The Last Word On Nothing

I first met Julia Galef while reporting a story about rational thinking for Discover Magazine back in 2014. Galef is co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, which she was directing at the time. I attended one of the workshops on rationality that CFAR puts on and was instantly impressed with Galef’s ability to question her own beliefs and identify irrational and unhelpful patterns of thinking. Her ideas have positively shaped my own work habits, and I was thrilled to read her new book, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. The book is a terrific primer on how to think more clearly and with less bias, and if you’re reading this and thinking that you’re not the kind of person who needs such a book, well, that’s a pretty good sign that you are. I spoke with Galef about the book and what it has to offer even the smartest among us.

Christie: Your book is about “The Scout Mindset.” Could you start by explaining a little bit about what this is and how you came to choose this particular metaphor?

Julia: Sure. The Scout Mindset is the book’s title, and it’s also the framing metaphor of the book. Humans are very often, by default, in what I call “soldier mindset,” which is the motivation to defend your pre-existing beliefs or defend the things you want to believe against any evidence that might threaten them. And so you shoot down arguments to the contrary. Scout mindset is an alternative to that. Unlike the soldier, the scout’s role is not to attack or defend. Instead, it’s just to go out and see what’s really out there and try to form as accurate a map as possible of the territory or an issue. A scout mindset is the motivation to try to see things as they are and not as you wish they were. It’s being intellectually honest or objective or just trying to be curious about what’s true.

Christie: I tend to think of this as the idealized version of how the scientific mindset should work, even though, as a science journalist, I’ve often seen that scientists don’t always act that way.

Julia: It does have a lot of overlap with kind of our platonic ideal of what a scientist should be. But I like the scout metaphor, because an accurate map serves such a direct purpose for the scout. You’re trying to form an accurate picture of what’s going on because understanding yourself and other people and how the world works helps you make better decisions. I really wanted to emphasize the practical usefulness of seeing things clearly, and not just the joy of intellectual discovery, even though I love that too.

Christie: One of the main points you make in the book is that everyone falls prey to cognitive biases. We may all aspire to be scouts, but so often the human condition is to fall back on the soldier mindset. You tell a story about this involving a friend of mine, Bethany Brookshire, who’s one of the smartest people I know. How is it that even very sharp people like Bethany can fall into these cognitive traps?

Julia: I love that story, and it made me an instant fan of Bethany. She’s a science journalist, and a few years ago she tweeted something that basically said, I’m a science journalist, and in my email signature, it says I have a Ph.D. This morning when I checked my email I had two emails from scientists who I had contacted requesting an interview. One of the scientists was male and his email to me began, “Dear Ms Brookshire.” The other scientist was female, and her email to me began, “Dear Dr. Brookshire,”  and you know, this isn’t a 100 percent correlation, but it’s a definite pattern.

Her tweet really resonated with a lot of people and it kind of went viral, and she got a lot of very validating and supportive comments from other women saying that this really matched their experience too. As the supportive responses came rolling in, Bethany felt a little bit troubled, because she had made this claim about a pattern that exists in the data, but she had made it just kind of off the cuff  without actually checking. She had the data sitting in her email, and she kept thinking, “I’m a scientist, shouldn’t I actually check the data?” And so she did.

She went back and collected all of these emails from scientists and she classified them as best she could, and she ran the numbers and discovered that she’d been wrong. There actually wasn’t a strong pattern there, but to the extent that there was, it went in the other direction and wasn’t significant.

The data did not actually support the claim she had made, which does not mean there isn’t gender bias and doesn’t mean that other people’s experience doesn’t show this pattern. It just means that this specific pattern she’d claimed existed in her emails was not actually there. And so she wrote a follow up tweet explaining that she’d run the data and it turns out she was wrong. She apologized and published her data. I was just so impressed with her, and I was gratified that her responses to the follow up tweet were actually quite positive. People really applauded her for her intellectual honesty.

