The Burleson Box: A Podcast from Dustin Burleson, DDS, MBA

Julia Galef on The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't

Episode Summary

Julia Galef hosts the popular podcast, Rationally Speaking, and is the founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. She has consulted for organizations including OpenAI and Open Philanthropy. Her TED Talk “Why You Think You’re Right – Even If You’re Wrong” has been viewed over four million times. And now she is the author of the book “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t.”

Episode Notes

In this episode, Dustin talks with Julia Galef about her book, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't.

You'll learn about motivated reasoning, what Julia calls "soldier mindset" and how to hold your identity lightly, so that you can create a more accurate map of your world and embrace the worthy pursuit of intellectual honesty. Julia and I discuss Darwin's "golden rule" and how to express uncertainty. Julia gives practical tips on how to decide what to believe and how to seek out evidence that will make our maps more accurate.

Julia says, "Over time, our beliefs about the world adjust to accommodate our track record." Instead of doubling down on soldier mindset, you'll learn how to see more clearly, make better judgments and enjoy the freedom and thrill of discovery. The Scout Mindset doesn't just show us how we fail to think clearly but helps us understand why we do it and practical steps we can take to improve our rationality.

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Episode Transcription

Dustin Burleson:

As humans, we are masters of self-deception. In our personal lives and in our work, we see what we want to see. Julia Galef calls this a soldier mindset and explains why we defend the ideas we most want to believe and we shoot down those we don't. Julia Galef is the host of the popular podcast, Rationally Speaking. And is the founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. She has consulted for organizations including OpenAI and Open Philanthropy. Her Ted Talk, "Why You Think You're Right, Even if You're Wrong" has been viewed over four million times. And now she's the author of the book, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. On today's episode, Julia and I discuss how our beliefs of the world adjust to accommodate our track record, why we cling to ideas even when the evidence suggests there's a better way forward, how to express uncertainty and what it means to be intellectually honest. I'm excited to share these lessons and more from Julia's new book on another episode of The Burleson Box.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Julia, thanks so much for joining me today. It's an honor to have you on the program.

 

Julia Galef:

Thank you. It's great to be here.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I love your new book. First, thank you for writing it. I know it took a ton of effort to get out.

 

Julia Galef:

It did. Thank you for appreciating that. It did.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I'm curious what motivated you to write about this subject and what is scout mindset?

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. So The Scout Mindset is the title of my book and it's also my name for a way of thinking. So the framing metaphor of the book is that we humans in general are often in what I call soldier mindset which is the motivation to defend your preexisting beliefs or defend things you want to believe against any evidence that might threaten them and shoot down opposing arguments and avoid contradictory evidence and so on. And so scout mindset is an alternative to that because the scouts role, unlike the soldier is not to attack or defend, it's just to go out and see, what's really there. And try to put together as accurate a map of a situation or an issue as possible including things that you don't know or that you have uncertainty about and being willing to, or even excited to revise your map as you learn new things and discover what you were wrong about.

 

Julia Galef:

So that's why I use the terms scout mindset. And the motivation for writing the book was basically I've spent the last 10 years of my life being a writer and a podcaster and a consultant. And I ran some workshops at a educational nonprofit that I co-founded all about how do we improve our judgment and reasoning, especially about really important and complicated topics? And I just increasingly to feel like the discourse around this topic of improving our judgment was missing this really important factor which was the motivation behind our thinking. Because most of the books and articles about how do we think better and reason better, they focus on giving people knowledge, like here's a list of cognitive biases, or here's a list of logical fallacies. And I'm not saying that's not important because I think it is, but I think what's even more important is the motivation that you have to use that knowledge.

 

Julia Galef:

Are you motivated to use that knowledge to actually examine your own thinking and discover flaws or biases you hadn't been aware of? Or are you motivated to use it to find flaws in other people's arguments that you wanted to shoot down anyway? And I think this is a common trope you're probably already familiar with. If you go to any online forum, like on Reddit, there'll be people who come armed with lists of cognitive biases and fallacies. And they just use that as a cudgel to beat other people over the head with. And so I, yeah, this just seemed like a really important really overlooked element in good judgment that I wanted to make more prominent, which is the motivation that's guiding your thinking.

 

Dustin Burleson:

That's why I love the book so much. I mean, listen, there are other great books out there that talk about rationality, you go back to thinking Thinking, Fast and Slow or Predictably Irrational. But I think that was just like the primer, because it just got you excited of like, okay, this is where we fool ourselves. But your book goes, I think in, I shouldn't say a better direction, but it takes it a step further and kind of gives you a, I don't want to, nothing like dissing Daniel Kahneman on a podcast. It gives you practical tools to actually see, and maybe identify scout mindset or to identify in yourself when you are clinging to the soldier mindset. I'd never heard that metaphor before, the scout versus soldier. And then I saw your Ted Talk I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is great." So can you kind of, maybe, I guess the next question might be, why is our default soldier mindset?

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. So I think this is a really interesting and important question. And I spent a lot of time thinking and reading to, or researching this question because I really wanted to do justice to soldier mindset and not just write a book saying "Oh, soldier mindset's terrible. Let's do this other thing instead." Because as I say in the book, I try to follow this principle called Chesterton's Fence. Which is that before you try to knock something down or try to abolish something, you should make sure you really understand why it's there in the first place. And the term Chesterton's Fence comes from this essay by a British essayist named G.K. Chesterton, where he kind of tells this little parable of suppose you buy some property and you are out walking, you discover that some previous owner has built a fence across one of the roads and you say to yourself, "Well, I don't see any reason for this fence to be here. Let's knock it down."

 

Julia Galef:

And he says if you don't understand why the fence is there, you should be a little wary about knocking it down. So you should go off and make sure you understand why it was put there before you feel confident about taking it away. So anyway, that is why I wanted to make sure I understood what is soldier mindset doing there in our brains, in the first place before I tell people we should try to knock it down? And the answer is multifold. I think there are multiple things that we try to use soldier mindset for, but to just summarize we use soldier mindset to feel good and look good. And so feeling good could consist of things like protecting our egos, defending beliefs about ourselves and about how we're good and virtuous and competent people.

 

Julia Galef:

And we did the right thing and we weren't responsible for the bad things that happened. It could consist of feeling good about our lives or the world telling ourselves comforting narratives about how the world works. That bad people will end up being punished and everything will work out for the best. And then looking good is it's about how we present ourselves to other people. So we sometimes defend beliefs that help us persuade other people. If you're a founder of a company you have a strong motivation to convince yourself that everything's going great, and you're going to be the next Google so that you can feel more confident making those claims to other people like investors, who you might want to believe those things. And we also care a lot about looking good in the sense of the people in our tribe, our social groups, our community, seeing us as good people and having the right beliefs and being part of the group.

 

Julia Galef:

And so that also gives us a strong motivation to defend beliefs that our tribe agrees with and thinks are the right political or ethical or ideological beliefs. So that's just kind of a taste of all the things that we use soldier mindset for. And I want to acknowledge that those are totally legitimate goals to feel good and look good. And I think those are very important part of being human, but I think that we don't actually need soldier mindset to look good and feel good nearly as much as we kind of intuitively think we do. And that in fact, we can use scout mindset to look at and feel good as well, and then without suffering all the downsides of soldier mindset like distorting our judgment, so I'll stop there.

