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Conversations with Coleman
How to Think with Julia Galef [S2 Ep.13]
01:26:20
My guest today is Julia Galef. Julia Galef is an author and podcaster. She's the Co-founder of the Centre for Applied Rationality and the host of the podcast "Rationally Speaking". In this episode, we discuss her new book, "The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't". We talked about the difference between intelligence and open-mindedness, the tension between pursuing the truth dispassionately and belonging to a tribe, the notion of instrumental rationality, the trade-off between building a larger audience and remaining true to one's principles, and whether affiliating with a political party makes it harder to form true beliefs. #Ad We deserve to know what we're putting in our bodies and why, especially when it comes to something we take every day. Rituals clean, vegan friendly multivitamin is formulated with high quality nutrients in bioavailable forms your body can actually use what you won't find sugars, GMOs, major allergens, synthetic fillers and ar...
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- [00:00]
A
Sam.
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B
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can gain access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHughes.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q and A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Julia Galef. Julia Galef is an author and podcaster. She's the co founder of the center for Applied Rationality and the host of the podcast Rationally Speaking. In this episode we discuss her new book, the Scout Mindset. Why Some People See Things clearly and Others don't. We talk about the difference between intelligence and open mindedness. The tension between pursuing the truth dispassionately and belonging to a tribe, whether it's possible to be too rational, the notion of instrumental rationality, the trade off between building a larger audience and remaining true to one's principles, and whether affiliating with a political party makes it harder to form true beliefs. Because I'm technologically incompetent, the video for this episode is not quite as good as usual, so I apologize in advance for my error. Hopefully it's not too bad. So without further ado, Julia Galef. Julia Galef, thank you so much for coming on my show.
- [02:12]
A
Oh, it's such a pleasure. Hi Coleman.
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B
So I went on your show a few months ago and had a very pleasant and interesting discussion about the notion of colorblindness. Partly.
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A
I thought so.
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B
Yeah. I really enjoyed that.
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A
Heard from a lot of listeners who felt that way.
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B
Good. And I've been a fan of your podcast, Rationally Speaking for at least two years, I think.
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A
Nice. Thank you.
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B
And I recommend that people will get a taste of you in this podcast if they don't know about your work already. But if you like what you hear, that podcast is a goldmine of clear thinking and on a lot of different topics. So just heaping some praise on you before we get to your book.
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A
I'm just bathing in it. Thank you.
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B
All right, so before we get to your book, which I loved by the way.
- [03:02]
A
Thank you. That's wonderful to hear. Can this whole episode just be you praising me? That's Going great for me.
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B
Yeah. Yeah, I bet. Can you give people a sense of your background, how you came to be someone who's interested in thinking about thinking and rationality and unbiasing the mind and so forth?
- [03:23]
A
Yeah, it's something I've been interested in for many years now. I've had a bit of a dilettante career path. I studied statistics in college, and then I started a grad program, PhD in economics, and dropped out of it. And I guess the kind of guiding question for me throughout this meandering career path has just been epistemology and really wanting to be in a field or a community where I could kind of really dig into questions of like, well, how do we know that? And how confident can we be? And what are the alternate hypotheses? And I had a hard time finding a field where I felt like the standards of rigor were high enough to satisfy me. And so I kind of dropped out of grad school and became professional dilettante. And I started this podcast, rationally speaking, 11 years ago now. And I co founded an educational nonprofit called the center for applied Rationality in 2012 in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I just spent the last 10 years or so trying to figure out how do we improve human reasoning and decision making? And I have a lot of thoughts about that. Thoughts about what? I think the discourse in general about rationality is missing. And so that was kind of the motivation for me writing this book.
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B
So the big theme throughout the book is the difference between the scout mindset and the soldier mindset.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Can you describe what you mean by these two terms?
- [04:53]
A
Right. So soldier mindset is my metaphor for this really common default mode of thinking that humans are very often in, in which our motivation is to defend our preexisting beliefs or defend something that we want to be true against any evidence or argument that might threaten those beliefs. And the metaphor is inspired by the fact that when we talk about reasoning or argumentation, our language is very militaristic. So we'll talk about, you know, defending our beliefs or buttressing a position or, you know, building a case or supporting a position. These are all language that you would use to talk about a military position or a fortress you're defending. And when we talk about encountering evidence or argument that contradicts it, we talk about attacking or shooting it down or poking holes in someone else's logic. Again, very militaristic. And so I call it soldier mindset. But I didn't invent this phenomenon. A lot of people have written about it and spoken about it under other names like rationalizing or motivated reasoning or wishful thinking or denial or confirmation bias. So it's kind of my umbrella term for all these phenomena. And then scout mindset is an alternative to soldier mindset. So a scout's role, unlike a soldier's, is not to go out and attack or defend. It's to go out and see things as clearly as possible and put together as accurate a map of the landscape or of a situation as you can. So scept mindset is basically motivation to see things as they are and not as you wish they were. So being intellectually honest, trying to be objective, just being curious about what's actually true. So I essentially felt. The thing that I felt was missing from the discourse about rationality was a focus on motivation. Because most books and articles about improving reasoning tend to be focused on giving people knowledge, like knowledge of cognitive biases or knowledge of logical fallacies. And it's not that that's not important. It's just that's not. You know, you can have all the knowledge in the world, but still only use that knowledge to attack other people's positions, like stereotypical person on Reddit or Twitter or whatever forum who comes equipped with a list of cognitive biases and just uses it to point out biases in other people's thinking and never turns that lens on themselves. So I just increasingly came to feel like intelligence and knowledge are great, but they're tools that can be directed however you're motivated to direct them. You can direct them towards trying to figure out what's actually true, even if it's not what you wish were true. Or you can direct it towards finding clever ways to justify your preconceived beliefs. And so I felt like the bottleneck is really more the motivation that directs our thinking than about our knowledge and intelligence.
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B
Yeah, this is a really profound point, I think, and it's one that was also raised in my recent podcast with Jesse Single. The the fact that intelligence doesn't actually have very much to do with having the sort of temperament that is open to, say, changing one's mind.
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A
Right, right.
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B
Like it's not. You actually have a quote in your book that I think gets at this very well, which is the point is simply that as people become better informed, they should start to converge on the.
- [08:25]
A
Truth.
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B
Wherever it happens to be. Instead, we see the opposite pattern. As people get better informed, they diverge. So I guess there's two points here. One is that whatever we're thinking of as raw Intelligence, you know, whether you think IQ measures that or not, having more of that doesn't necessarily give you more accurate beliefs about the world. In fact, I remember at one point reading an article about the person who had the either the highest or one of the highest IQ scores ever measured. And this person was like a foaming at the mouth white supremacist conspiracy theorist, you know, just believed all kinds of crazy things about who was controlling the world and no doubt used his intelligence to connect those dots in as interesting a way as possible. But these things are disturbingly orthogonal. Intelligence and then knowing about a particular subject even, and then having accurate beliefs. And so it seems to me what your book is about, it's about thinking clearly, but it's not about intelligence as a means to thinking clearly or becoming better informed as a means to thinking clearly. It's about a certain temperate sort of personality, cultivating a personality trait that is not intelligence or sort of the desire to become informed. Is that right?
- [09:52]
A
That's very well put. Yeah. The only thing I would amend is that I'm not saying that intelligence isn't useful. And I think, I expect that intelligence and knowledge do correlate with getting the right answer in many domains. It's just specifically in domains where you have some, they're ideologically fraught in some way or emotionally fraught in some way. So the studies that I was referencing when I wrote that line about people become, as you look increasingly up the scale of intelligence and knowledge, like scientific education, people's opinions diverge. Instead of converging on a shared truth, I was specifically referencing a study about people's views on ideologically charged scientific topics like climate change or stem cell research or the origins of the universe. And so the point isn't that intelligence can't help you get the right answer. It's that when you have some ideological or emotional motivation to defend a particular answer that may or may not be true because it's, you know, what you want to believe for personal or political reasons, then intelligence and knowledge don't help you and can in fact backfire because they just help you cleverly argue your way to the view that you wanted to hold. So I'm making a distinction between those two different domains.