Christie: It’s easy to feel mortified about being wrong, but you talk about how sometimes recognizing and acknowledging that you’re wrong can be very useful.

Julia: Right. Another thing I really liked is that Bethany did this post mortem to ask, why did I get this wrong? And she said, well, one reason is that I was probably influenced by recency bias. These most recent emails showed an example of this phenomenon, and so I over-anchored on that. I thought that that’s such a good thing to do — to notice what you got wrong, and then ask yourself, what process was I using that led to me getting this wrong?

I think that’s what makes you a better thinker in general — becoming more aware of the kinds of mistakes your brain makes and the kinds of situations where you tend to be biased or get things wrong. All too often we don’t even notice or acknowledge our mistakes. So that was another thing I wanted to compliment her on.

Christie: I’m curious about another thing that you talked about in the book: leaning into confusion. I wonder if you could just explain what you mean by that and why this is such a good thing.

Julia: So the standard thing that we do when the world contradicts our expectations, like when an event doesn’t turn out like we expected it to or when someone behaves in a way that we think is irrational or or weird or surprising, the normal thing we do is to try to resolve the contradiction while still retaining our original beliefs. We try to find some way to make the new evidence make sense within our existing framework.

This is partly just because we have limited time and processing power, so we can’t always be questioning everything. But we do tend to take it too far. We can go to absurd lengths to explain away contradictory evidence. One kind of disturbing example of this that I bring up in the book happened during World War Two. The governor of California was convinced that Japanese Americans were plotting to sabotage the U.S., and, and therefore they should be interned. It was pointed out to him that there hadn’t been any evidence yet of Japanese American subterfuge, and his response was to say, well, that is all the more frightening to me because it just shows that whatever subterfuge they are planning is going to be super secret, and take us totally by surprise. And that’s an example of really bending over backwards to take this contradictory evidence and make it fit your theory.

Leaning into confusion is the opposite of that. It’s being really interested in the things that don’t fit your pre-existing theory. It doesn’t necessarily mean you should immediately give up your theory, it just means that you should be especially interested in the cases that don’t fit it. Sometimes those will cause you to just slightly revise your theory, but sometimes they’ll accumulate over time to where you will substantially change your worldview. But you have to notice them and acknowledge the existence of these anomalies for that process to be possible.

Christie: It sounds like you’re talking about having a mental flexibility with your beliefs, so you don’t allow your beliefs to become too rigid. You’re leaving space for updating.

Julia: This really gets at what I think is one of the concerns people have about the idea of being a scout, which is thinking that you’ll just be forever stuck in analysis paralysis and you’ll never be able to actually act on anything. I don’t think that has to be the case. You absolutely can act on your best guess at the time and decide that if evidence comes up in the future that suggests something different, then I can re-evaluate. But for now I’m just going to treat this as the provisional truth. And that’s a really invaluable skill.

Christie: You talk in the book about the importance of being open to changing your mind. Were there things you changed your mind about while writing the book?

Julia: That is a great question. Originally, in the first draft, I had written the book as if the scout mindset was always better than soldier mindset. But after a lot of thinking and talking to people, I realized I can’t actually defend that. The thing that I think is true now and what what I ended up claiming in the book is not that we can know for sure that scout mindset is always better, but rather: On the margin, we would be better off with more scout mindset and less soldier mindset than our default settings. That’s a more nuanced claim than I was originally making, but it’s one that I actually feel confident in and can defend.

Christie: That’s a great note to end on. I’ll just add that one strength of your book is that it doesn’t come across as overconfident in the way that someone with a soldier mindset would have written it. It feels like you’ve taken your own advice. Kudos to that!

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Julia Galef is the host of the popular Rationally Speaking podcast, where she has interviewed thinkers such as Tyler Cowen, Sean Carroll, Phil Tetlock, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. She co-founded the Center for Applied Rationality and has consulted for organizations such as OpenAI and the Open Philanthropy Project. Her 2016 TED Talk “Why You Think You’re Right — Even If You’re Not” has been viewed over 4 million times.