Learn To Improve Your Decision Making - Julia Galef | Modern Wisdom Podcast 332

Julia Galef is the co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, a podcaster and an author. Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings said that tens of thousands of Covid deaths could have been prevented if the Government had read Julia's book. Why is it that he swears by Julia's rationalist manifesto? Expect to learn what most people get wrong about confidence, the difference between a soldier and scout mindset, why attitude is more important than knowledge for effective judgement, how to avoid being self-deceptive, what the rationality movement has got most wrong and much more... Sponsors: Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy The Scout Mindset - https://amzn.to/2RM1RNT Follow Julia on Twitter - https://twitter.com/juliagalef Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #juliagalef #rationality #decisionmaking - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Soldier mindset is my term for this often unconscious motivation that's guiding your thinking when you're reading an article or listening to an argument, where motivation in the back of your mind is trying to defend your pre-existing beliefs, or trying to defend things that you want to believe against any evidence that might threaten those beliefs. And so you're going to be much more accepting of evidence if it supports what you already believe or want to believe, and you're going to be much more motivated to find flaws in evidence that goes against your beliefs, rationalizing, or wishful thinking, or self-justification. Those are all facets of what I call soldier mindset.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  Is being as rational as possible something that everyone should aim to do all the time?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Well, so like any philosophy nerd, I want to immediately define all of the terms that you just used in that sentence, so we can understand how we're using different words. But I'll just, I'll start with the idea of being rational. I think a lot of people hear that word and they think of being like Spock from Star Trek, where you're not allowed to have any emotion and you're only allowed to do things that you can justify in dollars and cents, or in time efficiency, or something like that. That's not actually, that's not how academics use the word rational, it's not how I'm used to thinking of the word rational. Rationality is just about forming beliefs that are as accurate as you can. That's one kind of rationality.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  And another kind is just making decisions that, that help you achieve your goals, whatever those goals might be. Those goals could be helping people you care about, or it could be enjoying life, or, or, you know, succeeding at whatever you want, but, but the goal of being more rational is to just find more effective ways to get those goals for lower, lower cost or sacrifice. So to find that way, I think it's harder to argue that being rational is, is not something we should strive for. And so, yes, I think. Improving your, they're called epistemic and instrumental rationalities is a really

• 2:04Speaker 00

  valuable goal and I tend to argue that improving your ability to see things clearly and have accurate beliefs actually is a really good way to achieve your goals, to be more instrumentally rational, that there's a real synergy between those two kinds of rationality that I think people should be more aware of.

• 2:22Chris Williamson?

  The problem is that most people aren't aware of just how irrational they are being. Most people presume that the decisions that they're making are going to take them towards their goals, right? If they have goals, they don't purposefully make decisions that don't take them toward them, but it's kind of like the emperor has no clothes in a weird way. They don't know that the things that they're doing are irrational.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think in the moment, we all, we never feel like, yes, I'm doing an irrational thing. But I do think that many people are able to kind of zoom out, take a step back and think, you know, okay, yes, I do sometimes do things that are predictably bad for my goals. Like, I do sometimes put off working on a project until the day before it's due, and I know from past experience that that tends to shoot me in the foot and I do a worse job. But I still do it anyway, because for various reasons, you know, there's always like a short-term temptation that can pull you into doing something that you

• 3:19Speaker 00

  know is bad for your goals. Or, you know, you might lash out in anger at someone, even though there's no real, there's no real expectation there that you're going to improve the situation by yelling at someone, but you just feel compelled to do it anyway. And so, I think, I think people can often recognize that at least, you know, in the past, they have done things that they now accept were not the most rational strategy for getting the things that they want. But in the moment, it's really hard to recognize that.

• 3:50Chris Williamson?

  So why does some people see things more clearly and others don't?

• 3:55Speaker 00

  So this is a big question that I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing and talking to people about, and I'll just try to give you a very, very simplified answer, so I don't spend two hours answering this one question. I think some people have, A, some people care more about seeing things clearly and accurately, and so they're more motivated to, you know, double-check their initial intuitive guesses about what's going on. They're more inclined to say, "Well, before I share this story on social media that seems really true to me, maybe I'll just spend a moment fact-checking it just to see if there's any obvious flaw I'm missing." So some people just, you know, are already more motivated to do that because they like being the kind of person who just sees things as accurately as possible.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  And then, also, a big part of the puzzle, I think, is that some people, just for various reasons, have developed more effective emotional skills to cope with some of the stressful or difficult aspects of seeing things clearly. And it can be stressful and difficult, you know? It can be uncomfortable to notice that you were some, you know, some political position you've been taking passionately to your friends and family, or, you know, saying publicly. To notice you were wrong about that can be very uncomfortable. Or just to seriously consider, you know, unflattering or difficult truths about yourself that, you know, "Maybe I do tend to lash out at people unfairly," or "Maybe I did screw

• 5:22Speaker 00

  up at that, you know, that problem at work maybe is my fault after all." That's not fun to recognize, but I think some people have developed tools that allow them to kind of tackle those situations and be willing to see things clearly even though it's not the easiest thing in the world. So I think a lot of the task of moving towards what I call scout mindset, the ability to really want to see things as clearly as possible, even if the truth isn't what you wish it were, I think a lot of that progression involves just developing these emotional skills that make seeing the truth easier on you.

