alternately to reinforce our confidence in our beliefs, whatever they happen to be, because we want to be seen as someone who's really confident and certain of their opinions and so on.

So, you know, all of that is wrapped up in what you called identity. Our identity can be made of our political beliefs that, you know, being an atheist or being a Christian or being a liberal or a conservative can be a really important part of your identity that you want to reaffirm through the beliefs that you defend. And, you know, our identity also involves being a good person and not making mistakes. And so we might use soldier mindset to reassure ourselves that, yes, indeed, we are a good person. We've, you know, successfully shored up our identity that way. And so, as you were kind of hinting, I think a large part of being able to move away from soldier mindset is holding those identities more lightly so that you don't feel like you have to be,

you know, you have to believe a certain thing about climate change or immigration, or you have to believe that you didn't make a mistake in order to feel good about yourself as a person, and finding other things to kind of rely on as part of your identity that don't require you to believe X, Y, or Z. Yeah. Just to take a little kind of detour here, what are your thoughts about how the advent of kind of social media has dovetailed with this soldier mindset, because you'd have a sense that in some ways it is, it's created precisely to provide both those functions that you just described, a kind of a signaling function, a seeking of status through the telegraphing of a series of beliefs that you believe are popular amongst your milieu, and then, you know, an awful

a lot of confirmation bias. So you're seeking out information. The algorithm is literally providing you with information that I would think solidifies or reinforces your soldier mindset. Would that be a fair characterization of maybe an aspect of social media that we don't think enough about its actual effects on our rationality and why that might be detrimental to our own interests or to a more open and creative way of thinking itself. Yeah, I think social media both helps and hurts. It definitely hurts for the reasons that you're pointing at. And I think people, we tend to underestimate the impact of these kind of constant, subtle reinforcements

that we get from our social environment on how we think just in the privacy of our own mind. What we do notice is that when we post something outraged about, the other side or, you know, snarky or straw manning an argument from the other, from some other political tribe, we get reinforced for that positively by, you know, the people who follow us online. But just knowing on some level that that is going to happen can shape how we react to evidence and arguments that we're reading, you know, in private. Because you know on some level that, ooh, if I interpret this article in the worst possible light for the other side, then I'm going to have something that I can post about later on social media.

Or, you know, if I do find this article that goes against my views credible, then it's going to be harder for me to confidently and snarkily make fun of that view later online. And so there's this kind of backchaining effect where the reinforcement we get for talking publicly about our beliefs changes how we evaluate ideas and just the beliefs that we form privately. So I do think that's like a very insidious and unfortunate effect of social media on our ability to think and see clearly. That said, you know, a really lovely thing about social media. Like if you go back to the early days of the internet when everyone was so idealistic about how this technology would help people connect with each other across the world and help people discover, you know, new subcultures and tribes that they otherwise wouldn't be able to connect with in their day-to-day lives. we've gotten a lot more jaded since then, as we've seen some of the harmful effects of social media.

But the idealism isn't totally false. Like, you actually can connect with people who you never would have been able to meet in person. And one nice aspect of that is that even if you yourself are not surrounded by other people who are trying to be objective and fair-minded and trying to resist the temptations of soldier mindset, even if you don't have those people around you and your, you know, personal. life or your work life, you can find them online. You can kind of create a tribe for yourself online of people who I would call scouts. I guess we haven't really gotten to that side of my metaphor, but to just briefly summarize it, I talked about soldier mindset. Scout mindset is this alternative way of thinking, which we can all do sometimes, just not really our default most of the time. But whereas the soldier is motivated to defend a particular idea against any threatening

evidence and, you know, shoot down arguments and evidence to the contrary, the scout's motivation is just to go out, see things as clearly as possible, and form as accurate a map of a situation or an issue as they can, including all of the areas of uncertainty and including the assumption that, you know, your map is a first draft. And as you learn more about the world, you're going to revise it and change your perspective and so on. And so scout mindset is my metaphor for what cognitive scientists would call accuracy motivated cognition, reasoning that's aimed at figuring out what's really true to the best of your abilities, given the information you have. And so to go back to what I was saying about social media, even if you don't really have a lot of scouts around you in your