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B
So I think many people recognize this now more and more in their lives, trying to have conversations with friends and family members about charged political topics, whether that is climate change or who you're voting for. And this is a very visceral issue for people because you risk, on the one hand, you want to develop as Accurate a picture of the world as possible. At least many people do.
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A
At least in theory.
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B
At least in theory. And almost anyone would claim that they do. On the other hand, so much of what we care about in life is connected to being approved of by our immediate circle by a chosen tribe. And that tribe can be many different things, but those two goals are necessarily going to be in tension at least much of the time.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And negotiating that is very difficult in some sense. You're always deciding between one of the central determinants of human happiness, which is to feel part of a group and to pursue the truth wherever it may lead. And both of these things seem so important that it's very difficult to know what to do when they're in conflict.
- [12:33]
A
Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. And I think it's really important to acknowledge the. The reasons why we are so often in soldier mindset. Like, what is it giving us or what are we trying to get with it, whether or not it's actually effective at that? There's reasons that we're in soldier mindset. We're trying to feel good, to feel good about ourselves and our lives, and we're trying to look good to other people. We're trying to look smart and virtuous, and we're trying to fit into our peer groups and to our workplaces and our community communities and our political tribes. And I don't want to dismiss any of that as unimportant or unnecessary, because clearly that's all necessary, as you say, for being a happy, fulfilled human being. And so there is often a tension between the goals of scout mindset and the goals of soldier mindset, at least in the short term. So part of what I argue in the book is that it's not that we're stupid or crazy by being in soldier mindset. There are these valuable things that we're trying to get with it. But soldier mindset also comes with these downsides of impairing our judgment and making it harder for us to think clearly. And there are all of these ways in which having false or distorted beliefs in one domain can kind of ripple throughout your network of beliefs and impact you in other ways and have unpredictably bad consequences for your own decision making. So soldier mindset has these downsides, and fortunately, I think we can. It's very rare that we actually need soldier mindset to feel good or look good, and with a little bit of extra sort of care and strategicness in how we live our life, how we design our life, and how we think about our lives. We can be happy and confident and fit into our community as well without having to resort to self deception. So I can talk more about that. That's kind of one of the main focuses of the book. But that's like my thesis statement.
- [14:31]
B
No, I think that's. I think you should talk more about that because one of the most interesting arguments here is that people in general tend to overestimate the consequences of being in scout mindset more and more of the time. They tend to overestimate the degree to which they will be cast out of their peer groups, for instance.
- [14:58]
A
Exactly.
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B
And then I'm not sure if you mentioned this necessarily in the book, but the salient examples in the news of people cast out of their jobs for having the wrong opinion, say, can lead people to have an irrational sense of how likely that is to happen to them. Right.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So I, much like a plane crash can sort of make people afraid to ride planes.
- [15:29]
A
I think that's part of it that we over anchor on particularly emotionally salient examples, even if they're not that common or not that representative. I think you can also go a long way just being diplomatic in how you talk about things without necessarily having to wholeheartedly accept all of the views of your tribe internally. So I often try to be diplomatic. You don't have to always contradict everyone just because you don't agree with them and you don't always have to wholeheartedly agree with someone just because that's the prevailing view in your tribe. So there's ways to be diplomatic without having to agree with everything your tribe believes. But then the broader point, I think, is that it often seems like soldier mindset is your best bet when you're looking at the choice very locally in the short term. And so yeah, in the short term, if you feel like you have to choose between losing your friends or seeing things clearly, then yeah, maybe I'll choose my friends instead of seeing things clearly. But A, I don't think that choice is nearly as stark as it feels to us. And B, if you zoom out and look at the longer term, allowing yourself to notice, ah, I think I don't actually agree with a lot of the core beliefs of my community around politics or around gender norms or religion or the kind of lifestyle that people should lead. If you allow yourself to notice that, then you give yourself the chance of over time finding a different community that you fit into much better, where you actually do share a lot of their same beliefs, or even better, a community of people who aren't going to cast you out because you don't agree with everything that they believe. But in order to make that shift, you need to be able to notice that you don't really believe the core beliefs or values of that community. And so I think in the longer term, seeing things as clearly as you can and being honest with yourself about what you actually believe and what you actually agree with can be really beneficial. But that's not always as clear if you're just looking at the short term choices right in front of you. Does that make sense?
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B
Absolutely. And it dovetails with one of the other really interesting points you made in your book about how evolution hardwired a preference for the soldier mindset.
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A
I theorize. Yeah, yeah.
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B
I mean, it makes intuitive sense at least that. Partly because we had much less control over our lives in the context in which we evolved. Right. Here's your quote from the book. Having an accurate map doesn't help you very much when you're allowed to travel only on one path. So if our instincts undervalue truth, that's not surprising. Our instincts evolved in a different world, one better suited to the soldier. So, for instance, if you're just.
- [18:15]
A
I love hearing my words read in your voice. Because everything just sounds so smart and reasonable when you read it. Sorry, go on.
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B
So, yeah, so imagine you're living in a context where you're just in your tribe your whole life. There's no prospect of going on Reddit or the Internet and finding a different community. You're not going to college away from your parents. You're just stuck in the town you grew up in or in the tribe you grew up in for your whole life. Well, then instrumentally, and we should talk about this distinction between instrumental reason and epistemic reason. It just doesn't make sense to have a scout mindset from the point of view of self preservation. Because there's no possibility of you finding a richer life with people who you share more values with.
- [19:06]
A
No, exactly. I think the number of choices that we have available to us now compared to the number of choices that our ancestors had tens of thousands of years ago. It's like night and day. And similarly, the number of opportunities we have to change things that we don't like about our lives or ourselves is many orders of magnitude bigger. We just make so many choices every day about how to spend our lives or what career to go into, how to run our business or who to hire or fire or what medical treatments are worth trying. If we're not happy, what can we do to Change that. We could take pills, or we could see a therapist, or we could read self help or philosophy, or move to a sunnier place. I could go on and on. But the point is not that there's always an easy fix for every problem, but just having the opportunity to even consider potential fixes for your problem and to even be able to think about, is this problem in my life worth trying to fix or does it make more sense to just try to live with it? Even having that choice at all is a relatively new thing in our history. And so when you're thinking about why, or when I was thinking about why, would it be the case that we seem to be hardwired for soldier mindset in so many situations when, if you look at it, it seems like that's not actually best for us in the long term, or it's much less clear that it's best for us in the long term, why would that be the case? I think this is a reasonable explanation that the world we live in today and the benefits of being able to have an accurate map of yourself, or as accurate as you can, a map of yourself and the world, the benefits of such a map are just much greater than they were in the past when, as I say, there was kind of only one road to travel on.
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B
Yeah, I think that seems right to me. So, yeah, I want to talk a little bit about the difference between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. I think this is a great concept.
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A
I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but I. There was one thing I wanted to clarify and something I said earlier that I would mind getting in before we change threads.
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B
Yeah, go ahead.
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A
So I just want to make it clear that I'm not claiming that scout mindset is always better for you than soldier mindset, because I don't think I can claim that. I don't think there's any way to know that for sure. And it may well be the case that in some situations you are better off even in the long run. In soldier mindset, it's totally possible. The claim is specifically that on the margin relative to our kind of default settings, as human beings, the settings we evolve with, we are better off with more scout mindset and less soldier mindset than our default, because our default settings tend to bias us towards soldier mindset even when it's not actually the best choice. So that means that we can expect to do better if we shift on the spectrum away from the soldier and toward the scout. So it's a more specific and nuanced claim than you should always be a scout, But I think it's still an important one.