• 5:59Chris Williamson?

  And what's the opposite of scout mindset?

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Right, so I have this metaphor that I talk about a lot called soldier mindset versus scout mindset. Soldier mindset is my term for this often unconscious motivation that's guiding your thinking when you're, you know, reading an article or listening to an argument where the motivation in the back of your mind is trying to defend your pre-existing beliefs or trying to defend things that you want to believe against any evidence that might threaten those beliefs. And so you're going to be much more accepting of evidence if it supports what you, you know, already believe or want to believe. And you're going to be much more motivated to find flaws in evidence that that goes against your beliefs. So this phenomenon isn't new. It has many names. You might have heard of it under the name motivated reasoning.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  That's what cognitive scientists often call it. And then there's other sort of colloquial terms like rationalizing or wishful thinking or self justification. Those are all facets of what I call soldier mindset. And then scout mindset is just the alternative to that because, you know, the scout's role, unlike the soldier, is not to attack or defend. It's to go out, see what's really there as clearly as possible and to form as accurate a map of a situation or a topic as possible, including all the things that you don't yet know or that you can't be certain about. And always, always being motivated to learn new things that could help you revise your map and make it more accurate. So the map is always a work in progress that is going to be subject to revision.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  And so scout mindset is basically just trying to be intellectually honest and as objective as possible and just curious about what's actually true.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think most people default to a soldier mindset rather than a scout mindset? I know far more soldiers than I do scouts.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so to be clear, we're all a mix of both. We're all, you know, somewhat soldiers and somewhat scouts and we can fluctuate between the two mindsets. Um, you know, I'm often in scout mindset when I'm thinking about some intellectual issue. But if someone is confronting me and arguing with me, and especially if they're being kind of a jerk about it, um, then it's much easier for me to slip into soldier mindset where I really just want to prove myself right. Um, or, you know, the context can matter a lot, like the topic. Someone might be, uh, really good at being a scout at work. Like, let's say they're a trader, a financial trader, and, um, and maybe they're, they're really good at trying to test their own assumptions about the market.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  And they're quite happy to discover that they were wrong about something because it means they can improve their, um, their trading strategy. But then they come home and they're a soldier in their personal relationships and they're unwilling to even consider the possibility that other people's perspectives might be valid or, you know, completely closed to the possibility of problems in their relationship, things like that. So we're all a mix of both, but some people are better at being more of a scout, especially in these, especially trickier, you know, emotionally, ideologically fraught situations. Um, and so I forget your original question.

• 9:03Chris Williamson?

  Just why do people err toward it?

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Oh, why do we, why do we so often default to the soldier?

• 9:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. Um, right. So there are, there are things that soldier mindset does for us, at least in the short term, um, that can be very tempting and, and can pull us into soldier mindset, even if scout mindset is better for us in the long run. So, you know, one of those benefits is just comfort, just like feeling better about our lives or the world. Um, we often are motivated to reach for, reach for defenses of some narrative in which we're a good person. And, um, things that happen weren't our fault. And, you know, things that are wrong with our life are, are someone else's fault. So, I don't know, suppose you're, suppose you tend to do poorly at standardized testing, um, like SATs or IQ tests or whatever.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  You might be especially motivated to believe articles that tell you that standardized testing doesn't actually measure anything important. And it's, you know, it's like a meaning, they're, they're meaningless tests or something. That might be an especially appealing belief for you to try to, to accept. Um. So soldier mindset can give us comfort, it can make us feel better about ourselves and our lives. It can also, people also sometimes use soldier mindset to help motivate themselves. They'll try to convince themselves that, you know, if I just work hard, I'm guaranteed to succeed, which, you know, working hard is great and it will help your chance of success, but there's a lot of randomness and luck in life and a lot of things you can't control and we're often kind of motivated to downplay that because we are afraid it's going to demoralize us. And yeah, there's lots of other things that people try to use soldier mindset for to feel

• 10:37Speaker 00

  good or to look good to other people. And that's all totally understandable. I'm not, I'm not going to come on here and say you shouldn't worry about feeling good or looking good, because those are very valuable, you know, parts of being a happy and fulfilled human being. But I think there are better ways to get those things that don't require you to, to tell yourself falsehoods and deceive yourself.

