The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
The point is simply that as people become better informed, they should start to converge on the truth, wherever it happens to be. Instead, we see the opposite pattern—as people get better informed, they diverge.
Julia Galef • The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
Being in scout mindset means wanting your “map”—your perception of yourself and the world—to be as accurate as possible.
Julia Galef • The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
The “self-belief” model of motivation assumes that if you acknowledge the possibility of failure, then you’ll be too demoralized or afraid to take risks. In that model, people who believe that failure is unthinkable are the ones who try the hardest to succeed. Yet in practice, things often seem to work the other way around—accepting the possibility
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When you think of someone with excellent judgment, what traits come to mind? Maybe you think of things like intelligence, cleverness, courage, or patience. Those are all admirable virtues, but there’s one trait that belongs at the top of the list that is so overlooked, it doesn’t even have an official name. So I’ve given it one. I call it scout min
... See moreJulia Galef • The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
Motivated reasoning is so fundamental to the way our minds work that it’s almost strange to have a special name for it; perhaps it should just be called reasoning.
Julia Galef • The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
almost everyone estimated their company’s probability of success to be at least 7 out of 10, with a third giving themselves an eyebrow-raising 10 out of 10 chance, despite the fact that the baseline rate of start-up success is closer to 1 in 10.
Julia Galef • The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs. If you find out you we
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The best description of motivated reasoning I’ve ever seen comes from psychologist Tom Gilovich. When we want something to be true, he said, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe this?,” searching for an excuse to accept it. When we don’t want something to be true, we instead ask ourselves, “Must I believe this?,” searching for an excuse to reject it.
Julia Galef • The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz argues, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, that there’s no point in thinking about your odds of success when building a company. “When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it,” he writes. “It matters not whethe
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