personal or work life, you can find other people online, you know, writers or just other people, random people on social media who actually seem to want to be scouts and, you know, add them to your kind of online tribe and let their approval and disapproval shape your thinking instead of the approval and disapproval of people who just want to, you know, pat themselves on the back for being on the right side of the issue. And so you can basically use this phenomenon where your social reinforcement that you get changes the way you think. Use it to your advantage and to make you a better and clearer thinker because you're kind of being reinforced by people who actually care about the truth and not about, you know, being down the other side.

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Now, back to our program. So I'd be fascinating to know, Julia, because through the Center for Rationality that you founded, you've spent a lot of time working with people, trying to give them habits and techniques that prompt them out of a kind of soldier mindset into a scout mindset. I'd just be curious, you know, I realize this is unscientific, but what is your sense of, you know,

walking into a room with 100 participants at your center? I mean, are 99% of us soldiers and 1% scout? How is our population set up today? And then, you know, what are, again, some of the techniques that you start to use in that type of environment to grow that segment of the audience that could transition to a scout mindset. And maybe the third part of this question is, are there frankly some people that this just really is not for, right?

That they have a certain way of thinking. I think we've all met a lot of these people online, frankly, on Twitter, especially. And there's just really a sense that the soldier mindset possesses them and they're happy with it and they're invested in it. And moving off that to some other imagining of rationality and thinking just really isn't in the cards. I don't want to be deterministic, but I guess I am. That's what I'm asking you. No, I think that's realistic, not not deterministic or if it is, it's not wrong. So I agree. I don't think we have, well, we have a little bit of research on this distribution,

on whether people, for example, whether people would endorse the idea of soldier mindset versus scout mindset. There's a scale called actively open-minded thinking, which was pioneered by a psychologist named John Barron and someone else whose name I'm forgetting. But anyway, it just asks people about what kind of thinking they think is good. So, you know, do you think people should change their minds when presented with evidence against their views? Do you think people should have 100% certainty in their views or not? Things like that. And so I might be misremembering the example. exact details, but my memory is that most people will at least somewhat endorse the idea of

actively open-minded thinking or, you know, what I would call scout mindset. That's a separate question from whether they practice it, but at least they would sort of acknowledge that like, yeah, that it's good to, you know, acknowledge evidence that goes against your beliefs in theory. But there is a substantial minority of people who actually endorse soldier mindset on these questions and will say, no, you shouldn't change your mind when presented with arguments against your views. Now, I don't know exactly what those people are thinking of when they read the questions. Maybe they're thinking of kind of fundamental moral premises like murder is bad or something. And those are, those are a little different from kind of questions of empirical fact, like,

how does increasing immigration affect the wages in various sectors? So maybe if you kind of broke down the questions a little more, even those people would acknowledge like, yeah, okay, on questions of empirical fact, you should change your mind in response to evidence. I don't know. But anyway, the evidence and my anecdotal experience does seem to suggest that there is at least a substantial minority of people who are not interested in the idea of becoming better scouts, even in theory, they think soldier minds is actually good and virtuous. And so sometimes people ask me when they read my book, do you actually really think there's a chance that this book is going to change the minds of the committed soldiers? And no, honestly, I don't really. maybe a few if I'm lucky, but I wrote it with the intent of reaching the people

kind of more in the middle who at least in theory think, yeah, yeah, it would be good to be more of a scout. And at least in theory, I can recognize that probably sometimes I'm irrational or biased. You know, most people acknowledge that at least like looking back in the past,

they can see times that they were in retrospect, irrational or biased. And they also recognize that it doesn't really make sense to think that they would be an exception to the general pattern in humanity of being sometimes irrational and biased. So they at least think there's room for improvement in theory, but, you know, they haven't, like, yet developed the habit of