• 10:57Chris Williamson?

  It definitely seems to reduce complexity. When you don't consider all of the options and the fact that you might be wrong, conviction goes up, culpability probably goes down and complexity gets reduced. And that creates a scenario in which you're just more certain and the parameters within which or the degrees of freedom within which you could be wrong have been reduced.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Right. No, that's, that's very well put. And I think that, that simplicity can be very appealing to people. And it can also be a way that people are trying to avoid a, a common failure mode, which I agree is a failure mode that we should avoid, which is like analysis paralysis, where people are afraid, well, if I, if I don't just stick to one way of looking at things, or I don't just stick to the first plan I think of, then I'm just going to get mired in, in uncertainty.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  Nihilism.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  I'm never going to be able to ask. Yeah, or nihilism, right, exactly. If you allow yourself to, you know, consider other moral perspectives or other whatever. Yeah, so this is, this is also a very legitimate concern because analysis paralysis can be a terrible thing and I've seen people get stuck in it. But again, I think there are better ways of avoiding analysis paralysis that don't require you to, you know, insist on false certainty. So for example, a lot of the like very successful scouts, people who are good at scout mindset, who I know, are just really good at the skill of saying, well, I'm going to, uh, I'm going to spend a little while considering some options, then I'm just going to go with whatever my best guess is right now. And I'm just going to act on that. You know, I'm going to make this business plan that seems like I, I've bounded the

• 12:31Speaker 00

  amount of time I'm going to consider this and I'll just go with whatever my best plan is that I can come up with in a day or, or something. And I'll just, I'll go on with that until some new evidence comes to light that makes, you know, makes it worth reconsidering. Like if I, if we get some feedback from our beta testers that is surprising and, you know, makes this plan seem flawed, then we'll reevaluate, we'll reevaluate then. Or maybe I'll reevaluate at a set time in six months or something. But until then, I'll just act on this assumption that this plan is worth doing and then we'll, you know, revise if and when we need to. And so they're able to keep that awareness of uncertainty, um, in the back of their mind.

• 13:09Chris Williamson?

  It's bounded in a way.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it has to be bounded, right? We humans have limited time and energy and computational power. And so you, even if you wanted to, you know, uh, consider all the possibilities every time, you wouldn't have the, the time to do that. So it's just really important to be able to act on imperfect information and just trust that you can, you know, iterate and revise as you go. And I, I think that's like a much healthier approach than trying to be 100% confident in, you know, whatever your current guess is, so that you don't have to deal with the, uh, complexity.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Can you tell us that story from the book about the guy who got stranded at sea in the raft?

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I just, I found this such an engrossing and, um, and moving story. So the guy, his name is Steve Callahan, and he was a sailor, um, just a, you know, on his own, not a professional, um, sailor. And he set off, I think this was in the seven, seventies or eighties, I can't remember. He set off on a solo voyage across the Atlantic. And he, he just had a stroke of bad luck. Um, I think it was a whale hit his craft and, and broke it. And so it started sinking and he managed to, um, to escape in a life raft that he had brought on with him on the boat. But, so he was alive, but he's, he's stuck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  The nearest land was 1,400 miles away. And he had very, like, he had a little bit of food and water that he'd managed to salvage as the ship sank, but that was it. So, um, it was a pretty dire, um, dire situation. Um, and so to back up for a minute, the reason that I focus on this story is that, you know, as I mentioned, soldier mindset can give us comfort and can reassure us, um, in times of stress or insecurity or fear. And these kinds of survival situations where, you know, the stakes are life or death, can be extremely stressful and fear inducing. And because of that, people in these situations are very often tempted to reach for soldier mindset to, to assuage their fears.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  They're tempted to, you know, insist that I will definitely be rescued. There's no question, I will be rescued. Or sometimes they go the other way and they just collapse into fatalism and say, well, there's no hope. There's nothing I can do to, to salvage the situation because, you know, sometimes that little bit of hope is even more uncomfortable than having no hope at all because it means you have to try it. You have to worry and you have to, et cetera. So there's, there's all of these temptations towards soldier mindset in a survival situation. Um, and that's, that's unfortunate because in a life or death situation is when you most need clear eyed judgment. It's when you most need to be able to, you know, weigh the odds as best you can of, well, should I, you know, wait here to be rescued or should I go out to seek help? Which one strategy is more likely to work?