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B
So I have some questions about that claim.
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A
Great. And let's get back to epistemic versus instrumental rationality soon.
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B
Sure. So just to summarize what you just said, it's not the case that we should be in Scout mindset 100% of the time. It's the case.
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A
Or at least I can't claim that with confidence. Maybe true, right? Yeah.
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B
Okay. But what you're confident in saying is that we should dial up. We should make a conscious effort to turn the dial on the scout mindset higher than it is now, basically.
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A
Yeah, that's right. That would be in our self interest.
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B
So one question I had is, do you think it's possible for a person to be too frequently or too consistently in scout mindset and for a person somewhere in the field of variance of how people are to have overdone it with the scout mindset and need to sort of correct by having more of the soldier in them?
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A
Well, one thing that can happen, which I think is often what people mean by that, is that people can get kind of trapped in analysis paralysis where they never take action because they're always just. They feel like they don't have enough information or they keep second guessing their own judgment. And so they never actually go out and try things and see what happens. And that is a failure mode. And that's not something I'm advocating. I should be clear that scout versus soldier mindset, the mindsets are defined with reference to how you decide what to believe. But when you're executing on a plan and you're just executing the decision that you've already made, that's not necessarily in tension with being a Scout. So if you're running a business and you're in scout mindset, when you decide what should our focus be for the next two months, say, and then you execute that focus and two months later you take a step back and revisit, okay, how did that go? What should we change for the next following two months? You're not in the soldier mindset just because you're executing based on the assumptions that you landed on the last time you deliberated. So I would say you want to make sure that as new information comes in, as you're executing on your plan, as you learn new information, which you inevitably will, like you get feedback from your customers or the market changes situation, the market changes, you want to make sure that you integrate that new information with your plan in an intellectually Honest way, which could be saying, huh, actually, maybe this indicates we should change our plan. Or at the very least saying it's not a good time for us to revisit all our assumptions. So we'll set this aside, we'll table this for now. I think that's perfectly intellectually honest. The soldier mindset thing, the intellectually dishonest way to react to new information is just to come up with an excuse to dismiss it. Like to say, well, that feedback doesn't count because those customers are, whatever, not representative or something. Or, well, my colleague's objections are bad because whatever, she is jealous or something. There's plenty of ways to dismiss new information in an intellectually dishonest way, but I think it's absolutely valid a lot of the time to just set aside the new information until it's a good time to make a decision about whether to pivot or not. Does that make sense?
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B
Yeah. Yeah.
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A
Okay. But did you have in mind a situation where you think there could be such a thing as too much scout mindset that you want me to address?
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B
I actually don't.
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A
Oh, okay.
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B
And that's why I was curious about it, because you seem to leave the door open to that possibility in the world.
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A
Well, just because it annoys me so much when I feel like people are over claiming. There's this quote from. I think it was Daniel Dennett who said that nothing annoys me more than a bad argument for something that I believe in.
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B
Right.
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A
And I feel that way sometimes when I hear other advocates of things like scout mindset, like intellectual honesty or truth seeking. When I hear them over claim, it kind of makes me wince a little bit, like, oh, no, I don't think we can say that. Like, what's a good example? Well, I remember reading this quote from Bertrand Russell, who is a big advocate of intellectual honesty in his day, and I think this was in his autobiography. He was talking about the importance of just facing the truth, no matter what it is, and not self deceiving. And he says something like, it is always better to face the truth and just incorporate it into your model of reality. I might be fusing some of my own language with Bertrand Russell's here, but that was the gist. It's always better to see what's really true and just get used to it than to deceive yourself. And I read that and I thought, well, how do you know that? How do you know it's always better? Maybe there's some situations where it's just really hard for a particular person. To cope with the truth. And there are very few benefits to learning the truth. And so it kind of wrecks their life for not much benefit. That seems at least theoretically possible.
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B
You know what's interesting about that, though?
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A
What?
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B
So I can imagine, when I think about that, I think about that as being different from the scout mindset versus soldier mindset. Probably.
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A
Yeah. How so?
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B
So if I imagine classic scenario is, woman is on her deathbed, husband cheated on her so long ago, that it, you know, it's sort of irrelevant.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But for whatever reason she asks, were you ever unfaithful to me?
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A
Yeah.
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B
So is it the soldier mindset necessarily to lie in that moment, or is it a scout mindset, sort of honest assessment of the limits of the utility of truth telling. Right. Well, is the scout committed to truth before, to telling the truth before anything else, or is he or she committed to sort of reasoning technically?
- [27:55]
A
You could be a perfect scout in theory and lie to other people because the mindset's just about how you see the world yourself. You could see things very honestly and then lie to other people. Strategically, that's theoretically possible. And so not necessarily in that scenario. It's not necessarily a violation of scout mindset for the husband to lie to the wife. It would be technically a violation of scout mindset for her to try to avoid learning the truth about her husband's infidelities. And that's a case in which, at the very end of your life, when there's nothing much you can do with the information, I think that's a decent contender for a case where scout mindset would make you worse off overall compared to soldier mindset, where you convince yourself that, no, your husband wasn't actually unfaithful in the past. So, yeah, such cases could exist. My claim is that they're much less common than people tend to assume they are.
- [28:49]
B
Yeah. So, yeah, this goes into the concept of epistemic versus instrumental rationality. Can you describe what you mean by that?
- [28:58]
A
Yeah. So when people talk about being rational or rationality, there's two common senses of the word that often get conflated. So epistemic rationality is about how you reason, reasoning in such a way as to make your beliefs more accurate over time. So this is basically what I'm talking about when I talk about scout mindset, Trying to see things as accurately as you can given your limited time and information. And then instrumental rationality is about making decisions that help you achieve your goals as effectively as possible, whatever those goals might be. And when I say goals People often think of, like, career goals or goals to earn money or something, but it could be anything. It could be making yourself happy or making your family happy or saving, saving lives. Whatever your goals are, instrumental rationality is the art of pursuing them effectively. And so I touch on this briefly in the book because there's a claim made by or proposed by some economists and evolutionary psychologists that humans are naturally rationally irrational. And so that phrase sounds contradictory if you aren't aware of these two senses, different meanings of the word rational, but what it means is humans are naturally good at just instinctively choosing just the right amount of epistemic irrationality in order to further their goals. So this is sort of what we were talking about a few minutes ago, that this hypothesis, this theory would say that humans are just naturally good at choosing soldier mindset when it's best for them and choosing scout mindset when that's best for them. And so if that were true, then I wouldn't really have much to say to the world. I could say, here's this great thing called scout mindset, you should do it more. But then I couldn't actually claim that it would make them better off relative to their default settings if humans were already rationally irrational. And I don't think that we are. And I make that case in the book, and a lot of it is an evolutionary case that I think we shouldn't expect, that humans, the way our brains evolved many, many thousands of years ago, is going to lead to the ideal balance of scout and soldier mindset now in the modern world. That's one central reason why I don't think we're rationally irrational. But I did want to acknowledge that theory because I think it's one of the more important and well defined counters to what I'm trying to claim in my book.
- [31:22]
B
Yeah. I think I first encountered this in Robin Hanson's book, the Elephant in the Brain.
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A
Yes. Yeah. I think that the GMU crowd, that George Mason University economists, I think, are sympathetic to the rational irrationality thesis. But go on.