doing thought experiments and noticing biases on themselves and, and actively getting out there to seek out disconformatory evidence and so on. And so my book was written largely for those people who, I think, maybe I'm being too optimistic here, but I think they make up the majority of the population. That like unless they, unless you put them in an environment where they're surrounded by other soldiers who will yell at them for showing any sign of doubt in the social consensus, unless they're surrounded by soldiers, they actually do kind of want to be more scoutlike. They like the idea of being more objective and fair minded, even if they haven't, you know, actively tried to put that into practice yet. So partly what I'm trying to do is get really applied and practical, as you mentioned, about, okay, how do we take these out? abstract ideals and translate them into practice.

But also, I discovered it was really important to address some of the hesitations and misgivings that people have about shifting from soldier mindset to scout mindset. And here I should interrupt myself and say that even though I sometimes talk about soldiers and scouts, as if some people are all one and other people are all the other, it's an oversimplification. And actually what I think is true is that we're all a mix of soldier and scout. Some people are more soldier, other people are more scout, but we all can be in one mindset or the other, depending on the context,

and we can shift between the two mindsets. And what I'm trying to get people to do is to want to move marginally towards scout mindset and away from soldier. Yeah. So I'll interrupt myself there, but just say that I think an important piece of the puzzle is overcoming some of the concerns about letting go of soldier mindset. Yeah.

Julie, what do you think about the, you know, this practical movement around rationality really, I think, in terms of our generation, I think he really exploded on the scenes with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the kind of new atheists who, who had a, compared to what you're talking about, had a much more aggressive kind of elbows up attitude towards irrationality, especially rationality as it related to. religion and religious beliefs or on you know the the non-acceptance of science as you know an arbiter of of truth um people have rightly i think pointed to your work and the work of others now as a you know an evolution of that school of thought of the new atheist with the kind of elbows coming down and the edges edges coming off um how do you feel about that being characterized in that way, attached to that tradition. And I guess the question I wonder often is, you know, there is a lot of irrationality out there. And some of it really is kind of bonkers. Is it time to be more forceful about calling it out? Is there something that the new atheists

understood maybe that we've either lost or that we need to rediscover in order to reclaim a public square that's frankly more coherent, less tribal. I want to hear your views on that. So at the very least, I feel confident that we need the gentler approach in addition to the harsh approach. You know, I wouldn't be out here trying to talk about introspection and self-reflection and self-reflection and improvement and so on. I wouldn't be out here talking about those things if I didn't think that that was an

important piece of the discourse that, you know, should be bigger than it is. Then it's a separate question whether we should also have the harsh elbows-up approach to combating irrationality. I'm kind of torn. I mean, to be fair to the elbows-up crowd,

I have seen anecdotal evidence of people's minds being changed by the Christopher Hitchens' approach to fighting religion. I've seen people who saw the kind of mockery of religion and actually it was kind of that was like a splash of cold water to their face and they were like, oh yeah, this is, this doesn't make sense. And people are treating it with too much reverence. And,

you know, and so yeah, there are examples of people's minds being changed by that. On the other hand, you know, I think that aggressive approach works better to, it's more convincing to people who are already kind of on board with what you're preaching. And there has actually been a little bit of research about this. I didn't cite it in my book just because it was, you don't have a ton of research on this yet. But there's a number of studies where they test the effectiveness of what they call one-sided versus two-sided arguments.

