It gives us an instant hit of confidence and esteem, which can propel us over obstacles that are immediately in our path. Taking our beliefs as given, rather than questioning the facts and spending time observing the terrain, saves us time and effort. Her argument is that in choosing the soldier mindset, we are falling victim to a cognitive bias: present bias, or the tendency to care too much about short-term consequences and too little about long-term consequences. She argues instead that we minimise the costs and overstate the benefits of the soldier mindset - that we are not “rationally irrational” in choosing the soldier mindset. The immediate benefits seemed clear, and prompted me to continue down that path. I felt more confident about my decisions. I felt a strong sense of pride and belonging within the party. My capacity to persuade would be enhanced by my confidence.Īnd I wasn’t wrong. I would worry less about how to be right, and more about how to be on the winning side. By adopting a “my party, right-or-wrong” view, I would feel better about the early starts and late nights spent at the office. Galef categorises the benefits of the soldier mindset into six broad categories: comfort, self-esteem, morale, persuasion, image, and belonging - and that’s more or less how I saw it. Under the circumstances, the benefits of becoming a hardcore Labor partisan seemed clear. I was no longer serving an abstract principle out of a sense of honour, but an actual existing party of people who I desperately wanted to see in power. Even though it wasn’t a perfect fit, I agreed far more with the Labor Party I now served than the conservative government who ruled the country. In becoming a political partisan, I needed a new mindset. I served the government of the day as well as I possibly could - not because I agreed with their politics, but because I agreed with the broader principle of an apolitical public service serving a democratically elected government. My approach to excellence in that job had been to think of myself as a knight in a grey suit, following a code of honour. Prior to working as a political adviser, I had worked for years as an apolitical public servant, employed by a conservative government that I regularly disagreed with. While we all regularly resort to the soldier mindset, people like me are even more prone to it. I don’t spend my whole day engaged in intellectual warfare with my political foes, but I probably spend more than most. My job is being a partisan political adviser. And she’s wise to do so - the benefits of the soldier mindset are all too clear to people like me. Galef doesn’t dismiss this approach out of hand - she spends several chapters outlining the benefits of the soldier mindset. It is the framework that guides motivated reasoning - using our powers of logic and deduction to protect a belief we already hold, rather than explore and probe new ideas. The inverse is the “soldier mindset”: the intellectual approach that focuses on protecting our views and defeating our opponents. It’s what prompts you to honestly ask yourself questions like “Was I at fault in that argument?” or “Is this risk worth it?” or “How would I react if someone from the other political party did the same thing”. Scout mindset is what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course. The “scout mindset” that Galef wants to promote is the mindset of seeking truth, of being motivated to understand the world as it truly is. Her book leans heavily on one metaphor: the idea of the “soldier mindset” versus the “scout mindset”. So she takes a different approach from the Malcolm Gladwells of the world: rather than telling us how we’re failing to think rationally, she dedicates much of her book to telling us why we should think rationally instead. Intelligence and education don’t seem to protect us from irrationality - indeed, sometimes it reinforces the problem. But Galef has realised that knowing that we’re biased doesn’t necessarily help us become any less biased. Most of us have heard a TED talk or read a pop-psych book on the various forms of cognitive bias that lead us astray. Galef is not the first author to propose a better way of thinking - she admits as much in the first few pages of the book. Into this battlefield marches Julia Galef with her plan to stop the fighting: The Scout Mindset, a well-argued plea to seek truth instead of war. Medical science, urban planning, climate change, transport design, economic theory - the range of fields where the truth is impossible to ascertain seems to expand with every tweet. The digital revolution seems to have unleashed a Misinformation Age. “Post-truth” seems to be the defining phrase of the 21st century.
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