- [31:37]
B
Yeah. To give a concrete example for people of why, at least why I think this is an interesting concept. Say we're talking about climate change, right? Say you're an average Joe, you're not head of the United nations, you're not head of a major oil company. You're just an average person whose influence on the trajectory of the world's climate is close to nothing. You can recycle, you can get a electric car and so forth. But you understand that your contribution to wherever the Earth's climate heads is infinitesimal. Right? On the other hand, your opinion about climate change can have a rather large impact on your own social life. It can have a rather large impact on who you can and can't be friends with, who you can and can't date, on how prospective mates will perceive you. So your opinion on climate change has a much more powerful effect on your own goals in life than it does on the reality of climate change itself. So what the instrumental, the point of the, the idea of instrumental rationality is that, okay, sure, you can say epistemically it doesn't make sense to just have your opinion on climate change without looking at the evidence, but instrumentally it totally makes sense given your goals and given that you can't actually have much of an impact in this case, or you're unlikely to to choose whichever belief furthers your own goals and to even believe it, right? To really convince yourself you believe it enough that you can convince, that's the idea, is that in that situation it makes perfect sense to choose to be irrational or on other topics it might not. And again, if you're the head of the UN or you're someone with some serious influence, or you're part of a tribe that is neutral about climate change, so that you could have either opinion and still be part of the tribe, well, then it's going to make sense to me in scout mindset. So the idea is that we naturally choose when to adopt either of these mindsets in a way that is already optimized, Right?
- [34:01]
A
Exactly. That's the theory. That's a beautiful articulation of it. That's the theory that I'm disagreeing with. So I think the example you gave of political beliefs that where there's no direct consequence to your life from having the wrong picture of reality, but there is a direct reward to you emotionally and socially from having a particular wrong picture of reality. I think that's one of the strongest points in favor of the rational irrationality thesis. I just think there's some things that's missing. So part of it is the long term versus short term focus and that allowing yourself to see that you disagree with your tribe can be beneficial in the long term in ways that it can't be beneficial in the short term because it can allow you to decide you want other friends or community members. But then also there's some benefits of scout mindset that don't get counted in the direct consequences on your life category that I think are still really valuable. So even when we're talking about ideological views on things that have no relation to your own life, like, like climate change or foreign policy or whatever. You know, scout mindset is really, it's a collection of habits and emotional skills. Essentially, it's the habit of noticing that you're getting defensive, or the habit of it even occurring to you to second guess your intuitive judgments, or the emotional skill of being fine with being wrong. And so when you practice scout mindset on even something that's unrelated to your own life, like climate change or foreign policy, you're still reinforcing those general habits of mind, habits of thought and emotional skills, as a general rule. So every time you say to yourself, like, huh, I guess I was wrong about that political issue, you're making it easier for yourself to notice that you were wrong in general. Every time you force yourself to double check an intuition before you tweet about it, you're getting better at second guessing your own intuitive judgments in general, et cetera. So this is not an argument that in every case for everyone, it will be in their interest overall to try to see politics or climate change honestly. But I think it's something that should be counted in the pro and con, like in the calculus on the side of pros of scout mindset, that our intuitive weighing of costs and benefits is not counting because it's a kind of abstract, diffuse, delayed in time benefit. And our intuition is much better at counting rewards and consequences that are very immediate and salient, like the reward of feeling good or of getting approval from your tribe. And so this is one reason why I think our intuition underweights the value of scout mindset relative to soldier mindset. And even on these cases where it seems like you should just be in soldier mindset. So hence my claim about on the margin we are underweighting scout mindset relative to soldier mindset, I can't claim that we would always be better off in scout mindset.
- [37:17]
B
So a related point you make is that in the long run, adopting the scout mindset is akin to the way you put it is investing in your future ability to be convincing.
- [37:29]
A
Yeah, this is one thing that helps make me willing to say that I was wrong about something. Because when it occurs to me, like in an argument or after I've made some claim online that people are pushing back on, that I might be wrong or maybe I overstated my case, that's not a pleasant thought. And it's very tempting in the moment to kind of flinch away from that thought and just focus on finding ways to defend myself. But One way that I am often able to overcome that temptation is by reminding myself, you know, a silver lining of telling the world you were wrong about this issue is that it makes me more credible in the future, because I've shown that I'm not just someone who sticks to her guns no matter what. And so in the future, I'm going to be better able to convince people, or I'm going to be more credible, because now I've admitted that I was wrong about something. So the general principle here is it can make it possible for you to be open to unpleasant or inconvenient truths or possibilities if you can find some silver lining to those unpleasant possibilities. And that's not claiming that there's no dark cloud. It's just claiming that, well, at least there's a silver lining. At least I'm investing in my ability to be credible in the future. And even if that doesn't make the unpleasant possibility pleasant, it can at least make it palatable enough that you're willing to consider it honestly. So that's one that I find helpful for myself. I think other people in different situations have their own silver linings that they can use to make themselves emotionally willing to consider unpleasant possibilities. But that one works for me.
- [39:16]
B
Yeah, I think there are a lot of things like this in life where we all know it's true when judging someone else, but it's very difficult to apply to ourselves. We all know that it increases. We think people are more credible if they're willing to admit when they're wrong. We just think of their judgment as more sound in general. And apologies are like this, too. I recently got an apology from someone which I did not expect to get, and it made my estimation of this person go way up in terms of maturity because of how sincere the apology was and how it didn't. I wasn't expecting it or demanding it.
- [40:03]
A
Isn't that interesting how we mispercept that? Sorry. Go on. I just find it so fascinating.
- [40:07]
B
No, it is fascinating. And we don't apply that misperception when we're the one. If I'm the one who needs to apologize, I would hope that I remember this example. But more realistically, I'm probably gonna try to convince myself that I don't need to apologize for anything and they're in the wrong. And if I'm reminded of how their judgment of me would probably go up if I apologized, it would soften my attitude towards apologizing and make it seem like more of a plausible option.
- [40:41]
A
Right. When I interviewed people for the book I was seeking out. One of the kinds of interviewee I was seeking out were people who I could tell were really good at at least some aspects of Scout mindset, including people who I thought were really good at just saying when they were wrong or when they had made a mistake. And a theme that reoccurred in these interviews was these people would say, you know, it really intuitively feels to me or used to feel to me. Like, when I apologized or admitted I was wrong about something, people would judge me negatively for it. And I just had to force myself to kind of get over that hump. But then every time I did it, or almost every time I did it, the reaction was so positive. Like, people. People were so appreciative or so admiring or pleasantly surprised and. And often just seemed to think better of me for it. And I just had to go through this kind of repeated practice of predicting emotionally that it was gonna be bad and then seeing that it was actually good before my expectations started to rewire themselves. And I just think that's so interesting why we would systematically misperceive that.
- [41:47]
B
Well, I guess the wrinkle in this is that public figures and politicians don't seem to benefit from apologizing.
- [41:57]
A
Yes. For mistakes. So I've noticed this, and I think it's important to distinguish between situations where your audience is adversarial versus situations where your audience is, at least in theory, sympathetic to you, or. I don't know if that's exactly the right way to word it, but politicians are kind of an unusual case where their audience doesn't care that much about what's true, and a lot of their audience is just looking for any excuse to make them look bad. And so that's kind of an unusual case. And in such cases, yeah, if you say you were wrong about something, maybe they can use that as a weapon against you. But in a lot of everyday cases, like in the workplace or with your friends or partners, saying that you were wrong about something is not. They're not looking for an excuse to attack you with any weakness that you show. And in a lot of cases, they actually do care if your judgment is accurate, like whether you are good at predicting how some business idea is going to turn out or how long it's going to take you to finish some project. And so getting better over time at making those judgments accurately actually does matter to them where it may not matter quite so much to a politician. Does that distinction make sense?