So a one-sided argument is you only list the points in favor of what you're trying to persuade people of. The two-sided is you list the points in favor of your side. And you also acknowledge like, okay, but the other side has a point because of ABC. And then you can also respond and say, now, here's why I don't. don't buy ABC, but you've at least acknowledged some nuance to the, to the issue instead of just portraying it as a clear-cut black and white issue. And in the study as the result was that the one-sided argument was more persuasive for people who were already kind of on board. They

weren't skeptical. They had no reason to doubt what the speaker was saying. And they're like, oh, okay, it's simple. He's portrayed it. He's shown why one-side is correct. But the one-sided arguments backfired on people who were approaching the issue with some pre-existing skepticism. They were not necessarily on board with what the speaker was going to tell them. And when they hear the one-sided argument, they go, oh, this guy's way oversimplifying. He's dogmatic. He doesn't actually understand my side at all. And so I'm just going to write him off.

And on those people, the two-sided argument was more effective. Because at least the two-sided argument shows, like, yes, I understand what the other side believes in why. I'm not going to write it off immediately. But here's why I think my side is actually correct in spite of the good points that the other side makes. So we have a few studies on that. And that also matches my kind of anecdotal experience. I tell a story in my book about, so something that might fit the characterization you call bonkers nonsense or bonkers irrationality out there is the anti-vacc anti-vaccine crowd who, you know, strongly believes in spite of a lot of evidence at this point that vaccines cause autism.

So I cite some examples of journalists trying to combat that bonkers irrationality, but they do it in this very one-sided way where they're like, okay, listen up, here's why it's idiotic to be anti-vax, and here's why it's obvious that vaccines are fine, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't have evidence about this, but I suspect that those screeds are not all that convincing to the people who read them, you know, already skeptical of vaccines because they just completely missed the concerns that those people have. Like one of these articles said, you know, come on, guys, the CDC or whatever, the government has already proven that vaccines are fine,

so stop worrying about it. But like, that's missing the point. The whole point of the anti-vax crowd is that they don't trust the conclusions of these, the government scientists. And so if that's how you're going to try to convince them, you're going to fail. By contrast, there's a journalist who I, whose story I tell in the book, who was like that. He was strongly and angrily, aggressively pro-vax and anti-anthax. And he used to write stuff like the screeds I was describing. And then he got to know personally someone who was anti-vax, a mother who hadn't vaccinated her children,

who was genuinely scared of vaccines and thought there was a chance they might be really dangerous. So he got to know her personally and came to believe, okay, she's not crazy, she's not stupid. I think she's wrong, but here's, I can see how a reasonable person could come to believe this. Like, here are the sources she was reading. She had bad experiences with the medical establishment in the past that made it seem plausible to her that they might be pushing something dangerous. And so he talked to her over time and listened to her points, acknowledge points that he thought were legit, like times the medical establishment had screwed up.

But still, I think in this case, we have enough evidence that vaccines are safe. and he did change her mind eventually. She actually vaccinated her daughter, which is great. And I think, you know, for people like that, the bombastic approach is just pointless. And often we resort to the bombastic elbows up approach with the kind of fig leaf of we're trying to combat nonsense and improve the world.

But actually what we want to do is just vent and make ourselves feel better about, you know, how smart we are and how stupid other people are. And I understand that important, pulse. I indulge in it sometimes myself, but I don't actually think it's productive. And so I don't, I don't think we should be trying to, like, encourage it and, and spread it. Sorry for that long-winded answer. No, no, a great analogy to think this through. Julia, let's spend the rest of our time together, again, focusing as we have on this discussion on the kind of practical mindsets and attitudes that

we can develop. Because one of the things I thought was really honest of you to, you to, you acknowledge this is that in your work on this area, you've had some frustration to the extent to which you kind of went into, especially the establishment of your central rationality with an idea that, you know, you could train people. And these were, you know, our becoming better thinkers, more rational thinkers could be a kind of, you know, a syllabus, a process that we could all go through and start at one place and end up in another. And you've obviously learned a lot by actually working with people individually and as groups. So let's start by going deeper with you on the concept of the Scout mindset, because I think that's really important to understand. You've portrayed for us