 

Dustin Burleson:

It's great. And you give some excellent examples in the book of people you would think, and on the surface are very persuasive, but do it with a scout mindset. You talk about Jeff Bezos and how he actually got his first investment. You talk about Elon Musk. And how they assign really low probability of success to companies that have been wildly successful. Can you kind of dig into why's, maybe soldier mindset backfires and why we won't see that scout is better, I guess?

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. So one of the things that I didn't mention, that we use soldier mindset for, is to motivate ourselves. So to convince ourselves that if we just work hard, we're definitely going to succeed at whatever project or endeavor, like starting a company. And that can be motivating that kind of false confidence that you're definitely going to succeed, that can motivate you to work hard and persevere through hard times. But it also comes with the downside of not being true that you have this guarantee of success because entrepreneurship is a very risky and chance filled business. And because it's not true you can end up making bad decisions, like sticking it out much longer than you should have. And not in fact pivoting to a different business or a different business plan or investing risking a lot of your capital on a business plan that actually never had a very good chance of success in the first place.

 

Julia Galef:

Or just not spending the time to look for different plans that might be better than the first one you thought of and just committing to that wholeheartedly and not looking for something better. So these are all downsides of over optimism in your business. And so it's much better if you can motivate yourself without having to believe falsely that you're guaranteed a success. And so in the book, I look at some examples of people who were able to do that, very driven and hardworking and quite successful entrepreneurs who believed from the start that, "Yeah, this is quite risky. This business will probably fail because most businesses probably fail." And yet it's still an important and valuable thing to try and it's worth trying anyway. And so Elon Musk is actually an example in this category because most people don't realize this, but when he first founded Tesla and also SpaceX, he believed there to be only about a 10% chance of success that either company would become successful.

 

Julia Galef:

And he said as much from day one in interviews that he's given about his companies and the low odds that he assigns to his company's success tend to baffle people. One interviewer on 60 minutes was like, "Well, but if you think you're probably going to fail, then why try?" And Elon's answer is always, "Well, if you think something's important enough, then it's worth trying." And so a way to summarize this type of motivation, this more kind of reality-based motivation is that it's about expected value. So if you think that something is probably going to fail then it can still be worth doing if the upside is large enough and the downside is tolerable. And so for Elon Musk, yeah the upside of SpaceX or Tesla succeeding is huge.

 

Julia Galef:

And the downside is tolerable. He's not going to be personally ruined. He can still try again with a different company and he still felt like he would probably make some progress in helping electric cars or space exploration become more of a reality. And so, yeah, in his calculus, the expected value of starting a company like Tesla or SpaceX was very positive, even if the most likely outcome was failure. And so this is a different way of thinking about what can motivate you that is it's probabilistic thinking essentially, and it's less common than this kind of false optimistic approach to motivation, but I think it's much more valuable because it doesn't force you to deceive yourself and reject any evidence that might tell you that your plan is flawed or that things are going badly. So that's one way in which I argue we don't actually need soldier mindset in order to get these things that are important to us, like the motivation to do something hard.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I really want to kind of double click on that topic because the listeners in this audience are mostly professional practice owners who've been to eight, 10, 12, 16 years of professional education. And given a lot of very one path only kind of mindset. We joke in medicine that if the patient's allergic to penicillin, you might want to keep them only around very unopened bottles of penicillin. If the surgical procedure is named after you, it's really hard to admit when there's a better technique that comes along. So which we tend to do in medicine. And so-

 

Julia Galef:

That's a good point.

 

Dustin Burleson:

... We'll go back to, but also there were tremendous scouts in my training that I consider mentors. And so I want to talk about how to look for some of those signs of Scouts, but I want to kind of double-click on Elon Musk and that don't you think, I guess, I don't know, but someone who goes into a new enterprise assigning at a 10% probability of success while most, I think are a lot of people in Silicon valley will say, "Oh, it's absolutely going to succeed at 100% success rate." Don't you think that opens him up in his scout mindset to see more than one path and actually couldn't that, and I don't know, couldn't that increase his odds of success?

 

Julia Galef:

Yes. So I think this is an underappreciated benefit of trying to think realistically about your odds of success at some endeavor. People tend to focus just on once you've chosen a path, shouldn't you believe in it wholeheartedly. But there's never only one path to choose. Even within one particular business idea, there's lots of different ways you could try to execute that. And yeah, there's lots of different business ideas that you could pursue and even zooming out farther there's lots of different careers that you could choose. It's possible that entrepreneurship isn't really the career for you and you'd be way more successful and happy in a different career. And so trying, these are difficult choices to try to wave all these different possibilities and really think about the upsides and downsides and what's worth risking.

 

Julia Galef:

So I won't deny those are difficult choices, but in order to try to make those difficult choice as well, you have to have as realistic a sense of the different probabilities involved of the different paths as you can. And there's no guaranteed right answer, but an important first step is just to try to think clearly about the different odds of success and failure involved in your different choices. So yeah, in the case of Elon Musk, I don't know a lot about the thinking behind how he settled on the particular plan for Tesla or for SpaceX. But I know that he does think about his companies as kind of portfolios of bets. And this is I think an important thing that makes this probabilistic thinking approach to motivational work is just keeping in mind that yes, you're fixated on one particular project at the moment, this one particular company that you're starting or one investment, but that's not the only bet you're ever going to take in your life.

 

Julia Galef:

Over the course of your lifetime, someone like Elon Musk can start, I would say at least 10 companies like Tesla or SpaceX. And so that knowledge makes the risk much easier to stomach because if you think about just the traditional portfolio of investments, you accept that any one investment might not do well, but altogether the whole portfolio is much more likely to benefit you on net. And so the bets that you take in your life, the investments that you make over the course of your lifetime are kind of like that just spread out more in time and not all made at once in one investment portfolio. And so yeah, it just makes it a lot easier to accept the reality of risk if you know that any one that is risky, but the entire portfolio has a much higher chance of success overall. Does that make sense?

 

Dustin Burleson:

Absolutely. And then considering the flip side, and you used to have a great quote in the book on, so if we do the opposite right, and cling to this soldier mindset that you say, "Over time, our beliefs about the world adjust to accommodate our track record."

 

Julia Galef:

That's right.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I mean, that just slapped me in the forehead. I was like, "Oh my gosh." Because there's a big sacrifice we make when we ignore that truth or we put all of our eggs in one basket and we refuse to change our mind about that basket.

 

Julia Galef:

That's right. Yeah. That was, I think I brought that up in the context of talking about a study that followed college students over the course of their whole college career. And asked them before each semester or each quarter, I forget, how they expected to perform academically and then followed up at the end of the quarter or semester to see what their actual grades turned out to be. And some students kind of consistently underperformed their expectations of themselves. They were overly optimistic about their academic performance which according to this kind of common wisdom about how it's good to be over optimistic because that motivates you. That should have helped the students this over optimism. But in fact it didn't, it didn't actually improve their performance over time. Instead, what it did is it caused the students to cope with the disappointment of underperforming by changing their views about, well, how important is education anyway?

