![]() ![]() ![]() She asks, “Can I believe it?”, when considering an idea she prefers to accept. Rather than asking, “Is it true?” (in the style of the Scout Mindset), the Solider asks two different questions. The Scout, therefore, would try to see the reasoning behind (and the appeal for) both sides of an issue. Scouts, by contrast, aren’t committed to a side, but to finding out the truth, to finding answers to their questions, to finding acceptable justifications for any given position. Soldiers are committed to their sides, their positions, they can get defensive or go on the offense, they can win or lose. What is the difference between the Scout and the Soldier? To give a short answer, their difference is in their commitments. By personifying this distinction, by introducing them in terms of types of persons, she has made the compass more effective and “readable”. Given that we are changing constantly, that our minds are in constant motion, we could ask: Why not, to some limited degree, take charge of this constant and inescapable motion? Galef gives us a kind of compass, by introducing the distinction between the Soldier Mindset and the Scout Mindset. It is that she treats the material through a different lens, with a different attitude, an attitude that is responsible, practically minded, and hopeful. Much of her material can be found in other books about human (ir)rationality. It’s not that Galef has found a whole new set of material for her book. Galef’s approach is superior and preferable, in my opinion, because she does not reinforce that tendency. The books, and the approach, that I am criticizing responds to the limits of human rationality, by reinforcing the dichotomy between experts and non-experts. Reading this book, I believe, would encourage us to take responsibility over our thinking process it would encourage paying attention to the our own thinking (as opposed to a passive and unproductive pessimism about the unthinking masses or those people with their incorrigible biases) and, in doing so, it subverts the boundary between the rational experts (who are equipped to write books about our irrationality) and the laity (who are informed about themselves, thanks to the experts). My thinking about these questions is related to why I liked Julia Galef’s book, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. Do we pay attention to our own thinking, as opposed to focusing on others or on humanity as a whole? And what about our perception of the boundary between the experts and the laypeople? Does that boundary become thicker and more difficult to cross, as a consequence of the popular treatments of human psychology? Is it the reader that is elevated by the book or is it the pedestal on which the experts stand? We could ask, for example, do we feel more inclined to pay attention to and take responsibility for our thinking and decision-making, after we read a book about the subject? Are we charged with an attitude of “Why bother?” or with an attitude of “Let’s get to work?”. I tend to think that both of those (and especially the consequences) deserve an ongoing examination. These arguments, it goes without saying, have motives and consequences. They argue that we deceive ourselves, that we become satisfied with a feeling of knowing rather than knowing, that we instrumentalize our capacity for reason to justify what we want (and what we want isn’t itself decided by reason), that we conform unthinkingly to established norms and group opinions. Is it education, fashion, genes? The Scout mindset is fine for reading physical landscape that of the human mind is more intractable.Recent books in popular psychology, and particularly those about our capacity for judgment and reasoning, don’t paint a flattering picture of our intellectual capacities. The interesting question here isn’t so much that we’ve got a stubborn anti-rational aspect to our thinking it’s to ask what makes us think the way we do, which she does only superficially. And you notice that when it comes to perceiving rational thinking, she does tend to award her side – atheist/liberal/Democrat – most breaks. Soldier model is binary… as our author observes, we’re often a bit of both. ![]() Like all self-help books, this one is an exercise in over-simplification. “You were wrong, get wrecked” isn’t quite the Scout mindset. The question remains… how does that apply to Dominic Cummings’ bid to undermine Boris Johnson by demonstrating he got things wrong and then changed his approach to Covid? You see, the Scout mindset is all about being open to the possibility you are wrong and not seeing the pursuit of truth as a win-lose scenario. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT. ![]()
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