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Um, for Steve Callahan, the kinds of decisions he had to face were things like, um, you know, I have a few flares that I, that I've salvaged. When a ship passes by, you know, I have to judge, is it close enough that I should waste one of my flares in hopes of being seen? Or is that just going to be a waste of a flare because it's too far away? Um, How, how much water can I afford to drink per day? So there are all these really tough judgment calls that make a real difference in whether you end up surviving or not. And your best hope of making those decisions well is to just be as, as clear-eyed, objective and realistic as possible. And so what Steve Callahan was able to do was to comfort his own fear and anxiety without deceiving himself, without telling himself falsehoods like I'm definitely going to be rescued. So he found other ways.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  I call them honest coping strategies, ways of, you know, comforting yourself without lies. So for example, one thing he did was just to remind himself, he used this mantra, he said, "All I can do is the best I can. I'm doing the best I can." Which was true, he was doing the best he could. And he just kept reminding himself of that and, you know, and that was comforting to him. And he also worked on his memoirs while he was in the boat because he figured, you know, even if I die, maybe someday this raft will be found and my memoirs of this experience could be useful to someone else. And he found that comforting too. So Steve Callahan relied on these honest coping strategies allowed him to keep going without deceiving himself. And his story has a happy ending.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  He eventually made it after three months, almost three months of drifting in this raft slowly across the Atlantic Ocean. He got to the Caribbean. I think he'd lost over a third of his body weight at that point, but, but he, you know, made a full recovery and now his memoirs are this amazing book called Adrift, which is a story of how he survived both logistically and emotionally in the Atlantic for all that time. So I, I love his story just as like a gripping adventure story and also as this kind of emotional role model that I try to follow.

• 17:55Chris Williamson?

  And he had five pints of water left when he was found as well, right?

• 17:59Speaker 00

  He did, I was so impressed with that. What self-restraint, you know?

• 18:01Chris Williamson?

  Outrageous.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Oh, I should mention, he, yeah, I mean, he had very little water at the beginning, but he managed to rig up this device to collect rainwater on the raft so that he could replenish his supply of water. But still, it was a very slow rate of replenishment, so he could only afford to drink, I think it was like a liter a day or, or something, you know? It amounted to about one gulp of water per hour, I think.

• 18:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting that you say that he found comfort in rationality. So I was reading Red Rising, which is a series by Pierce Brown. It's just a sci fi fiction series that I've addicted half of the audience to. It's so good. It's outrageously good. And in it, there's this line, and the protagonist is talking about the fact he's in this emotionally charged situation. He's at war in space and stuff because space. And he says, someone comes in and asks him about how he's feeling or sort of brings him back to this social issue that he's having while he's in the middle of planning the attack, this new attack that he's doing out in space. And he says that he was ripped out of the cold comfort

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  of rationality and into the emotion of it all. And I thought that was really poignant. I highlighted it. I've saved it down in my favorite quotes. And this is something that I think, I've been thinking about this for a while to do with the rationality movement at large. So less wrong and Slate Star and all this sort of stuff. I wonder how much of the comfort that people take in the rationality movement at large is them trying to wrangle the infinite complexity of the world and the inherent fear that comes from being a finite creature like we are surrounded by infinite complexity. I wonder how much of the compulsion and the desire and the enjoyment of the rationality movement comes from creating

• 19:49Chris Williamson?

  a little bit of order, trying to reduce the amount of chaos that you're surrounded by. What are your thoughts on that?

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Well, I guess that would seem more plausible to me if the non rationalists were all wrestling with uncertainty and feeling like, but like

• 20:05Chris Williamson?

  Pandora's box with that though, right? Isn't it? It's like if you don't know that it's there, you can't know your own ignorance if you're still ignorant to it.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Okay, got it. So you're suggesting like, the rationalists are people who have, they have opened Pandora's box. They have, they have become, you know, aware

• 20:22Chris Williamson?

  Plato's, they've stepped out of Plato's cave. Yeah.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Right. To pick another ancient Greek metaphor. So they've, they've, they've become aware of all this uncertainty. And so they're, they're clinging to rationality as a way to try to, you know,

• 20:38Chris Williamson?

  Wrangle it.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  It all wrangled the uncertainty into order or something.

• 20:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, that's just something that I considered.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  It's, uh, it's possible. I mean, I'm, I'm maybe one of the worst people to try to, uh, give a nice, uh, unbiased take on your psychoanalysis of the rationalist, since I'm like more inside of the group than outside of it. Um, I, I mean, I'd be curious for your take on the actual like kind of analysis or, or, you know, approach to wrangling uncertainty that rationalists tend to use because it's, you know, again, I'm not unbiased here, but it, it's not that simplistic. It's, it's pretty complicated. Um, there's, there's always like, you know, one rationalist will suggest one thing and then another rationalist be like,

• 21:25Speaker 00

  "Well, but, you know, we have to add this nuance here and, or, you know, well, but there's this flaw in that approach." And so it, it doesn't feel to me like we're just like reaching for some simplistic explanation.