how it's an attitude as much as it's anything. It's a kind of curiosity about the world and the extent to which our own beliefs are actually confirmed by sources of information, insights that we can find kind of outside of ourselves. So I'd like you to explain it. Let's go to the next level of explanation, but then if you could also maybe start to give some concrete examples of how a scout mindset could be applied in a real world situation. And if there's a specific hack or trick that you've given a few examples, but if we can get into some other, that would encourage people to kind of move off the soldier oppositional view of the world and people around them to this, I guess, kind of inherent curiosity that we might all do more of to evidence and how we behave with each other and just how we think about the act of thinking. Sure. So I briefly alluded in one of my earlier answers to the fact that one key to shifting,

away from soldier mindset and towards scout mindset is just to have some tools to deal with the hesitations that we have around letting go of soldier mindset. On some level, we're justifiably concerned that we're going to lose those benefits of feeling good and looking good if we, you know, go out there and try to see things clearly instead of just reinforcing the beliefs that, you know, help us feel good and look good. And so it's almost, almost feel silly to call it a technique because it's so simple, but it's, I actually think it's transformative. The technique is just to stop before you try to figure out if something is true. And instead ask yourself, okay, if it were true, how bad would that be?

And what would I do about it? So on the personal level, that might be something like, suppose you're worried that the project that you spearheaded at work is going badly. and it's really hard to think clearly about that because you really want it to not be the case that it's going badly. And so you're really motivated to look for reasons why the problems aren't real,

et cetera, et cetera. Before you try to think about that question, you should stop and ask yourself, okay, suppose it were true that this project is failing. How bad would that be and what would I do about it? And I claim that it is often the case that our initial kind of knee-jerk reaction against an idea, whether it's personal or political or whatever,

our New Jerk reaction is based on the idea that it would be terrible if that were true. And actually, if you stop and just think about it, much of the time, maybe most of the time, it wouldn't actually be as bad as it feels like it would be in that split second when you first flinch away from the idea. And so if your project at work is going really badly, how bad is that? Is it going to be the end of your career?

Like it maybe feels in the moment like it's going to be the end of your career. Probably not. And probably you can, if you take a moment or two, you can think of how you could deal with it in a way that would cushion the blow. You can come up with sort of how you would explain to your team that things didn't work out and we need to pivot. You can come up with maybe the outlines of a new project to pivot to. None of this is going to make it painless to recognize some unpleasant truth that you were flinching away from. But it can at least make it tolerable. It can at least make you kind of willing to consider openly. an idea that you had previously been just pushing out of mind and dismissing because you didn't want it to be true. And I think this also applies to ideological or political ideas. If I'm in an argument on Twitter,

for example, about something political, my instinct is often to just immediately reach for rebuttals to any point that someone makes that goes against what I'm saying because on some level it feels like it would be terrible if they were right and I was wrong. But if you just stop and ask yourself,

okay, suppose they were right, how bad would that be and what would I do about it? Usually the answer is actually it would be fine. Like, I've changed my mind before on Twitter and it's been fine. Like people overwhelmingly have been appreciative and, you know, admire me for it. Not everyone, but most people. And what would I do about it? Okay, well, here's how I would, if I decided I was wrong, here's how I would say it. You know, I can come up with wording in my head like, actually, that's a good point. I was thinking of X, Y, Z, but, you know, this isn't an example of that. And so maybe you're right. And even just having a concrete plan like that, where the plan can be as simple as, you know, knowing how you would tell

people that you're wrong or that your plan, your project failed, even just something tangible like that can allow you to like release your hold on the thing that you feel has to be true or else things would be terrible. And so this, this kind of stepping back and asking yourself, how bad would be of that thing were true and what would I do about it is just a general all-purpose technique, for lack of a better word, that I think makes it much easier to be a scout when otherwise you would sort of cling to being a soldier. It's interesting, Julia, you know, listen to you, I think, a little bit of, you know, stoicism, you know, that the stoics had this idea of, in their case, they were trying to deal with just the chaotic reality of, you know, life at 200 BC. So they would,