- [43:08]
B
Right. Yeah. No, I think that's right. We deserve to know what we're putting in our bodies and why, especially when it comes to something we take every day. Ritual's clean, vegan friendly multivitamin is formulated with high quality nutrients in bioavailable forms. Your body can actually use what you won't sugars, GMOs, major allergens, synthetic fillers and artificial colorants. Plus the fresh taste and delayed release capsule design makes taking your vitamins easy. A multivitamin should contain key nutrients and forms your body can actually use to help fill gaps in the diet. No shady extras. Ritual's delayed release capsule design delivers high quality nutrients, including vitamin D3 in just two daily pills. Ritual multivitamins are delivered to your door every month with free shipping always. You can start, snooze or cancel your subscription anytime. And if you don't love Ritual within your first month, they'll refund your first order. Get key Nutrients without the BS. Ritual is offering listeners of this podcast 10% off during your first three months. So visit ritual.comcoleman to start your ritual today. So, speaking of politics, you have all these examples in the book, and as you say in the book, there have been lots of other books written about motivated reasoning and political tribalism and so forth. There was one that was particularly depressing to me, and all of these things do increasingly make me despair. So here's one. When law students prepare to argue for either the plaintiff or defendant in a moot court, which is, I guess, a mosquito court. Yeah, I don't know what that term.
- [44:56]
A
Okay.
- [44:57]
B
They come to believe that their side of the case is both morally and legally in the right. Even when the sides were randomly assigned.
- [45:06]
A
Yeah.
- [45:06]
B
Right. So they come to actually believe that their mock court case assignment that their side was morally correct.
- [45:17]
A
Right. Yeah. So the students in this study, it was a nice study because usually if you're looking at whether people come to believe things that they're going to persuade other people of, or going to try to persuade people of, it's tough to get a clean experiment because often people choose things to persuade people of that they already believe. And so those two things are kind of intertwined. But the moot court experiment is really nice because the students are just randomly assigned one side or the other. And so if people on average are more likely to support their own side than the other side, like think their own side is correct on the merits, then that can't just be a result. I mean, they didn't choose that side. They got it randomly assigned. And so we know which way the causality has to Go. And so this is an interesting experiment because A, it showed that just knowing you're going to have to persuade other people of something gives you the motive to start believing it yourself. And B, we get to see how that strategy actually works or not, because we can see how the students actually performed in their moot court testimony. And interestingly, this dovetails really well with what we were just talking about. The students who had the most confidence that their side was actually legally and morally in the right did worse in the moot court. They got lower scores from the judges who I guess were their professors. And there's different explanations you could give for that. It's possible that maybe students who are really inclined to believe that their side is right are just not as smart or that they're, I don't know, worse at legal thinking or something. But I think another very plausible explanation is that believing that your side is clearly in the right blinds you to the potentially very good arguments on the other side. And so you're not prepared for them when they come up in the, in the moot court case. Because yeah, you didn't think about them ahead of time, you didn't prepare for them, you didn't, you didn't carefully craft your own arguments to avoid those pitfalls. So I think this example really highlights that we seem to instinctively think that just believing something really strongly will help us persuade other people. And that's only true in specific situations where our audience is already sympathetic or doesn't really isn't really that interested in scrutinizing what we're saying. And so they're just happy to believe whatever we want to convince them of. But if your audience is at all adversarial or skeptical or coming at it from a different angle, then if you come in there all bobastic with your one sided arguments, that's just going to turn them off and they're going to think you don't know what you're talking about. And that kind of situation our instincts don't seem to have prepared for at all. And so we keep doing this instinctive persuade them with conviction strategy and it just backfires like it does in the moot court case.
- [48:18]
B
Yeah, I think there's also something to do with the desire to be consistent in one's beliefs over time that can lead to this. Maybe not specifically in the moot court case, but I noticed examples in myself and others where I say something jokingly or half jokingly and then someone takes it seriously and then I now feel a burden to. Yeah, but I But I haven't actually considered whether it's true, because I really did intend it as. As just a complete joke the first.
- [48:51]
A
Time I saw it. And it's just shocking when you look back and you realize, wait, why am I defending this? I don't even believe this.
- [48:56]
B
Yeah, I'm not even sure. I haven't even considered.
- [48:58]
A
I know. This happens to me. It's a similar thing where people will attribute a view to me, and they kind of almost sneak it in there without me even noticing. They'll talk as if this is something I believe or something I've claimed. And so I start defending it, and then I realize a few minutes later, wait, I don't think I've ever said that, and I don't believe it. So why am I defending it? It's a very reflexive process.
- [49:20]
B
Yeah, right. Desire to be consistent over time and to. To be able to defend anything that's escaped your mouth, even if it hasn't actually escaped your mouth. If people have only thought it did, or if it escaped your mouth as a joke that someone took seriously.
- [49:38]
A
I've read that professional persuaders like telemarketers or other salespeople use this property of human nature to try to sell people things. So they'll. I don't know how true this is. I read it in some book. But they'll call people up and they'll ask them leading questions like, so you're. You know, you're a supporter of the arts, right? And people will say, well, yeah, I support the arts. And then they'll say, oh, great. Well, so then you must want to donate to this whatever, art museum gala function. And so people just feel instinctively trapped, like, well, I. I kind of have to, now that I've said. There was this segment in. I think it was an episode of 30 Rock that kind of parodied this property, where one of the characters said to Liz Lemon, aha. By the law of verbal traps. Now, you have to agree with whatever the thing is. And it wasn't actually like, Liz Lemon wouldn't have been inconsistent if she. Oh, I remember what it was. Liz Lemon was pretending to be pregnant, and her adversary, this other woman, said, oh, and you think pregnant women should be proud of their bodies. Right? And Liz Lemon said, well, yeah, of course. And then the woman said, ah. So you would then have no problem appearing in a photo shoot of pregnant women. Right. By the law of verbal traps, you have to do it. And someone was like, oh, damn, you're right. I do. Yeah.
- [50:59]
B
Yeah. The version of this That I. That really irks me is occasionally there are people on the streets of New York, probably other cities too, that are trying to get you to sign up for their particular nonprofit or charity. And the question they ask me is, do you have a moment to support dying children? Or something like this? And then that requires me to say.
- [51:22]
A
No, I don't have a moment.
- [51:24]
B
No, I don't have a single moment. I don't have what I'm doing. I don't even have a single time slice, less than a second. I don't even have one moment to help dying children. But it's not an honest question. What you mean is, do you have a few minutes to support my particular charity that I care about because I'm a part of it? So don't ask me that blackmailing ass question. Like, I can't.
- [51:48]
A
I mean, I think that, like, getting annoyed at this kind of behavior is valuable because it's that for me at least, it's that annoyance and that. That resentment of people who are trying to exploit these natural social instincts that we have for their own gain. That annoyance is what allows me to overcome the. The urge to play along, because I just really resent that they're forcing us into this situation. So that allows me to get over the hump of whatever the social awkwardness is of saying no or ignoring them. So I wish more people were annoyed and didn't feel like they were being rude.
- [52:23]
B
I dislike the dishonesty of the. And I much prefer the honest. So in different contexts, if someone's begging on the street, often my decision of whether or not to give them a few bucks hinges on my assessment of how honest they seem.
- [52:41]
A
Yeah, right.
- [52:42]
B
At least. And I encounter in New York, one encounters that all the time on the subway, on the street. And some people seem very honest. They're not going to pretend that their life decisions had nothing to do with why they're begging on the street, and they're not going to give you the same rote explanation of sort of why they need this money? And I'm much more willing to give a few bucks to them in that case, because I feel at the very least I have the money to give. And they seem, at minimum, somewhat honest about why they're asking for it.