• 21:36Chris Williamson?

  No, no, I don't think it's, I, I don't think it's sort of a reductionist, a super, super simplistic approach. But I do wonder whether the, the deep core motivation part of that comes from this desire for, for us to just make the world feel a little bit less crazy.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  They are unpredictable and I'm no-

• 21:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because we can't rely, especially the people in the rationality movement, they can't rely on the old archetypes and narratives that would have given them that sense, "Well, everything's in service of God," or "It'll be fine when Judgment Day arrives." Um, another question I had for you, given that you are, uh, knee deep in the rationality movement. What do you think that the rationality movements got most wrong over the last 10 years or so? What are the blind spots that they've overlooked?

• 22:25Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Um, I'm not hesitating because I have no answer to this. I'm hesitating because I'm trying to like winnow down all of my thoughts into something concise. Um, I-

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Well, okay, one thing that I've been kind of converging on in the last few years is that...

• 22:53Speaker 00

  So, one of the main things that defines the rationality community is a... An emphasis on these kind of norms of discourse that you're supposed to follow if you want to participate in discussions. And there are norms that are intended to kind of help...

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Help push us all or keep us all in scout mindset and make it easier for us to kind of collectively get closer to the truth, hopefully. And so these norms include things like, you know, You shouldn't dismiss someone's argument just because you don't like them. You should like, take it faith value or... Assume, you know, that your fellow, your interlocutor is arguing in good faith. Don't just say, "Well, you would say that because you're a, you know, white male," or "You would say that because you're Just trying to defend your country," or whatever. Just like, Deal with the arguments that people make as they make them and just talk about the ideas, you know. And then, you know, it also includes things like, You should be willing to talk about the evidence that you have for your beliefs, or, you know, even if you don't have

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Randomized controlled trials behind everything you say, you should at least be able to talk about, "Well, here's, here's, I think, what my intuition might be based on." Instead of just saying your belief and expecting people to take it as the truth, you should be willing to talk about the reasons. So, I think these are great norms. Of course I do, because I'm part of this community, but There is a potential downside to them that I think I've become more Aware of in the last few years, which is that they're somewhat gameable. Or they, to put it a different way, they They, they create the potential for exploitation by bad actors. So... You know, knowing that we have these norms, someone can come in and say, "Well,

• 24:40Speaker 00

  you know, here are all of my theories about whatever controversial topic." And they could, they could actually be, you know, quite disingenuous and even harmful claims, but the rationality community has committed itself to, you know, evaluating all arguments as if they're being made in good faith and, and to not dismiss something just because it sounds evil or crazy or weird. And so that can lead to some ideas being, you know, taken more seriously or given more of a hearing, just because the rationality community doesn't feel like they're allowed to, you know, reject something.

• 25:16Chris Williamson?

  Because someone's a dick.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, because someone's a dick. And so, uh, so this has come back to bite us in some ways. Um, uh, you know, Slate Star Codex, who you mentioned, or Scott Alexander, who wrote the blog Slate Star Codex and now blogs at Astral Codex 10, has, you know, he's really committed to these norms of discourse in the comment threads on his blog and also on some of the, the like forums on Reddit that he's moderated. And, you know, there, as you would expect in any forum where people are committed to taking ideas seriously, even if they sound weird or fringe, that attracts some people with like very unpopular, unsavory ideas. And the fact that, you know, a prominent minority of commenters in his community have

• 26:03Speaker 00

  these unsavory ideas has definitely been used like against him. Um, but anyway, I was supposed to be criticizing the rationalists and not defending them.

• 26:12Chris Williamson?

  I think, I think that's a good, I think that's a good point, that the, the playing field, the gracious playing field, which is given in the, the hope of intellectual purity.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  Is kind of one of the flaws. To take it back a little bit of a step, I've got a suggestion that comes from kind of like the kindergarten kiddies playpen version of the rationalist movement, which is, um, the mental models world, which has been popularized by Shane Parrish from fs.blog. And there's been basically an unlimited number of books about mental models written over the last few years.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:45Chris Williamson?

  And what I think you've done a good job of with the scout mindset is You identify that simply being able to glossary term define a whole bunch of different mental models doesn't really do very much for us at all. The fact that I know that I can define availability bias, or the fundamental attribution error, or survivorship bias, or Occam's razor, or Handland's razor, or whatever. The fact that I can identify all of these different things doesn't really get me all that closer to rationality. It means that post hoc, I can look back and perhaps see what I did wrong. But you have this quote that says, "Our judgment isn't limited as much by knowledge as it is by attitude."