 

Julia Galef:

And so they were more likely to downgrade the value of education or downgrade the importance of education to them in their lives over time, which is, this is a great example of using soldier mindset to kind of protect your ego changing, like adapting your narrative about how the world works or what's important to you in the face of disappointing evidence. And that's very understandable. I totally get that impulse and I've done that before too. It's just unfortunate to have to distort your picture of the world or of what matters in your life as a response to disappointment, I think there are better ways to deal with it.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I agree. There's a lot of those in the book that might've been Gabriele Oettingen's research who's been on this program and it was met with a lot of skepticism when I think she published in the '90s and at NYU, she was going against the grain of just think positive and everything will manifest in your life. And it actually turns out that a lot of these studies, the opposite is true. But we have that particularly in this country. So about a quarter of our members are international and they don't seem to struggle with this as much. And that this kind of Puritan work ethic in the United States of just work harder and it'll come true. That's not the case, is it?

 

Julia Galef:

The Puritan work harder and every, all your dreams will come true message?

 

Dustin Burleson:

Yeah. Just think positive and work hard and I grew up with that. My grandfather was a coal miner and it was just, "We'll just work harder." But what if I'm on the wrong path?

 

Julia Galef:

Right. Exactly. I mean, with all kind of folk wisdom or kind of common sayings, there is some truth to it. It is true that all else equal working hard is going to make you more likely to succeed and achieve what you want in the world. It's just the truth is a lot more nuanced than that. And if your way of motivating yourself to work hard blinds you to the choices involved in success, then that could end up being a net negative for you. And if your way of motivating yourself to work hard requires you to deceive yourself about what's actually possible or likely then that also has downside. So, yeah, I just think people tend to underrate all of the ways to get the things we want, like motivation without falling back and just lying to ourselves or distorting our judgment.

 

Julia Galef:

So that was another one of my main motivations in writing the book was I felt like there were all these different strategies for looking good and feeling good that people were neglecting and they were just telling themselves, well, there's this unfortunate trade off. We can either see things realistically, or we can be happy and successful. And so I kind of wanted to shake people by the shoulders and say, "No, that's not true. You don't have to resign yourself to that trade-off, you can have both a realistic picture of the world and happiness and success."

 

Dustin Burleson:

Which is so motivating, right. Because it's, I've said that before, I kind of have this reputation in our industry of just being really pragmatic and just-

 

Julia Galef:

Nice.

 

Dustin Burleson:

... Never, I wouldn't say never but I joke and say, no one's going to ask me to come give a motivational speech at the annual association. It's like, this is not how it really is.

 

Julia Galef:

I knew I liked you.

 

Dustin Burleson:

One big challenge in our industry is the advent of telehealth and teledentistry, which I think you might get a kick out of this. We were staunchly opposed to pre pandemic. I think at St. Luke's one of the hospitals where I'm on the medical staff, they were doing 20 to maybe no more than 200 tele-health visits in a cardiology department per month. And when the pandemic happened, it ballooned to 20,000 per month. And I don't think we're going back. Why make a patient drive an hour and wait in a reception room to do something that could be done remotely? And I don't know who said it, it was someone much smarter than me that said these times of crisis really breed a lot of innovation. And I think he said it smarter than I said, innovation loves crisis. And I think some of the tools you're giving in the book help us see different ways of achieving a goal where we don't have to lose that look good, feel good. You don't have to give that up, I guess, as you said it more succinctly.

 

Julia Galef:

I've rarely been accused of being succinct, but thank you. Yeah.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I might have just beaten you on the verbosity of like, that was a long way of saying you don't have to... I think a lot of people look at a book about rationality or a book about emotional kind of intellectual honesty and getting to the core of who you want to be as a person and think, "All right, well, I'm going to trade off all the other things in life that are fun and spontaneous, and I've had to be rational about every decision I make." I guess you're making the argument that that's not true.

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. And I think another thing that's going on with this confusion, or this misunderstanding that I see in people is just conflating, making yourself feel good with deceiving yourself. And those are actually two different things. I think of kind of two overlapping circles, like a Venn diagram where one of the circles is things that make you feel good or comfort yourself in the face of stress or fear. And the other circle is things that are true or at least justified based on the facts as you know them. And I claim you should be looking for things in the intersection of those two circles and that there are a lot of things that are both comforting and true. And that people by default just aren't really tracking that distinction. And so they just, they reach for something comforting and sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not, and they're not really paying attention to that difference.

 

Julia Galef:

But I argue since you can have it, have both true and comforting, why not have both true and comforting. And so just one example like people there's this example you brought up Danny Kahneman before, and I also loved Thinking, Fast and Slow. But there was this one kind of almost offhand point he made in the book that I disagreed with where he was talking about the potential upsides to irrationality. And one of the upsides he brought up was essentially feeling good. And the example he gave was a door-to-door salesman who, he gets the door slammed in his face by some angry homemaker. And so Danny Kahneman says, "Isn't it much better to tell yourself well, that person was just a jerk rather than to tell yourself, well, I guess I'm a bad sales person."

 

Julia Galef:

And the way he framed it like that. Okay. Yeah. I guess maybe you'll feel better about yourself if you blame that event on the person who slammed the door in your face, but it's not like those are our only two choices. There are so many ways to make yourself feel better after a setback that don't require you to just lie to yourself. You could tell yourself, "Well, okay. Yeah, she slammed the door in my face, but at least I only get doors slammed in my face once a week now, instead of once a day, I'm getting better." That's a thing to feel happy about. Or you could tell yourself, "Everyone gets doors slammed in their face sometimes. This does not make me uniquely bad." That's also a comforting fact that happens to also be true. Or you could just focus on things you could do better in the future and feel happy about the fact that this is going to happen less often in the future.

 

Julia Galef:

Anyway, there's tons of different things that you could focus on that can help you deal with these inevitable setbacks. Like when someone slams the door in your face or you get rejected or fail, et cetera, that don't require you to just tell yourself a falsehood. And so I think we could, we might as well just focus on those things that are both comforting and true.

 

Dustin Burleson:

That's great. And because there's a tendency in this group with surgeons and dentists and healthcare providers to try to be perfectionists. And so then the opposite, "Oh, well, I failed once. So I am a failure or I'm never going to try that again." And how we hire and how we manage and how we promote our practices. I really, I love the example and that you took Kahneman to task like, "Wait a minute, this isn't binary."

 

Julia Galef:

Just a little bit. He can take it. He can take it.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Just a Nobel prize winner, no big deal. I want to talk about, I mentioned it that I had really great and still have great mentors in my life who are scouts. And I found myself now, particularly latching onto this metaphor that's brilliant. And your book and really your idea that what would that person would that mentor mind would they see it this way? And so can you talk about some, maybe share some signs of a scout?