- [53:19]
A
I had a question for you, actually, that's kind of related to something we were talking about a few minutes ago, and I think I had wanted to ask it in my podcast interview of you a few months ago, and we didn't have the time, but I'm curious For your thoughts. So I was wondering whether you experienced the same kind of tension, this trade off between being a scout, being intellectually honest in the way you write your articles or the way you speak on your podcast, versus appealing to, you know, a wide audience and having your ideas shared and spread widely. Because I think a lot of people feel like that is a trade off you face, where if you really want to get a lot of attention, a lot of views, then there's a lot of pressure to be just one sided and bombastic and strawman the other side and present things in a really intellectually dishonest way. So I find your writing and talks to be extremely intellectually honest. And I just wonder if you feel like you're sacrificing anything by doing that.
- [54:21]
B
Or not, not, not anything that, that would be worth me having. I do think a lot of it comes down to your psychological profile and you know, how you are to begin with. I mean, someone like Candace Owens is, is huge. I mean, partly because many of her arguments are going to be sort of meme formed and she's gonna. Even if I were to say the same thing as her, I would probably say it in five times as many words with more caveats and probably would have honestly considered the alternatives. And I do, I really try to cultivate the, you know, the idea that I could be wrong. You know, this is the reason I love your books. You know, it's because it appeals to me to begin with. Right. It's not. I came into your book a very sympathetic reader because, you know, I, I do tend to be the kind of person where if I see. So for instance, recently I saw a study on Twitter that, you know, said something like, when black people are shown narratives about how racism is ubiquitous, they feel less control over their lives as rated on a kind of survey of their psychology. Now, this is the kind of thing that would very much appeal to me.
- [55:52]
A
Claims that you've made. It would help support arguments you've made.
- [55:57]
B
That's right. It would help support the idea that narratives of ubiquitous racism are net harms, which is a. I do believe. On the other hand, I don't find this evidence to be persuasive at all. Right. Like, this is exactly the kind of thing in my mind that Jesse Singles book criticizing fad psychology would lead me to just be immediately skeptical of. And so I'm always trying, never with perfect success, of course, but to not simply believe evidence because it accords with something I deeply care about and an issue which really angers me in Many cases, because it just is. It's a bad long term solution to persuading people, I think, and it's, it's corruptive. It feels bad to me to not be able to simply believe something because it confirms what I already believe rather than because it's true. I actually do worry that I'm wrong virtually all the time.
- [57:16]
A
I believe that.
- [57:17]
B
Right. So yeah, yeah. So the question is, is there a tension between building an audience and sort of operating in the scout mindset? I think no doubt there is. Probably my audience could be larger if I were less nuanced and just, you know, tweeted more scathingly and so forth. But honestly, I feel no, no regret, you know, at any point I could choose to start behaving that way and I just don't because it keeps seeming like a totally unattractive proposition to me to have a larger audience, but to feel worse about what I'm doing, that.
- [57:59]
A
Makes sense to me and that I could have said the same thing just, you know, less eloquently. Yeah. I think if one's goal is to appeal to the widest possible audience, then nuance and uncertainty and avoiding overclaiming are probably not that helpful. But I think for a lot of people, the goal, you don't get your best outcome by building as large an audience as possible. You get your best outcome by building a decently large audience that's optimized for what you actually care about. This actually came up in my interview with Vitalik Buterin on my podcast a couple months ago, because he also is someone who I think really strives to be intellectually honest and acknowledge uncertainty when he talks about Ethereum. He co founded Ethereum and its corresponding cryptocurrency, Ether. And so I asked him, do you feel like that's had downsides for you? And he said, well, it definitely turns off some people that I am not just a cheerleader for Ethereum the way they might want me to be. But I'm fine with turning off those people because the crowd that I want, like the audience, the community that I want for Ethereum is the community of people who are thoughtful and smart and actually care about the truth. And those are the people who are going to be attracted by this communication strategy and not repelled by it. So I'm building the community that I want to have, basically. I think that's a good way to look at it, because you can't actually appeal to everyone. You just have to choose who you want to appeal to. And you can say, well, I want to appeal to a larger group of maybe less sophisticated listeners or less intellectually honest or curious listeners, or I can choose to appeal to a smaller group of more sophisticated or more intellectually honest listeners. And I prefer the latter. I think you prefer the latter.
- [59:52]
B
And in a way I feel like it's not even really a choice. It's like a mental setting.
- [59:57]
A
Yeah.
- [59:58]
B
I think the truth is, if I started being much more scathing and uncharitable to counter arguments and absolutist in my messaging, I think I would very quickly get caught in an inauthenticity trap. Right. Like I would be in a situation where people were now expecting that kind of thing and I would be unable to do it because it's not the way that I'm built. It's not to say I can never sound like that on particular topics for periods of time, but it's just a very difficult way for me to be in the long run, certainly building a career. And I'm not totally sure that that's the right way to be in every context. Right. Just like what you say in the book that you're not sure that scout mindset is appropriate in every conceivable situation or for any person over the span of their whole lifetime. I'm not sure that the scout mindset way of engaging topics is always the right way to be. I'm genuinely not sure about that. But it's the way that is most natural for me to be. And I think that that is enough for me to continue to try to remain in that mode and kind of self referentially.
- [61:30]
A
My decision to be intellectually honest in the book and say I don't know for sure that Scott mindset is always best. That's very kind of relaxing for me because when I do interviews now, I don't have to worry that I'm going to be. People are going to push me on a claim that I've made in the book that I can't really defend. And I'm going to be forced to kind of squirm my way out of it and give arguments that are kind of flimsy and not very good because I've just said what I actually think is true. And so I don't have to defend anything that I can't actually defend. And so that's very liberating for me. I much prefer it. I think something we've been kind of glancingly touching on a few times is in this conversation is whether people. Is my book actually useful if the people who read it and find it sympathetic are already pro scout mindset. And I bring that up because I think there is a large contingent of people who are just very strongly, staunchly soldiers and are not that interested in scout mindset and are just, if you ask them explicitly. There's this metric in cognitive science called active open mindedness, and it's just a measure of what you think good thinking is. So it consists of questions like, do you think people should change their minds in response to new evidence? Or do you think it's good to listen to the other side? And you might think, well, of course everyone would say yes to that, but in fact, a lot of people say no, it's not good to change your mind at all in response to new evidence. And I don't have a lot of hope of reaching those people. But I still think that within the set of people who say that, yes, at least in theory, it's good to change your mind in response to evidence. And they kind of like the idea of being the kind of person with an accurate map of the world and an intellectually honest approach to evidence. Even within that pretty large set of people, there's a ton of room for improvement in how much you actually practice science scout mindset in your everyday life, in your career, and the way you think about the world. And the reason I think there's so much room for improvement is, well, two things. First, it's just, even if you agree in theory, in practice, I think we often just don't pay very much attention to it. It's just not very salient to us. And so I was hoping, by writing a book with lots of examples of people being in scut mindset and lots of stories of different aspects of scout mindset and the consequences, that that would just make it a lot more salient for people, so they'd be more inclined to do it. And then the other reason I think there's room for improvement is just because people have these conscious and unconscious hesitations where they think, yeah, scout mindset is maybe good in theory, but you can't really be in scout mindset very often if you want to be happy or if you want to be confident, or if you want to be influential or if you want to be a good activist. And I think those objections are actually, to a large extent, misguided. And you can be a scout and be happy and influential and confident and so on. And so I was hoping that by addressing some of those hesitations people had that that would free people up to be more scout, like in practice. As you know, as well as in theory, if that makes sense.
- [64:46]
B
Yeah, I think so. And you mentioned activism, I think, becoming a loaded term more and more. Although it's, you know, in theory you can be an activist for any cause. What it means to a lot of people, I think in practice is you're either a left wing or a right wing activist around a certain set of issues. Although I did recently see the Free Britney documentary and she has Free Britney activists.