• 27:28Chris Williamson?

  And I think that really hits the nail on the head, that we need to be attitude and action focused. If we are going to aim toward seeing the world more accurately, making more rational decisions, being less self deceptive, it's not something that you can armchair philosophize about. And I think that the rationalist movement, at least the parts of it that I have seen, sometimes attracts people who enjoy the philosophical debate. But when it comes to putting skin in the game and actually making changes, that's perhaps a step a little bit further beyond. It's one that's more difficult to prove on the internet as well. So there is a caveat there.

• 28:10Chris Williamson?

  It's like, I don't know quite how much these people are making changes, but there's certainly people within the

• 28:15Speaker 00

  There's also the selection problem of like, the people you see arguing on the internet about rationality are like, by stipulation, the ones who are less motivated to go out and do things.

• 28:25Chris Williamson?

  Do the proper rational thing. But that's it. Just that, I think, naming, there was a period about sort of three or four years ago where everyone was adamant that simply by knowing all of the different mental models, that they would somehow make it closer to rationality. And they didn't. All that they did was take up mental bandwidth to learning glossary definitions.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's called insight porn sometimes.

• 28:46Chris Williamson?

  Insight porn.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  Insight porn. Insight. Yeah.

• 28:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  I mean, I agree with that as a common pitfall or failure mode of like, the rationalist approach. And I think I fell prey to it too, that I I have a bias in favor of ideas that are intellectually interesting, or I have a bias in favor of supporting causes that are intellectually interesting, or even to be less flattering to myself, not normie. Like, I don't know, some causes-

• 29:19Chris Williamson?

  Signaling, right?

• 29:20Speaker 00

  What?

• 29:20Chris Williamson?

  It's signaling. You get to say, "Look, look at what I know." "Oh, you don't know that? Don't worry. Don't worry. I'll explain it to you. Sit down."

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Right. Like, if it turned out that the results of my mental calculations was that the most important thing to care about was climate change, then in a sense, that would be a bit disappointing, given my personality. Just because everyone cares about climate change. It's not a very cool thing to care about. Like, I want to care about something more esoteric, or obscure, or sophisticated, or something.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  And so, I'm trying to psychoanalyze myself and other people like me here, and I'm just guessing that this is an effect that's working in the back of my mind. And I do try to correct for it when I can. Like, I try to motivate myself to be the kind of person who just really tries to care about whatever happens to be the most important thing. And I like the idea of being that kind of person, hopefully more than I like the idea of being some esoteric, some person with esoteric tastes and interests. So, I'm trying. But I agree that that is a kind of blind spot that I suspect rationalists will all pray to more than the average person does.

• 30:33Chris Williamson?

  I would agree. So, dig into that attitude and knowledge limitation. What sort of attitudes can we have that will foster better self-awareness?

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the first thing is just to actually want to notice yourself being in soldier mindset, to feel good about yourself when you notice, "Oh, I was just being defensive there." Or, "Oh, something I often notice is..." Oh, when I answered that person's objection or that person's question, I didn't actually think about it. I was just like, if I pay attention to the mental motions I was going through, I was just reaching for something I could say that would, that would knock down their objection. I never actually stopped to think about whether they could be right.

• 31:18Chris Williamson?

  So let me interject there. What's a thing that you do to create a breakpoint in that? Have you got a practice that you have?

• 31:26Speaker 00

  In the reflex, like to stop the reflex? Well, part of it is just, you know, simply paying attention to it and building the habit of noticing. But there are, there's some concrete things as well that help. One thing is to step back and remind myself of, this is an example of kind of an honest coping strategy, like a thing, an emotional tool to make yourself more motivated to be in scout mindset instead of soldier mindset, even when the temptation to soldier mindset is there. And a specific thing I often do is just to remind myself that, oh, if I, you know, if I admit that I'm wrong in this argument, that might be uncomfortable now, but the silver lining, the upside is that

• 32:11Speaker 00

  by doing so, I'm going to be building this track record in which I've proven that I'm a, I'm, you know, arguing in good faith and I'm not the kind of person who's just going to stick to what she's saying just for the sake of it, you know, just to, to stick to her guns. And so I'm kind of investing in my future credibility by, you know, if it turns out that I actually was wrong in this argument, then, you know, the, the silver lining to that is that I can build a reputation as someone who's a credible, good faith arguer. And so sometimes just remembering that silver lining, it doesn't necessarily make it fun to notice that I was wrong, but it makes it like tolerable. It makes it just palatable enough that I'm kind of willing to do it.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  So I think that can help, like noticing the silver linings or the upsides to like being wrong or, or to, yeah, changing your mind. And then I also have some tools for this, for the noticing part, like tools to help you notice that you're actually in soldier mindset. There's a whole category of things called thought experiments. Where you, just for example, suppose you're, you find yourself defending a politician on your side who just did something that he's coming under attack for. A thought experiment you could do that would be useful in that situation is to imagine that a politician from the other party had done the exact same thing. What would your reaction have been? Would you feel like defending him too?