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. I think it's typically people the temptation is to say, well I feel like I'm a scouter. I like the idea of being a scout. And so therefore I'm a scout. And I think that can be a little bit deceptive because I'm kind of over simplifying here, but everyone feels like they're a scout. The people who are, you see online, who are being really unreasonable and who just infuriate you with how bias they're being, or their unwillingness to acknowledge self-evident truths. Those people feel like they're being scouts too. And so we kind of need more objective metrics or behavioral signs that you're actually practicing scout mindset instead of just feeling like, well, yes, of course I'm objective and reasonable. And so I talk about some of those in the book.

 

Julia Galef:

I think one sign is just whether you can name critics of yours, you think are reasonable. Because it's easy to focus on criticism that is unfair or unreasonable. And I certainly get my fair share of criticism that I think is unreasonable. And it's, I'm sure it's true that you have critics who are unreasonable, like people who disagree with your political views, people who attack you on Facebook for your posts about politics or just people who disagree with your career. Maybe like if you're in tech and people are criticizing the world of tech or you're in the military and people criticize the military, whatever it is, everyone has critics. And can you, in addition to being annoyed at the people who are unreasonably criticizing you, can you identify people who you think, well they have a fair point.

 

Julia Galef:

Maybe I don't agree, but I can see how a smart and well-intentioned and reasonable person could hold this view that is critical of me. That alone, I think is a pretty rare sign and a pretty strong correlate of actually caring about the truth more than you care about defending your own ego. So that's one sign. Another sign is just whether you can remember actual times, hopefully in recent memory, in which you've changed your mind and realized you were wrong about something. This also is not very common and I think a strong sign of scout mindset. And bonus points if you actually tell the person, you know what, I think you were right about this thing that we disagreed about and I was wrong.

 

Julia Galef:

And I have an example from actually one of my not mentors, but role models who did this. Abraham Lincoln wrote this lovely letter to Ulysses Grant during the Civil War in which he said, "This maneuver that you just executed, where you captured the city of Vicksburg, I really did not think that was going to work. And I thought you were making a mistake when you decided to do that. But it turns out that I was wrong and you were right. And I'm so glad that I deferred to your judgment." And Lincoln didn't have to write this letter, no one forced him to, but he just thought it was really important to acknowledge when someone else was right. And so he did, and I really love that and find it kind of inspiring. And I think it's a strong sign of scout mindset and someone who you can look to as a good role model of being a scout.

 

Dustin Burleson:

It's such a great example. And I believe in the book you share that the people around Lincoln were like, "Oh yeah, totally something he would do."

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah, exactly. They were like, this was wholly characteristic of Lincoln.

 

Dustin Burleson:

And there's a heartwarming story. I won't ruin the ending, but the end of the book shares another heartwarming story that really brings tears to your eyes at particularly if you're in the science realm. Just amazing.

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. And one of my motivations also in writing the book was to give people a bunch of these examples that are, I think often inspiring and kind of heartwarming. And at the very least provide kind of a template a sort of emotionally salient and vivid template for, oh, that's a way I could behave because we just, we don't have a lot of these salient stories of people being true seeking and intellectually honest. And so that makes it really hard to remember to do it ourselves or to be motivated to do it ourselves. And so I kind of threw just a bunch of my favorite examples that people in hopes that that would inspire and motivate them the way that it has inspired and motivated me.

 

Dustin Burleson:

It does. It's great. And so one caution, I guess, is that if you, and there's a tendency to do this where we see a new concept and we're like, "All right, this is great. I got to share this with the team." Because most of the people listening to this are either team leaders or professional practice owners. And if you bought the book and you've got it in your hands and you're thinking, well, "I'm so rational that now I need to take this book and give it to everyone around me so they can see things the way I'm seeing it." That's not scout mindset. Right?

 

Julia Galef:

That's right. Yeah. I did. I have heard from some people who bless their hearts were like, "Thank you for writing this book. Now I can use it to show all the soldiers around me, how they're being soldiers." I kind of wanted to be like, "Oh, I'm not sure I fully succeeded with my goal there."

 

Dustin Burleson:

But at least they have the book. There's a chance and a little hope.

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah, that's true. And I also was trying to kind of lead by example and share a bunch of stories of noticing that myself in soldier mindset like times when I've not reacted well to criticism or times when I've noticed that I was kind of fooling myself or trying to convince myself of something comforting. Because this is so universal and just an innate part of how the human brain works that just being aware of soldier mindset, it doesn't mean you aren't going to be doing it automatically a lot of the time as I can certainly as I've definitely an example of. And if you don't notice yourself in soldier mindset, I think that's not a sign. That's not a good sign because what is more likely that you are just an exception to the entirety of humanity, you're the one person who never does this thing? Or that you're just not as self-aware as you could be. And I kind of think the latter.

 

Dustin Burleson:

That's great. I don't know enough about evolutionary biology to make a wise comment on this, but it seems like our old lizard brains just do inherently even subconsciously maybe I don't, I'm curious your thought on that, protect us from you go back thousands of years, millions of years, pretty good odds we were going to be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger or something. And so we're in this protective kind of defensive soldier mindset. And then we bring that into a complex business environment with employees and key performance indicators and market statistics and our position and how we treat patients in medicine and science and all the things that have happened since then. And we kind of cling to that soldier mindset. What are your thoughts on the underlying kind of subconscious drivers that keep us in soldier mindset?

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. I thought about this a lot and I think at best we can kind of be speculative when it comes to evolutionary psychology and trying to explain why did we evolve this way? But I do think there's some pretty compelling speculations that we can make about how this happened. And one of them is that we were kind of by default, very risk averse, very wired to be afraid of taking risks. And that that does include kind of social risks. So as I've been, as we've kind of touched on several times in this conversation, one of the main motivations behind soldier mindset is a social motivation to avoid seeming wrong or incompetent or disloyal to your peer group. And so it's not that social factors don't matter at all because it does matter whether people think you're a good person and whether they like you and think you're part of the tribe. But we already know that the human brain is such that we tend to be really risk averse socially.

 

Julia Galef:

We tend to be really afraid of taking even small risks of social rejection or looking foolish socially. This is why we're often just paralyzed by fear at the thought of asking a stranger out at a bar or something like that, which if they say no, that actually doesn't have a big impact on our lives. It's not the end of the world at all if someone rejects us who we're never going to see again. But it feels like the end of the world, because we're really wired to be just extremely averse to any potential social downside. And I do think again, to speculate a little more, I think this, it makes sense if you think about the environment in which we evolved, where there weren't strangers, there was just our tribe, this tight knit, small group of people who you spend your whole lives with and who you rely on for protection and passing on your genes.

 

Julia Galef:

And so in that environment, it actually does make sense to be pretty averse to the risk of alienating the people who you rely on for survival. But that's less true in the modern age. It's less true that your survival and genetic success depends on never offending anyone. And so I think we can afford to be a little bit more tolerant of risk when it comes to disagreeing with people or holding opinions that don't necessarily portray us in exactly the same light as people expect. So that's one thing that I think we can be more tolerant of risk socially than we kind of intuitively feel like we can.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I like that.

