Scout Mindset Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don T, The

A better way to combat kneejerk biases and make smarter decisions from Julia Galef the acclaimed expert on rational decisionmaking When it comes to what we believe humans see what they want to see In other words we have what Julia Galef calls a soldier mindset From tribalism and wishful thinking to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believeand 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 shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn t that they re smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else It s a handful of emotional skills habits and ways of looking at the worldwhich anyone can learn With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think