- [65:14]
A
Has that become politicized at all?
- [65:16]
B
No, no, no. Actually, beautiful. I think not to my knowledge.
- [65:20]
A
Yeah, don't.
- [65:21]
B
Sorry, I shouldn't have said anything because it will. You know, I remember when Covid wasn't political for about two weeks.
- [65:28]
A
I don't remember that. No, I must have blinked.
- [65:31]
B
I do. It was about two weeks where I would read, you know, our early emerging Covid numbers about mortality rates. And I couldn't tell whether anyone was right wing or left wing saying them. And I thought to myself, well, imagine if. If we treated other topics this way.
- [65:48]
A
I feel so bad.
- [65:49]
B
May not have even been Coleman one year ago.
- [65:52]
A
Like, oh, sweetie, yeah, enjoy it.
- [65:56]
B
I had an illusion that it. I genuinely had an illusion that it might stay apolitical. That's how stupid I am.
- [66:01]
A
At least we have Britney.
- [66:04]
B
Yeah, so far. The question I was asking though, is about activism in general. It definitely seems like the picture of the sort of ideal activist as portrayed on people's Instagram feeds and Twitter and Facebook doesn't look to me like a person who's engaging in the scout mindset. So how's it possible that they can be compatible?
- [66:27]
A
Yeah, so when people feel like you need soldier mindset to be a good activist, I get where they're coming from. The idea being that soldier mindset, seeing things in black and white, ignoring nuance, ignoring the possibility that you might be wrong about something, seeing your side as purely good and the other side as purely evil, that's very motivating. It inspires this kind of righteous passion and this drive to act. And that's all true. The problem is just that not all actions are equally effective. And so if you want to be an effective activist where you're successfully causing change in the causes you care about, then you have to actually be good at thinking as clearly and objectively as possible about which causes to focus on, which tactics to use, when to pivot to a different tactic. And so one example that I really like of a particularly effective and particularly scout like activist organization is the Humane League, which is an organization focused on animal welfare and early in their history, their main focus was these very flashy demonstrations outside the homes of scientists who were experimenting on animals. And they ended up pivoting away from that, in part because they kind of looked at their track record and decided, you know, these demonstrations aren't working that well. They're kind of alienating. They're not having the effect we want. And then also, even in the best possible scenario, the number of animals we can help if we're focused on lab animals is very small compared to the number of animals we could help if we focus instead on farm animals, just because there are many orders of magnitude more farm animals in the world than lab animals. And so they pivoted away from that strategy to instead focus on negotiating with large agricultural corporations to treat their farm animals better. For example, to stop throwing young male chickens into grinders because they can't lay eggs. And so they've been surprisingly impressively effective at that strategy. And I think that's the kind of thing that if you're in soldier mindset as an activist, that can be really hard to do, to acknowledge to yourself, this battle that I've been waging is not actually working, or it's not worth the time and energy I'm pouring into it compared to other tactics that I could be trying instead, like negotiating with companies, which does not feel very satisfying if you're a soldier, because in your worldview, your side is purely good and they're purely evil, and you don't want to negotiate with evil. But if instead you're driven by just having the biggest impact you can on the world, changing the world effectively, then you want to be able to notice when some tactics are going to be more effective towards that end, even if they don't feel as satisfying to your identity as an activist. So I think the Humanely does an amazing job at this. And in fact, when they take in new hires, they have this motto that they try to instill in new members, which is, if you're not changing your mind, you're doing something wrong. So we just build that expectation in from the beginning. We expect to learn that we're doing some things inefficiently or that we can have a better impact if we shift our focus. And we kind of bake that into the process. And so when it happens, we don't have to feel bad about it. So I think that's a great example of scout like activism.
- [70:00]
B
Yeah, it's definitely possible, and I think we need more of it.
- [70:05]
A
And I should also add. Sorry to interrupt you. That I don't want people to take away that being a Scout always means negotiating with the other side or always means being moderate, because sometimes the most effective thing to do is to be really flashy and get a lot of attention or to be confrontational. You need Scout mindset to have the clear eyes to tell when the confrontational is more effective and when negotiating or compromising is more effective. If that makes sense.
- [70:32]
B
Yeah, I think a great example. After this podcast I'll send to you a text of his But Bayard Rustin was a great activist in the civil rights movement who helped organize the March on Washington, and he drew up the papers for Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and so forth. He was always also a writer, but primarily an activist in that he was arrested something like two dozen times for civil disobedience during the civil rights movement and such. But he had this way in his writings of being so rigorous with when he would organize a protest. Right. It was only after he met this checklist of requirements that he would protest racism in a particular case. Right. Things on the checklist, not off the top of my head, but I remember one particular example where he was, I believe he was going to protest something like the president of Yale for misbehaving in some racist way. But before he did that, he made sure to personally write the president to get an explanation of what happened from his side, compare it to the journalistic accounts of what had happened on the other side before making any public charges or protests. Because this is just the way he operated. And it just seemed obvious to him to operate this way so that once you're close to 100% certain that you're on the right side of a particular issue, that's when you can simply forget everything temporarily and just march, right? And just be a soldier. And that makes total sense that you could. And I think it's possible to sort of flip between those two mindsets, right? People are more than one thing. But this has always been part of my problem when I went to Colombia with sort of participating in protests about things I knew nothing about. There's an Israel Palestine Week every week at Columbia where the Palestinian or pro Palestinian activists would be on one end of campus and 50 yards away, the pro Israeli folks would be on the other side of campus just sort of jeering at each other.
- [73:01]
A
How impactful, how useful for the world.
- [73:06]
B
And I remember one scene I'll never forget is one of the pro Palestinian activists walked over towards the Israeli camp and typed the word shame into her computer like A hundred times and had the computer just read it out loud. It's very persuasive.
- [73:26]
A
Yeah, I have this chart in my head with these two axes. I put this in the book too. Where one axis is how impactful is your strategy as an activist and the other axis is how much does it validate your identity as an activist for your cause. And so strategies can vary a lot where they are on that chart. And I think a lot of strategies that are just really validating to your identity as an activist, a representative of your cause, are either not impactful at all or just anti impactful, like arguing with strangers on the Internet or typing shame into the computer of someone who's on the other side. Or I mean, there's this, this thing that Freud said about narcissism of small differences where I don't remember the exact quote, but basically he said the greatest passion is inspired in your hearts against the people who are very similar to you ideologically or culturally, but not quite the same as you. And so those are the people you're most passionate to attack. Even though if your goal is to change the world, attacking people who agree with you about 95% of the topics because they disagree with you about 5% is probably not going to be very effective. I see this happening a lot in the animal welfare world where vegans will fight over whether you should eat honey or not. And they'll get very angry at companies like Impossible Foods who are reducing meat consumption by making plant based burgers that people actually want to eat. And vegans will get angry at them. PETA will attack them because they experimented on like 20 rats or rabbits in order to get the FDA clearance for their food. So they're saving millions and millions of animal lives by converting people away from meat consumption, but in order to do it they had to kill 20 animals. So attacking people who are on your side and fighting for a reduction in meat consumption because they're not quite as pure as you or they don't quite agree with you about all the tactics is. I think I'd put that on the graph in the lower left quadrant or something where it's strongly identity validating and actively anti helpful for your goals as an activist.
- [75:40]
B
Right? Yeah. And yeah, it's definitely not to say my point in bringing up Bayard Rustin, for instance, is precisely to note that there can be a harmony between the scout mindset and activism and that generally the most successful activism, including the civil rights movement as a prime example, was perfectly compatible with the scout mindset and was was aided very much by this approach. So it's possible, although it's not. I don't see it as much as I would like to.