 

Julia Galef:

And then, yeah, I'll mention one other thing, which is just that we, by default are very, we overweight the immediate consequences of our actions. So we're much more motivated by what rewards or punishments do I get right now and less so by the rewards or punishments that we get a year in the future. Which is why we procrastinate and we'll eat the cupcake now and put off our diet til tomorrow and things like that. That's very well-known feature of human psychology. But I think that this also tends to result in us being in scout mindset less often than we should, because the rewards of soldier mindset are often very immediate. You feel good right away or you look good right away. But the rewards of scout mindset are a little more delayed. Although they are very significant, I think.

 

Julia Galef:

The reward of acknowledging to yourself that you made a mistake is that in the future, you're less likely to make mistakes, but you don't necessarily feel really good right away. And so it does take some amount of kind of willpower or longer-term thinking to be able to appreciate the rewards of in the long run, seeing things clearly. Does that make sense?

 

Dustin Burleson:

Yeah, no, that's great. I hope everyone goes back and re-listens to that segment. I know I will, because I need to hear it often.

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. So do I.

 

Dustin Burleson:

It's so tempting to get the immediate reward of soldier mindset. I want to talk about thought experiments. I was reading this chapter on thought experiments that will help us detect motivated reasoning, detect when we're doing this soldier mindset thing. And as I was reading that, I was like, "Julia would be a great guest for Shane Parrish's podcast." And I went way back in the history. I was like, of course she's already been on The Knowledge Project.

 

Julia Galef:

Back in the early days. Early days.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Yeah. I thought if I just keep scrolling far enough. And there you were. So can you talk about thought experiments and maybe what they do and what they don't do?

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. So the thing that's so insidious about soldier mindset, or as it's called officially in the cognitive science literature, directionally motivated reasoning. I just prefer the more metaphorical soldier mindset. The thing that's so insidious about it is that when you're in it, it doesn't feel like you're in it. And so if you're let's say you encounter a study that goes against something you believe like, well, when I was writing the book, I found a study that said, "Oh, soldier mindset turns out, makes you successful in life." And so that goes against what I believe and what I was trying to argue in the book. And so of course I have this motivation to reject it. And so I went through the study looking for flaws in the methodology, and I did find a bunch of flaws. It was actually a pretty poorly done study.

 

Julia Galef:

But then I stopped and just asked myself, okay, suppose this study had instead found the conclusion that scout mindset makes you successful in life. How would I have reacted then? And I realized, oh, in that case, I would have said, "Great. I should put the study in my book because it supports my thesis." And so that was a thought experiment that I just did where I kind of imagined, I imagined this hypothetical world in which things were a little bit different and I observed what my reaction would be in that hypothetical world. And the reason that that is that kind of thought experiment can be so valuable in making you more self-aware. Is that before I did it, when I was just kind of going through the study hunting for flaws, I felt like I was being a critical thinker and I was, I was like, I was, I was critically evaluating the methodology of the study.

 

Julia Galef:

So I felt I'm being smart, I'm being skeptical. And it's true that I was, it's just that if you only apply that level of critical thinking and skepticism to things that you disagree with, or don't want to believe, then you end up with this really asymmetric set of beliefs about the world, in which you lead in the things that you want to believe, and you keep out the things you don't want to believe. But in the moment it doesn't feel like you're being biased because you're only in that one world in which the studies goes against your conclusions and you haven't looked at the, how you would have reacted in that hypothetical world in which things were different.

 

Julia Galef:

This might actually be a good point, a good time to bring up what I think is my favorite definition of how soldier mindset works which comes from a psychologist named Tom Gilovich. He says that when we're evaluating an idea that we want to believe, we evaluate it through the lens of can I believe it? And when we're evaluating an idea that we don't want to believe, we instead evaluate it through the lens, must I believe it, just looking for any excuse to reject it. And so the thought experiment can help you juxtapose those two different ways of evaluating an idea against each other and notice, oh, I would be evaluating this idea through a must die lens if the conclusions were different. But instead I'm evaluating it through a can I lens. So that's one type of thought experiment. But just generally speaking thought experiments can help you notice when your motivations are influencing the way that your reasoning and the standard to which you're holding some claim.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I think it's a testament to your book. And it's evident when, so people listening as you go through the book to me, it was like, oh my gosh, this is so good. And I think the reason is we spoke kind of offline that you could have written many versions of this book, but based on your intellectual honesty, you saw a lot of research that just didn't cut it in terms of being able to put it into the text, right?

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. That thought experiment I did where I imagined the study had supported my conclusion instead of opposing it, that made me realize I needed to up my game and be more skeptical of studies that supported my conclusion. And so I went back through all of the studies that I had bookmarked to put in the book and kind of tried to evaluate their methodology through the same critical lens and decided actually a lot of these are not strong enough for me to feel like I can really get behind them and put them in my book as evidence. And so I had to throw a lot of them out and rewrite some sections of the book that I had previously written. But I feel much more confident in the claims that I'm making now than I did before.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Oh absolutely. And it's, I mean, I think it just goes to how I think this will help the group in, particularly in chapter nine, talking about uncertainty, because we're really bad as doctors expressing any level of concern. "What's the diagnosis?" "Well, it could be this, or it could be that." Can you talk about different types of confidence and uncertainty?

 

Julia Galef:

Yes. Thank you for bringing that up. That's one of my favorite findings from writing the section on uncertainty. So there's this common belief that I've often heard, including from some doctors that there's this expectation from patients that you have a definitive answer for them. And that if you can't give them a definitive answer, then they're going to lose some trust in you as a doctor and just generally be unhappy. And I get why people think this. And there are some studies that have found that yeah, when doctors express uncertainty, they lose trust from their patients. But there are also studies that have found that patients don't mind hearing uncertainty from doctors. And so this is an interesting puzzle to me. Why are we getting such different results in different studies?

 

Julia Galef:

And I think the answer lies in exactly what type of uncertainty the doctors are expressing. And so if you look at the studies, the cases where the doctors where patients don't like hearing uncertainty from doctors, the type of uncertainty that the doctors are expressing in those cases are things like, "Well, I really don't know what's causing your headache or I'm not sure what's going on here." And I think it makes sense that it's reasonable for a patient to think, well maybe a better or more experienced doctor would know the answer. I think that's a reasonable conclusion for the patients to draw, but in the cases where the patients were fine with hearing uncertainty, in those cases, the doctors were saying things like this. "Well, I can't know for sure whether you're going to get breast cancer, but here are some of the risk factors. And I would say based on these risk factors, you have maybe a 20% chance of developing breast cancer and if you do X, Y, and Z, then statistically that will improve your chances, et cetera."

 

Julia Galef:

And so that is a statement of uncertainty. The doctor is saying, "I don't know." But they're giving a lot of relevant information and they're kind of demonstrating in the way they answer the patient's questions, that there is just inevitable uncertainty in the world. We can't know for sure if someone is going to develop this disease or how it's going to turn out, but we can reduce the uncertainty as much as possible with information. And so I'm giving you that information. And so basically the doctor is showing that they are an expert and they're showing that they have sufficiently understood this issue to whatever extent possible.