I guess calm their anxiety or their uncertainty about the future by thinking about all the wrong things that could happen. And supposedly in a sense, I think what you're getting at is, is it's a, this is habit. It's not, it's not like some, you know, insight on high that comes down and your life has changed forever. It's, it's trying to turn a way of thinking into into a habit of thinking. And do I have that right? Yeah, No, that's well put. And I think we do tend to underestimate just how habit-driven our thinking is. And a corollary of that, actually, is that one of the most important things you can do to move towards scout mindset is to get better at noticing when you're in soldier mindset and to positively reinforce yourself for noticing.

So, you know, if whenever you notice yourself being biased or dismissing some point unfairly, If when you notice that, you punish yourself by feeling really bad about it and, you know, self-flagellating or whatever, you are negatively reinforcing that habit and you're making it harder for yourself to notice when you're in soldier mindset. And we're all in soldier mindset, at least sometimes. So if you never notice it, that's not actually a good sign. That doesn't mean you're, you know, some magical exception to humanity, to the rule of humanity being in soldier mindset. It probably just means you're bad at noticing. So the point is you should be reinforcing the habits of thought that are going to help you see things clearly, rather than punishing those habits of thought and, you know, further entrenching yourself in soldier mindset. Right. So just to look at some more examples around the scale mindset, not the antithesis, but kind of the evolution of soldier mindset, how would you apply this, let's say, to

not maybe an individual or interpersonal challenge, but to society. Because I think a lot of the concern that's out there right now is that the social discourse is very fragmented, that we're kind of assembling ourselves into tribes that seem to, from your description of a soldier mindset, these tribes seem to be founded on a lot of the attributes of the soldier psychology that were seeking affirmation and status from other people by evidencing, you know, a point of view and we're also at the same time, you know, affirming our own kind of biases and habits of thought and not having to go through the mental work, the energy expenditure of finding contrary points or evidence that might not back up

our easy assumptions about why the world is the way it is. So talk to us about, you know, how these things could unfold on a societal level. And if you If there are some tactics, I mean, you talked earlier about trying to seek out other people that have a scout mindset and aligning yourself with them. How does one go about doing that? Well, I think one important part of the process is to judge people not based on the views that they hold, but based on how they think and how they reason and argue. Because if your criteria for is this person smart and reasonable is just based on do they hold the same views as I do? then you're never going to find people who, you know, will help broaden your horizons or challenge your preconceptions.

Because you're only selecting for people who already agree with you. So your criteria for is this a smart and reasonable person who I should listen to has to be based on their process, not their result. So aspects of that process can be things like, do I see them acknowledging good points from the other side? do I see them adjusting their level of confidence based on how strong the evidence is? So, like, instead of saying they're 100% sure about everything, do they calibrate that and say, you know, this, I'm quite sure of this. You know, this other thing is, you know, I'm sort of confident, but I wouldn't be shocked if it were wrong.

This other thing I really have no idea. Do they seem to be making an effort to adjust the strength of their beliefs to the strength of the evidence? do they themselves ever cite things that they disagree with or, you know, that criticize them? Like, do they ever cite articles saying, you know, well, I tend to disagree with this person about everything, but I think this is a really interesting, well-reasoned article, things like that. People who show those signs of trying to be scouts are people who I think you should collect and read them and listen to them and take what they say more seriously than you would a random person on the internet because, you know, they've given signs that they're trying to get the truth.