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Or would you say like, oh no, that's terrible. That's, you know, he should be just taken out of office or something like that. I just, I call that an example of, or that is an example of what I call the double standard test, where you kind of check to see, am I applying a double standard to people on my side versus someone else? Am I applying a double standard to judging my own actions versus someone else? Am I applying a double standard to claims I want to believe or, you know, that I would apply to claims I don't want to believe? So in situations where I think it's possible I'm in soldier mindset, I will sometimes do a thought experiment like that just to test.

• 34:08Chris Williamson?

  What are the thought experiments do you like?

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Um, well, another one that I use a fair bit is called the outsider test. And the goal there is to check to see if your judgment about what's best to do in a given situation would be different if it wasn't you in the situation. So, uh, an example of some people who aren't me using the outsider test is, comes from Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, who are two founders of Intel. In the eighties, Intel's market share, so they, they made memory chips originally and their market share had been really high, but then started plummeting as Japan found ways to make memory chips much faster and cheaper than Intel. And so everyone was kind of, you know, tearing their hair and like wringing their hands.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  And in his memoir, Andy Grove tells the story of being in his office with Gordon, just going back and forth about what to do. And he asked Gordon, what do you think, like if, if the board kicked us out and got a new CEO and brought him in, he walked into this office, what's the first thing he would do? And Gordon said, oh, he would get us out of the memory chip business. And Andy was like, yeah, he would. So what's stopping us from just walking out the door, coming back in and doing that ourselves? And the answer was nothing, except that they had been so kind of stuck in the status quo that they were used to of like, well, we're a memory chip company. We should always make memory chips. It was kind of their identity, Andy said, and it felt almost like blasphemy

• 35:38Speaker 00

  to consider giving that up. But a new CEO without those attachments would have no such attachment. So just imagining what an outsider would do in that situation, or like what you should, what you think an outsider should do, can often cause you to realize, oh, this is, you know, my judgment was being clouded just by the, by my past attachments. It's almost like, um, I forget who wrote this. Some, some writer had this great metaphor of like, it's like hanging a sign around your neck that says, under new management. And, and just like getting rid of that past baggage, or imagining what it would be like, can, can give you a very different take on a situation. So double standard test, outsider

• 36:21Speaker 00

  test, two examples of thought experiments that can help you, you know, notice and then hopefully compensate for bias in your judgments.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

  That third party perspective is so important. It's like, it's such a scalable cue role for so many of the things that you do, because we're all capable of giving friends amazing bits of advice. You know, we say the thing, the friend that doesn't know what to do in the relationship, and you, you're firm but compassionate with them, and you're understanding, but you're not a total walkover, and you maybe give a few different points of view.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  And then when it comes to your own situations, you just lambast yourself about how short you are with your, your shortcomings are awful, and you're failing at this, and you watch your own blunders from a front row seat, and then give yourself a kick in the ass on the way out of the door. It's, it's such a, and you're like, well, hang on a second. If there's anyone that you should be your best friend to, it should be yourself.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:16Chris Williamson?

  And yet, we find it so hard to treat ourselves like someone that we are responsible for helping, to quote Jordan Peterson. And that third party perspective, to develop that metacognizance, and to step away from the identity, I think is super, super important. You looked at whether self deceived people are happier. What did you find out about that?

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this was a bit of common wisdom that I investigated for my book. I'm sure many of your listeners have seen the articles and books. Saying things like self deception makes you happy, or you know, a little bit of delusion is is good for your mental health, or things like that. There have been a lot of articles and books like this in the last 15 years or so. And so I looked into the research that these articles and books were citing and was kind of appalled at how bad it was. So I'll just, I'll give you one example. Here's a, a scale measuring self deception. So it's

• 38:17Speaker 00

  like a me, a measure of how self deceived a person is. And the way the researchers measured this was to ask people questions like, do you ever get angry on a scale from, and they ask you to answer from one, never, to seven, all the time. And if you, and their rule was if anyone gives a one or a two, then they're a self deceiver. So in that example, you might think, yeah, okay. Well, I mean, everyone gets angry. So anyone who says they never or rarely get angry must be lying to themselves, right? Well, I mean, maybe. I, I know some people very well who, you know, they've been my friends for years, and they get angry like, once a year.

• 38:58Chris Williamson?