 

Julia Galef:

And so the patient hears that and thinks, "Okay, good. Yes, I don't have a definitive answer, but I feel like my doctor is on top of things. And they've given me as definitive and answer as is possible too." And so that is, I think that's a really important distinction between two different kinds of uncertainty, one where it seems like you just don't know and maybe someone else would, but you don't. And then the other where you are explaining the inherent uncertainty that exists in the world and you're helping the patient cope with that uncertainty. And so if you can do the latter, I think you should be fine.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Yeah. I really enjoyed that segment of the book. It was surprising to me and I like, okay, just in a delightful way.

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. I mean, and even you can even go a step further and if you're worried that your patient might expect more certainty than is possible, you can kind of set their expectations sometimes bluntly by saying, look as one expert who I quoted in the books says, if someone tells you that they can know for sure what's going to happen or they know for sure how your case is going to turn out, you should run. Because they can't, they don't know for sure. And they're misleading you. And that is actually a pretty, pretty compelling and confident statement to make about why uncertainty is justified. And I think that that can almost paradoxically be very persuasive and trust-building for patients, or anyone.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Absolutely. I would say run and hold onto your wallet while running.

 

Julia Galef:

I know.

 

Dustin Burleson:

You mentioned in the book, I think it's, maybe, you tell me, pretty obvious that Darwin's had a big influence on your career and on your writings, you mentioned his golden rule-

 

Julia Galef:

I love Darwin.

 

Dustin Burleson:

... Which is what I really appreciated. And I'm curious if you still do this, this goes way back. I don't think this is in the book. If it is, I missed it. Do you still keep a surprise journal and kind of, how did that evolve?

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah, so one of the things I talk about in the book is about leaning into confusion which by that I basically mean we tend when the world contradicts our expectations like when something doesn't turn out the way you expect it. The election doesn't produce the result you thought it would, or someone behaves in a way that's surprising to you or seems irrational or crazy. Someone believes something that you can't believe they believe it. In all of those cases, our impulse is to find a way to explain away the surprising results in a way that's still consistent with our beliefs about the world. So if I think I'm a great teacher and I get surprisingly poor teacher ratings, I could try to explain that away by saying, well the subject I'm teaching is hard and students probably didn't like that it was a hard topic. And so that's why they gave me low ratings or something.

 

Julia Galef:

You can always find some way to explain away surprising data in the world that doesn't require you to change what you believe. So that's a very understandable impulse, but I think we should fight it and instead lean into confusion and be especially interested in things that contradict our expectations. Be fascinated by the fact that these people seem to be behaving irrationally, but that's interesting. Why might their behavior actually be rational in a way that I can't quite see yet? Or why might this seem like a rational thing to do to them? You can kind of turn these surprising observations into puzzles we're solving. And I think that over time leads to a much more richer and more accurate understanding of what's going on than just trying to shoehorn every new observation into your pre-existing view of the world.

 

Julia Galef:

And so this, as you mentioned, this is something that Darwin was really good at. He had what he called the golden rule that he would follow where anytime he came across an observation that didn't fit his theory of evolution by natural selection, he would force himself to really focus on it and obsess over it rather than ignoring it as he would be tempted to do. And that process of obsessing over things that didn't fit his theory ended up, it forced him to revise and refine his theory over time and ended up making it much stronger in the end. So for example, his one of these observations that he obsessed over was the existence of the peacock's tail, which his theory was that features that help an animal survive will tend to last and get passed down to future generations.

 

Julia Galef:

And the peacock's tail was this huge five-foot tall unwieldy, gaudy thing that if you imagine a peacock running from predators while carrying this five-foot tail behind it, that does not seem like a feature that would help with the survival of the animal. And so Darwin, he said in a letter to a friend, once that the site of the peacock's tail made him sick, it seemed to undermine his theory that he'd spent years and years building. But as after thinking about it for a long time, he came up with kind of a plausible explanation for how this could actually fit evolution by natural selection, which was that evolution isn't just about features that help with your survival. It's also about features that help with your genetic fitness, features that help you reproduce. And so if some features like a gaudy tail make you more attractive to members of the opposite sex that can in fact that can be good for your genes in the long run, even if it hurts with your survival chances in the short run.

 

Julia Galef:

And so he didn't have the full, he'd only sort of sketched out the beginnings of this theory, but it turned out he was really on the right track. And he got that insight by obsessing over the surprising facts that didn't fit his theory. And so that was something that I was trying to do to some extent, maybe less obsessively or formally than Darwin by keeping a surprise journal where I would just keep notes about things that were surprising or contradict my expectations. And I think even just framing them as surprises, is kind of cool and it motivates you to notice them and kind of collect them in a way that we are naturally predisposed to.

 

Dustin Burleson:

We've seen this and in our profession, particularly in there's a lot of orthodontists and dentists that listen to this and that when direct-to-consumer clear liners came out, the knee jerk reaction to the group particularly was, well, what's next? At home surgery, pull your own wisdom teeth, which really was a lot about just doubling down on soldier mindset. We're the specialists, how can a patient do this at a distance? Who do these wall street investors think they are? And then there was a surprise. And that I think very quickly a million consumers said, "Yeah, we think this is a great idea." And so one of the main direct-to-consumer companies went public, they've got an $8 billion market cap now, and there's millions of patients doing this. So that was a surprise, but did we, as a profession lean into that uncertainty, you could probably guess, no, we didn't.

 

Dustin Burleson:

We as a profession, the dental boards started suing these companies. And then we all came up with an excuse and we said, well, clearly these are patients that would never visit our practices anyways, these are patients that we're not losing, or I see this is interesting. So some really smart people from the University of Pennsylvania said, "Well, let's ask them, let's go." And they did a really great social media study to identify these people that were tagging and posting that they've gone through treatment. And the methodology is pretty good, but the result was another shocker. Over half of the patients had actually visited a dental office first before choosing to do this at home treatment. And we still are grappling with this in our profession, but I love your example of a surprise journal. Because the surprise to me was consumers do want this what are we not giving them was the next question. And so we started looking at our hours of operation and our fees and our pricing model and how we are flexible with billing their insurance and these direct-to-consumer companies are all providing that.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Whereas you might imagine dentists and orthodontists are very, very much the opposite. Open eight to four o'clock Monday through Thursday. So I just thought you might enjoy that example.

 

Julia Galef:

That's a really cool example. I love that example. I wish I had interviewed you before publishing the book. So I'm not personally that familiar with the world of dentistry or orthodontistry. But I'm familiar more broadly with just the problem of trying to figure out how to satisfy a customer's desires and needs. And I'm familiar with how frustrating it can be when the thing that you think your customers should want doesn't appear to be the thing they do want and it can be very frustrating. Like, "Why don't you want this? Like, why don't you see how good this would be for you?" But I think if you can flip that into a more curious mindset where you're like, interesting, it seems to me that it should be obvious to the consumer that this is good and useful and worth their money, but it's not obvious to them. Why is that? Let me try to figure this out. I think that can be a much more useful mindset.