not just promote whatever their side already believes. So that, I think that's an important criteria. And it's relatedly, I think a mistake that people tend to make when they do try to ranch out and listen to people from other tribes or, you know, other sides of the aisle is that they tend to reach for the most prominent representatives of the other side. So like if you're a liberal, you might say, okay, I'm going to challenge my preconceptions and turn on Fox News or something like that. And I think this is well-intentioned, but actually a mistake. And this approach to broadening your horizons tends to backfire. Because if you think about what kinds of sources become the most prominent members of a particular tribe, they get to where they are, not by being reasonable and nuanced, they get to where they are by playing to their base and, you know,

presenting things in a really one-sided way that people who already agree with them are going to cheer for and appreciate. And by straw manning and mocking the other side, which is you, because you're the liberal, listening to Fox News. And so all the examples that I could find of liberals trying to broaden their horizons by listening to Fox News resulted in them just being even more annoyed at the other side than before and even more confident that they're right. Because their example of the other side is, you know, an unreasonable set of people. And so they're like, well, if that's what the other side has to offer, then I must, you know, I'm even more sure that I'm right and they're wrong. And so this is actually really unproductive.

And if you want to broaden your horizons and listen to the other side, which I think is great, You should be seeking out people who actually show signs of being reasonable and nuanced. Or people who actually, you know, you have some common ground with them, even if you disagree with them on other things. Those are the people who you actually have some shot at learning from and, you know, changing your mind from, even though it's always hard to challenge your preconceptions. But you should at least give yourself a better shot at it, not a worse shot at it. I wonder, Julie, if you and your experience working with people, have looked at this in the context of, you know, a business environment and how, in a sense, people think about this big thing called management, you know, how we manage people.

Is there any kind of empirical evidence or suggestions that would indicate that, you know, businesses or enterprises that adopt this scout mindset have, you know, better performance? So because, you know, you live in Silicon Valley. You know what that culture is like. There's a lot of veneration to, I think, on the outside at least, as an observer of a, it's frankly a kind of soldier mindset that these monomaniacal founders who, you know, have this vision. And it's all about the pursuit of of that vision and a series of kind of founding assumptions, whereas the scout mindset you're describing seems to be somehow different, more adaptive, more reactive, more reaction. in a positive way to the world as we found it. So I wonder if you've applied these things or looked at them through the lens of a kind of business practice, a business case.

So I'll start by saying that there is some research in this field on the relationship between scout or soldier mindset and success. I don't think it's very good. Even the research that kind of supports my side, I don't think it's very good. It's just really hard to do good research on these topics because you can't like, you know, do a randomized control trial where you randomly. assign some managers to be scouts and some managers to be soldiers and then follow their companies for 10 years and see which ones succeeded and which ones didn't. So we're left with these kind of either really observational studies where you look at a set of managers and try to categorize what their management style is and look at how well they do. And that's just confounded,

you know, six ways to Sunday. Or these really kind of artificial experiments where you take some students in a lab and you're like, you know, okay, I'm going to show you a video where some people express uncertainty at different levels and you can rate how charismatic you think they are. And that maybe tells you a little, but it doesn't tell you that much about how these principles work in the real world in the management context. So I actually don't cite a lot of research in my book just because I don't think most fits very good. But one thing that I will say is that the common wisdom that you were referring to, which is that you can't be successful in Silicon Valley without a soldier mindset where you just show 100% confidence in your vision

and then you never doubt yourself, and it's much better to be overconfident than underconfident. I do think we have good evidence that that common wisdom is wrong because there are a bunch of counter examples to it. There are a bunch of examples of successful people who are very scout-like,

at least about their business. I don't know about politics. But like one example I talk about is Jeff Bezos, who, you know, love or hate the guy. I'm not here to pass judgment on him as a person, but just on one specific aspect of him as a person, which is he was from the very beginning, very scout-like about Amazon and its chances of success. When he was thinking about starting it, he kind of tried to honestly estimate,

what is the probability I'm going to succeed here? And he put it at about 30%, which is not bad for a tough field like entrepreneurship, but still below 50%. So he still thought it was more likely that he would fail than succeed. And he said as much to everyone from the beginning. Like in his early meetings with investors, he'd be like, just so you know, I think there was like a 70% chance you're going to lose your money. So only invest it if you are comfortable with that.