- [76:18]
A
Yeah.
- [76:18]
B
And I think more and more, the notion of being an activist as an identity attracts people that are somewhat turned off to the scout mindset. At least that's what I've noticed. That's what I noticed at Columbia.
- [76:36]
A
Yeah. I was looking for something encouraging to say to you. I haven't found it yet. What were you gonna say?
- [76:45]
B
One question I had for you is. So there's this essay I read. I don't remember who it was by or where I found it, but the name of it is called Keeping youg Identity Small.
- [76:57]
A
Yeah. By Paul Graham.
- [76:59]
B
Paul Graham. Okay. And you have a chapter called holding youg Identity Lightly, which I didn't get to read, but I imagine dovetails.
- [77:07]
A
Yeah, it's my.
- [77:08]
B
Can you describe this?
- [77:10]
A
Yeah, definitely. So I was very inspired by Paul Graham's essay. A lot of people I know were inspired by his essay. And the point, I'll do my best to summarize it, is that so many beliefs can become part of our identities. Our political beliefs, for sure, our religious beliefs, but also tons of random beliefs that you wouldn't think of. Like, you know, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for a number of years, and so I'm well aware that people's beliefs about which programming language is better than which other programming language can become part of their identities. And people will get very passionate and defensive in those conversations. And when I say a belief is part of your identity, I just mean, you know, it feels like it defines you. You feel proud to believe that. And when that belief is criticized or someone disagrees with it, you take it personally, and it feels like someone is, you know, stomping on your country's flag or something. And so Paul Graham's point was that when beliefs become part of your identity, it's very hard to think clearly about them. And so, all else equal, you should let as few beliefs into your identity as possible. And so I and a bunch of other people have. Have kind of tried to do this to keep our identities small. And the challenge that we often encounter is just that, practically speaking, it's really hard to not take on identities. I support this movement called effective altruism. It's basically about trying to apply reason and evidence towards the goal of doing as much good in the world as possible. And if I don't want to identify as an effective altruist because I'm trying to keep My identity small. That's a worthy goal. But it's really tricky to avoid saying I'm an effective altruist. I have to go through all these kind of contortions of language to say, well, I often work with and agree with the effective altruist movement. And then just beyond the practical language issues of it all, it's kind of nice to be able to lend your support to a movement by declaring yourself to be a part of it. I think that can help the cause. And so I don't mean to disagree with necessarily what Paul Graham himself meant, but just the way that a lot of us were trying to implement that advice by avoiding taking on any identities at all. I think it's not that practical. And what we really need to be able to do, in addition to keeping our identity small, is to acknowledge, yes, I am an effective altruist. That's part of my identity. But I'm going to try to hold that as lightly as I can, by which I mean just maintaining some, some emotional distance between your own beliefs and the ideology of effective altruism, keeping in mind that your support for whatever your cause or ideology is contingent. So remembering that, yes, I'm a feminist, but if it ever seemed to me that feminism was wrong, I would disagree with it, or if it ever seemed to me that feminism was causing net harm to the world, I would no longer be a feminist. So maintaining that separation and not repressing the urge to cheer for your tribe whenever it wins and jeer at the other tribe whenever it loses, I think is really valuable. So I talk a lot about how and why to hold your identity lightly and how to tell if you're holding your identity lightly.
- [80:20]
B
Yeah, I think that's great advice. I was also inspired by that essay and one of the things that leads me to ask myself and you is, does it make sense to be affiliated with, with a particular political party or does that violate the wisdom of keeping your identity small?
- [80:40]
A
So one of the consequences of my attempt at keeping my identity as small as possible is that I did stop identifying as a Democrat, even though I'm registered as Democrat. And I've, I think I've always voted for Democrats, at least at the presidential level, but that one was actually pretty easy for me to just shed that label emotionally. And if people ask me, are you a Democrat? I might say like, well, I'm registered to vote as a Democrat, but that doesn't feel as much like an identity based commitment that I'm then going to feel pressured to defend in order to show consistency as we were talking about earlier. So yeah, that's an easier one for me. It might be harder for some other people. Like if you work on the campaign of Obama or something, then I think it's probably gonna take more effort to hold that identity more lightly, but I think it's still valuable. Right. What do you find?
- [81:30]
B
Yeah, in my case? Well, I just find political tribalism and bias to be so noxious and depressing to me that I wanna consciously make every effort I can to not participate in that particular species of bias.
- [81:49]
A
Yeah.
- [81:49]
B
And even. And it's not that being unaffiliated, being an independent inoculates me from the possibility of having political biases. It's so ubiquitous in our society right now that even independents feel pulled to the left or right on particular issues. And I think you can for arbitrary reasons.
- [82:14]
A
I think you can also get pulled. It can become part of your identity to criticize another identity. So these are less obvious because they don't necessarily come with their own label. I sometimes think of them as oppositional identities where you just really hate feminism. And you're not, you don't like identify as an anti feminist, you're not part of some official anti feminist party, but they just really annoy the crap out of you. And you love finding ways that they're wrong or hypocritical or, you know, you love reading news stories about a feminist who did something wrong like was convicted of sexual assault or something. That's just, you know, catnip to you. And so that can make it really hard to think clearly about whatever juicy anti feminist claims or gossip come your way. So I think those, those are kind of the sneaky identities, the ones that are about hating on someone else's identity.
- [83:12]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And to me, the wisdom of keeping your identity small is just that none of us are immune to getting in mental patterns of liking certain facts and disliking other facts. This is just, again, this is just how we're wired. But the wisdom of keeping your identity small is that I don't want to add to that. If I have the choice, right? If I have the choice of being on a particular team in a domain that. In a domain that's going to lead me towards a certain set of truths or another. I would rather be the referee. I would rather cultivate the identity of myself being the referee in the hopes that that will at least take the edge off some of the biases that I'm nevertheless likely to fall into.
- [84:05]
A
Exactly. In fact, that's part of my closing advice in the book is that we always feel this urge to have some identity, something that we kind of pride ourselves on that we feel defines us. And so why not take advantage of that and make being a scout or being intellectually honest or being an independent thinker part of your identity. And. And you have to do that carefully because you don't want to. For example, you don't want to define your identity as I'm someone who's always right about things. Or you don't want to define your identity as I'm someone who never agrees with the common wisdom, because that's also not a truth tracking strategy. But if you can pride yourself on being willing to change your mind or pride yourself on being able to articulate the other side's position accurately enough that they say, yes, that's a well put articulation of what we believe, I think that's just positive, useful thing to incentivize in yourself. So if you can feel good about yourself when you change your mind or when you can steel man the other side, then you're incentivizing the kind of thinking habits that actually do make you more right over time. And that's more useful than priding yourself on being right all the time as the end goal, if that makes sense. It's kind of paradoxical because you, in order to actually be right more often in the long run, you have to be fine with being wrong in any particular case. So that is the thing you want to incentivize in your identity.
- [85:33]
B
All right, well, on that note, this has been very interesting and useful and enjoyable for me. And can you point my audience in the direction of your work? Do you have a website for the podcast?
- [85:46]
A
Yeah, it's.
- [85:47]
B
And my Twitter handle. Before I let you go.
- [85:49]
A
Excellent. Yeah, my website is just juliagalef.com My book is the Scout Mindset. You can read about that on my website or check it out on Amazon or on the Penguin Random House site, the Scout Mindset. And then my podcast is rationally speaking and the website is rationallyspeaking Podcast. And then you can follow me on Twitter. I'm just Julia Galef.
- [86:08]
B
All right, thanks so much, Julia.
- [86:10]
A
Thank you, Coleman. This was so fun. It was great chatting with you.
- [86:13]
B
Till next time.