 

Julia Galef:

And maybe my version of that story, about the reaction to the at-home orthodontia is an example I alluded to a few minutes ago that I didn't say it was from me, but getting low teacher ratings. When I first started teaching at this educational nonprofit that I co-founded. I was teaching workshops on improving your judgment and I was kind of surprised by my ratings being lower than I thought they would be. And certainly lower than some of my colleagues who were getting higher ratings. And I had stories to explain that like, well, they're whatever, they're doing a lot of like rhetorical tricks to be appealing and I'm not willing to do those tricks. And so of course my ratings are lower harrumph.

 

Julia Galef:

But when I kind of thought about it from a more curious mindset, I realized one thing that my colleagues are doing differently from me is they're working harder to make the material practically useful to their students. And I was more focused on, here's the thing that's interesting to me, let me share it with you. And I was kind of failing to appreciate, I think in retrospect that people come to these workshops, it's not that they're not intellectually curious people, but their main goal is they want something that's useful to them to justify the time and money they're spending. And I was kind of neglecting that. And so that did spur me to focus more on what can I say that's actually going to be useful to people and just focus more on that in developing the curriculum and in tracking the results of the classes? And that was a really useful kind of shift in my thinking about how to help be a good teacher and provide something that people are actually going to want.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I really like that. Thanks for sharing that at that personal level, I think that's really what this is about, right. About being intellectually honest. It really it asks the reader, what kind of person do you want to be? And there's plenty of status, ego comfort reasons to double down on our identity or to a double down on our beliefs, but that isn't the way forward, I don't think. And so I guess we're getting close to the end of our time together. I guess a big question that might help our listeners is how do we hold that identity maybe a little more lightly and how can we maybe flip the script on it?

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. Holding your identity lightly is a phrase that I use. It's kind of a play on a phrase that I like from a famous essayist and tech investor named Paul Graham. He has an essay called Keep Your Identity Small where he says things like politics and religion, most prominently, but lots of things can become part of our identities in that it makes it really hard for us to think clearly about them when someone disagrees with us or criticizes those beliefs, we take it very personally. It's almost like someone's stomped in your country's flag. It's that kind of feeling of indignation and outrage. And so all else equal it's best to just let as few things into your identity as possible. And so I, and a lot of people found this essay influential, and we tried to kind of avoid attaching any labels to ourselves at all.

 

Julia Galef:

I'm not going to call myself a liberal or I'm not going to call myself American or a vegan or all of these labels that can start to become part of our identity. And it's kind of challenging, just like practically speaking to avoid labeling yourself. If you vote for Democrats and you're registered to vote as a Democrat, and you agree with the Democrats, you could avoid calling yourself a Democrat, but it's a little hard to talk in conversation about politics and avoid labels entirely. Same thing for being an American and or a liberal or, yeah, it's just hard to avoid identifying with things. And so what I wanted to focus on in saying, hold your identity lightly is that, yes, we're all going to have these things, these beliefs that are to some extent part of our identities. But we can still maintain some amount of kind of emotional distance from them, some detachment where we're still able to step back and say, yes the word liberal or the word feminist, that is a pretty accurate description of my beliefs, but it's still just a label.

 

Julia Galef:

And my beliefs might change. It could turn out that I actually don't agree with feminism, or I actually think feminism isn't doing net good in the world and if that happens that I won't call myself a feminist. So it's just a description. It's just a label. It's not a flag that I'm waving proudly. And so from the outside, this can often seem very similar. Like a friend of mine who I interview for the book said he used to really strongly identify as a feminist and he would get angry if anyone criticized feminism online. And he was constantly being pulled into these very unproductive online arguments where he was arguing with critics of feminism. And then he decided to hold that identity more lightly and just kind of take a step back from it.

 

Julia Galef:

And so he still identifies as a feminist technically like if someone asks him, "Are you a feminist?" He would say yes, because that is a pretty accurate description of his views, but it now just feels like a label to him. And he no longer feels that what I call the, someone is wrong on the internet compulsion to jump in and defend the honor of feminism against its critics. So yeah, he can think in terms of criticism of feminism as etiology and not criticism of him as a feminist.

 

Dustin Burleson:

I like that. Yeah. I think part of the book, I encourage everyone to get through chapters 14 and 15 and talk about, you solidify a lot of the research on that exact topic. And then I really enjoyed how you say listen, because I was one of those for a while. Like, listen, it's, so some of this internet chatter and discussion is so toxic. I just want to opt out of a lot of it, but you've been really wise in curating and selecting who you follow online, the kind of people you attract online and you give some great examples. I love the ChangeAView.com website and the philanthropy, GiveWell.org. So maybe if you want to talk a little bit about that, because that's opened my eyes to, okay, you can still engage and you don't have to have this horribly defeating like, "Oh, here we go again." Like it's a battle, you've got to win every time.

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. We do tend to get stuck in these just really unproductive and kind of self-defeating equilibria where people complain all the time about how Twitter is just this terrible sea of people dunking on each other and manufacturing outrage and straw-manning other positions. And it's just such a mess. And then they spend hours a day on Twitter and I'm sympathetic to how some of this mess can be kind of addictive. I get that. But I think we could try a little harder to shape our experience online in a better direction if we want to. And so that is something that I've tried to do over the years is if someone's being really unreasonable and always caricaturing the opposition and being kind of a troll and I feel my blood pressure rising, I don't think that's good for me.

 

Julia Galef:

It's not good for my blood pressure, but it's also not good for my ability to think clearly because what that does is it makes you kind of want to fight back and it makes you, it kind of changes your standard for what's normal or acceptable. And so over time you tend to be like, "Well, everyone's doing it. So I might as well be unreasonable and trollish too." So I think that's not a great influence to create for yourself. And so I just unfollow those people. And instead I'm not trying to create an echo chamber just full of people who agree with me. I'm instead just selecting for people who are relatively speaking, more reasonable and thoughtful and nuanced and more scout like, and a lot of those people do disagree with me on object level things about politics or ethics or lifestyle choices. But they share with me the sense that no, it's important to be thoughtful and reasonable and acknowledge when the other side has a point.

 

Julia Galef:

And so those are the people that, A, I'm much more likely to actually learn from when they disagree with me and actually changed my mind sometimes because they're not being jerks. And B I think they just make me a better person because we tend to learn from the people who surround us and just adopt the values and the habits of mind and habits of discourse of people who are around us. And so making that a conscious choice and choosing to surround yourself with people who make you a better version of yourself is I think really worth doing in the long run.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Yeah. And I love in the book you share. I think, I hope it's okay to ask that you actually using the scout mindset, I believe you found your fiancé, right?