In early media interviews, he would emphasize, look, what Amazon is doing is very complicated. There's no guarantee we're going to succeed. If you look back in history at like the first wave of tech businesses, it was really hard to predict in advance, which ones would succeed and which ones would fail, which is true. This is a very intellectually honest way of looking at it rather than insisting that you can know for sure that your business is going to succeed. no one can know that, no matter how smart or talented you are. So anyway, Jeff Bezos said this from the beginning to the media, to his investors, to his employees. And he clearly was very successful at getting people to invest in and work for and follow him. And a takeaway, I think, from the case of Jeff Bezos is that what people actually want from a founder or a leader is not 100% certainty that they're right.

rather it's this kind of exuding social confidence that my ideas are worth listening to and my vision is worth trying, even if I can't guarantee it's going to succeed. And like Jeff Bezos had, I make this distinction between epistemic confidence, which is certainty that your views are correct, on the one hand, versus social confidence,

which is confidence in your sort of worth as a leader and the fact that you're worth listening to, willingness to get out there and take risks and speak to crowds, things like that, which Jeff Bezos had in spades. And a lot of his early investors commented on. They would say things like, well, you know, I know it's risky and I know it might fail. And, you know, Jeff acknowledges as much. But I just love his energy. He's just so passionate. And when he talks, you know, in these early videos when he's talking about his vision for Amazon and how big internet commerce is going to be, he's clearly very, you know, fired up. And he's got this vision, even if it's not 100% certain. And, you know, he's also clearly smart and competent, knows what he's doing.

And so those, I think, are the things that investors and employees actually look for. And we tend to conflate those things with having to be 100% certain in every claim that you make about the market or about your business plan. I think that's not actually necessary. Now, what the actual relationship is between epistemic confidence and success is really hard to estimate. So all I will feel, all I actually feel confident saying is that epistemic, certainty is clearly not necessary for success because we have a bunch of examples like Jeff Bezos where they showed low epistemic confidence and we're still very charismatic and successful. So at least I want to rebut the common wisdom that you can't be a scout and a successful

entrepreneur. Beyond that, I can't say. Well, Julia Gailiff, this has been such a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate the way you've approached this topic with a lot of intellectual honesty here, pointing us to maybe places where we can look for some. some kind of certainty and for insights that we can apply, but other areas, frankly, where the jury is out and we're just going to need to all kind of reflect on this more. So congratulations on Scout Mindset. It's a terrific book. And I really enjoyed having this conversation with you today. Thank you so much, Red Deird. It was a pleasure. And I appreciate the praise. And I kind of have to try to be intellectually honest because, you know, if I don't practice what I preach, I've got a lot of

eyes on me. So I've kind of tied myself to the mask by writing this book. You're evidencing the scout mindset. You're walking the talk. I'm trying. We appreciate that. I'm trying. Well, that wraps up our latest monk dialogue on rationality. I want to tease our final and upcoming show in this series. Conversation that you will not want to miss with I.N. Percy Ali. She is a exceptional voice for free speech and free thinking in an era of conventional opinion and debate. She's going to provide us with an in-depth and far-reaching look at how our conversation about many important topics and ideas is being stifled and what we can do to have a more honest and authentic public discourse with one another. For a complete list of our

winter dialogue, speakers, go to our website, triple w monkdebates.com forward slash dialogue. You'll get access to all of our terrific one-hour, in-depth conversations. on rationality and all the other great dialogues that we've done over the last two and a half years. We, as always, appreciate your feedback on this program. Let us know what you thought of Julia Galef's conversation with me, Rudyard-Griff's. You can do that right now. Send me an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK Debateswithn S.com. Thank you also to our presenting sponsors, Onyx and Gluskin Chef, for their generous support.

the Winter Spring 2022 Monk Dialogues. Thank you to all of you. Our listeners and subscribers that tens the hundreds of thousands of you listening to these programs on your favorite podcast platform, YouTube, or wherever you get your audio, thank you so much for lending your time

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