#Julia galef ted chiang software how to#
#Julia galef ted chiang software update#

Imagine your list of coping mechanisms, which includes self-justification, denial, and sour grapes. When facing an unpleasant truth, we may use a coping strategy to deal with stressful emotions. It increases credibility, makes the lesson you’ve learned more likely to stick, reduces identity-induced inflexibility, and disarms others.

Tell other people when you realize they were right. Seek empirical evidence that should make you slightly less confident in your position, and improve its overall quality. Look for and disclose a caveat or exception to your view. Look for evidence that would lower your confidence in your map of reality incremental updates add up.

#Julia galef ted chiang software update#

Update frequently and prove yourself wrong. To be well-calibrated, you should be right about your 55% level beliefs 55% of the time. For example, how confident are you that flamingos are pink because they eat shrimp 55%, 65%, 75%, 85%, or 95%? The point is to develop a sense of the different ranges of confidence, not to test your knowledge. The Scout Mindset includes a test to practice calibrating yourself to the feeling of differentiating confidence in a belief. For more detail, see episode #197 of Rationally Speaking, with management consultant Doug Hubbard. The percentage of winning that game is equal to how confident you are in your belief. You’ve converted your belief from a claim to a bet. If you calibrated correctly, you should be indifferent between which to bet on. Quantify degrees of certainty by using “the Equivalent Bet test.” Imagine a game where the likelihood of winning is equal to what you think is the likelihood that your belief is true.

The Scout Mindset offers a pragmatic list of questions, not an exhaustive list of biases and fallacies.Īre you applying a double standard? How would an outsider think of your situation? If your peers changed their minds, would you do it too, just to fit in? Are you employing skepticism selectively? Would you opt into your current situation given a choice, or are you just afraid to change it? Use thought experiments as precautions against fooling yourself, by identifying possible relevant biases and fallacies. Activists should focus on actions with high impact, rather than activities that satisfy an identity urge. Treat that identity as contingent, because beliefs are contingent. Hold your identity lightly by thinking of it in a matter-of-fact way, not as a source of pride and meaning. Look for signs that a belief has become an identity in the way you communicate, and how you feel about it. Your identity can turn empirical questions into ones that are much more emotionally fraught. When a belief becomes an identity, evidence is considered based on being favorable, not based on it being informative. That’s a price we should be unwilling to pay. But Soldier Mindset requires you to believe illusions and obscure the truth. Soldier Mindset has both emotional and social benefits: comfort, self-esteem, morale, image cultivation, and belonging. The Scout Mindset is broadly organized around three ideas: don’t choose between truth and achieving goals, learn tools to see clearly, and the emotional rewards of Scout Mindset.

#Julia galef ted chiang software how to#

The book also provides explanations for how to find constructive ways out of your filter bubble. Case studies span the political spectrum and various industries. Galef’s favorite example is the Treatment Action Group, citizen scientists who worked against the AIDS crisis. Some famous exemplars of Scout habits are Abraham Lincoln, Chalres Darwin, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. The newly introduced Scout Mindset is “what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course.”Įxamples of the Scout Mindset come from science, business, activism, politics, sports, cryptocurrency, and survivalism.

The Soldier Mindset is our default thought process of motivated reasoning. Like a good origin story, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t, by Julia Galef (host of the Rationally Speaking podcast), is about the tension between two nemeses.