 

Julia Galef:

Yes. Yeah. So that part of what I encourage people to do as in terms of curating a better online experience for yourself, it's actually just reaching out to people like random people you see being scout like and thoughtful online and send them a message saying, "Hey, I really appreciated that you did this. And you've got a new follower." And this can kind of help create a new makeshift community for yourself online, even if your real-life communities aren't all that scout like, it can still be pretty great to cultivate this online community for yourself. And so I was just sharing an example of one time over 10 years ago now that I did that where I saw this blogger who he'd posted some, a blog post about I think it was called sexy scientists or something.

 

Julia Galef:

And so it was a lighthearted post about some female scientist who he was calling sexy and it sparked a huge controversy where a ton of commenters on his own blog accused him of being misogynist. And then a bunch of commenters on other blogs defended him and were like, "You guys are overreacting. This post is actually harmless and it was complimentary." And so this debate raged for, I think, well, over a week with over 1500 comments on different blogs debating whether or not this post was harmful. And so the blogger, who's named, Luke, he read a bunch of the comments and he, after a few days, he responded saying, "Thank you for all the feedback. I still don't agree that my post was harmful. But here are some of what I thought were the best criticisms of my post that I read and really thought hard about."

 

Julia Galef:

So he linked to, I think he called that post reasons why I might be wrong, even though he wasn't yet fully convinced. And so then fast forward four more days he posts again saying, "You know what, I actually, someone made an argument that I found really compelling and it convinced me that in fact my original post was wrong and potentially harmful. And so I'm recanting it and sorry to everyone who's been defending me for the past week, but I actually disagree with you now. And I think my post was bad." And so I loved this. I loved this for two reasons first, because he didn't immediately bow down to social pressure. He thought about the arguments. He just didn't agree. And he didn't cave in just because people were yelling at him. And so I admired that. And then I also admired that he did change his mind in response to strong argument.

 

Julia Galef:

And that when he did find an argument that he found compelling, he was like, "Okay, yeah, I guess I was wrong." And so I admired both of those things and I messaged him on Facebook saying that I had followed this whole affair and I really admired how he seemed to really care what was actually true and not just about defending himself reflexively. And he wrote back, he's like, "Oh, I feel the same about your work. This is so great." And fast forward, 10 years later, we're now engaged to be married. And yeah, his name is Luke and I consider him one of the very best scouts I've ever met. And he's definitely one of my role models as well. So not to get too sappy, but scout mindset can bring you love, is the moral.

 

Dustin Burleson:

That's a great example. And I love that. I mean, it's like we should all just remember that like a little exercise on reasons I might be wrong, which I worked with and heard of GiveWell before. And I know you're a big supporter of it, and I love that one of their main menu options when you go to their website is, "Here's the mistakes we've made. Here's where we got it wrong." It's so huge.

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. I love that. It's kind of a common practice in the effective altruism movement which is a movement basically dedicated to figuring out ways to do good, ways to help people in the world and animals using reason and evidence. So what are the most kind of rigorous and evidence ways we can help people? And, yeah. So on the websites of many of the top effective altruist organizations, they have a section on, "Here's some mistakes that we've made." And some of them are just kind of logistical mistakes like, "We, I don't know, drop the ball on handling this human resources issue or something like that." Others are kind of intellectual ways in which they've changed their mind and think, "We were wrong to emphasize this cause area before. We now think that it actually doesn't have enough evidence in support of it, or we misinterpreted the evidence or something. And so we're changing our point of view."

 

Julia Galef:

And so I really like how transparent that is and how normalized it is, because if you think about it, every organization is going to be wrong about lots of things, and it's going to make lots of mistakes. They just don't talk about it. And so I appreciate, I think there's this kind of group dynamic that happens where the more people in organizations are willing to talk openly about things they were wrong about or mistakes they made, the easier it is for other people to do that as well. So I think those kind of a nice positive that happens that I appreciate.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Absolutely. It's really powerful. You tell me if you don't want to answer this question, I'm fair game. I just I've read other areas where you've shared about your parents and about your upbringing. And there's a lot of parents who listen to this program, who I think are trying to help instill the values of rational thinking in their children. And this is just a hypothetical. So since you and I have just solved all the world's problems-

 

Julia Galef:

Done.

 

Dustin Burleson:

... In the real world, now we can move on to the hypothetical. So I'm curious if you had gone, if you could go back in time and show your parents everything you've accomplished. I mean, not only the amazing people you've had on your podcast, but you've actually moderated a discussion between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. You had Michael Shermer who I believe is either a founder or co-founder of Skeptics Society, give a review of your book in the Wall Street Journal. If you could go back and tell your parents that you would accomplish all of that, what would they have said?

 

Julia Galef:

Oh, they've always been such wonderful and supportive parents. And so I think they would be delighted for me. I want to give them credit for really modeling the behaviors that I often talk about and encourage other people to adopt as part of scout mindset, like changing your mind. This is something that they were really good about from the beginning. I remember being, I don't know, seven years old and arguing with them about some rule that I thought was unfair and they went off and discussed it and came back and were like, "You know what, we decided you're right. That is an unfair rule. So we're changing it." And I really, I appreciated that so much as a kid and not just appreciated it, but also admired it. I thought that's a really cool way to be. I want to be like that too. And so I guess part of it, the answer to your question then is that I think they would be really tickled to discover that these things that they were trying too hard to do when I was a kid are now things that I'm broadcasting to the world.

 

Dustin Burleson:

That's awesome. I kind of knew the answer, but I wanted to get it for the group. I love that. I mean, it's because I have three boys and so many times you're tempted to say, "Well, I'm the dad. That's why." And your parents have such a better approach. So thank you for-

 

Julia Galef:

I'll tell them you said so.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Thank you for sharing that. And I know, I mean, we've gone over our time. I could talk for days if you let me about-

 

Julia Galef:

Oh, for sure.

 

Dustin Burleson:

... Topics like this. I love your book. I'm so grateful that you wrote it. I just want to give you a chance to share for our listeners how they can find more about you, your podcast, what you're writing, what you're talking about next.

 

Julia Galef:

Yeah. Thank you. Well, I encourage you to follow me on Twitter. I'm @juliagalef all one word. And come be part of this community of scout like people that I've been gradually curating over the years. So you can follow me on Twitter. My website is just juliagalef.com. And there are links on there to the book, The Scout Mindset, and I have a YouTube channel as well. And to my podcast, which is called Rationally Speaking. And you can also go to the podcast website, rationallyspeakingpodcast.org. Yeah. And that's it. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much.

 

Dustin Burleson:

Julia, thanks for being here. It's an honor.

 

Julia Galef:

Til next time.

 

Dustin Burleson:

You've been listening to another episode of The Burleson Box where we bring you and your team leaders into the conversation with today's best authors and business leaders. If you enjoyed today's program, please share us with a friend or colleague, visit theburlesonbox.com where you can sign up to receive my monthly reading list, study guides for each of the books and authors we interview. Give us a call at +1 800-891-7520 where we can discuss The Burleson Box membership, monthly coaching or annual leadership conference can work for you and your team leader. Be sure to listen to each month for new resources to help you and your employees serve your patients with excellence. Until next time, remember the words of Umberto Eco who said, "The person who doesn't read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards." Go make it a great month. I'll see you right here next time on The Burleson Box.