  I think that's me. I would be in that category.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Right. And so maybe it's not that common, but there's definitely people who rarely get angry. And so they would honestly answer like, two out of seven, and then they would be classified as self deceivers. And then the questions get weirder from there. So another question is, are you attracted to members of your same sex ever? Like, do you ever find someone of your same sex attractive? And if you answer one or two, like never or rarely, then you're classified as a self deceiver. So the researchers-

• 39:26Chris Williamson?

  Because everybody's a bit gay. Everyone's a little bit gay.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  You're lying to yourself.

• 39:31Chris Williamson?

  Are we sure that the, are we sure that the researchers didn't have a, was this for the gay times? Was this for the gay time?

• 39:38Speaker 00

  Oh, the gay times. This is like, these are respected researchers whose work has been cited in like, very bestselling books, and in very popular podcasts, and I won't name names, but-

• 39:51Chris Williamson?

  This sounds like a bad high school problem, doesn't it?

• 39:54Speaker 00

  And then I'll just give you one more question, since I, I can't get enough of how dumb this study is. Another question was- Do you ever fantasize about raping or being raped? And if you say one or two, like I, you never or rarely, you are a self deceiver. Which I don't think that this research tells us very much about self deception. Although it does perhaps tell us a little bit about the psychology of the researchers themselves.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  So, yeah. And you know, that's one particular metric that was just used in some studies and not all of them. But, but most of the studies I found investigating this question of like self deception. You know, or finding that self deception makes you happier. Most of those studies had some equivalent problem in the study design or how they were measuring self deception. And so I ended up just feeling like, well, okay, maybe self deception can make you happier. That might be true sometimes, but I don't believe that because of the research. The research itself is.

• 40:53Chris Williamson?

  So inconclusive.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  And I mean, I have other reasons for thinking self deception may or may not make you happy, but, but not research.

• 41:01Chris Williamson?

  What's your, what's, what's your outcome from your own ideas?

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Oh, I think, you know, just based on being a human in the world and like observing things and experiencing things. I think self deception can make you happier in the short term. I think it's much less clear whether it makes you happy in the long term. And I, my guess is that just cultivating the ability to look at things realistically and, and cope with reality is probably a better strategy for happiness in the long term. But at least in the short term, I think, yeah, it's pretty clear that it can make you happy to, you know, convince yourself that you weren't at fault or that, you know, your mistakes aren't, uh, aren't really that bad. Or, you know, everyone loves you, like, of course, yeah, that can make you happy in the short term.

• 41:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that learning to be wrong is a skill then that we need to acquire in a way?

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, in many ways. I mean, it's, um, it's partly an emotional skill. Um, as I was kind of talking about throughout this conversation. It involves emotional tools like recognizing the positive, the upside of, of admitting you were wrong. It's also a.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  It involves kind of a different frame, like a frame shift in the way you think about being wrong. So, you know, I kind of alluded to one of the aspects of being a scout is acknowledging uncertainty and never being 100% certain of your beliefs, always having, you know, your confidence level somewhere on a scale from zero to 100, shades of gray and not black and white. And so that's kind of a different way of thinking about things. It's a cognitive shift or frame shift. And one nice thing about that, I find, is that it can make it easier to acknowledge evidence against your views because doing that doesn't mean giving up a belief entirely. It just means a kind of incremental downgrade in

• 42:53Speaker 00

  your confidence level. So if you, you know, start out being 85% confident that, I don't know, that a paleo diet is, is the healthiest diet someone can have, and then you read a new study suggesting that, oh, actually, like, researchers didn't find any benefit to the paleo diet over whatever, traditional low calorie diet or something. Reading that study doesn't have to immediately undermine everything you believe. It just means maybe you should downgrade your confidence from 85 to 65 or 70 or something. And then as you, as you read more and experience more and, you know, maybe there's a follow up to the study, maybe your confidence level will go back up or maybe it will go down even more. But either way, each, each time, the, the update that you have to make to your map of reality is kind of gradual and incremental. And so I think that's like

• 43:38Speaker 00

  an underappreciated benefit of recognizing uncertainty in the world, is that it makes the adjustments you have to, you have to do, kind of emotionally easier. So there's a number of things like that, that are just like differences in the way you see the world that can make changing your mind easier.

• 43:55Chris Williamson?

  We see being right or wrong as binary, right? We think, okay, it's either, it's either that it's my, my proposal, my thesis, or something else, and that's it. It's interesting that you talk about confidence intervals because Scott Alexander, every year makes his predictions for the end of the year, right?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:12Chris Williamson?

  I'm 75% likely, there's a 75% likelihood that my bedroom will be painted yellow and this and this and this, redacted. I, I accidentally listened to that on the Slate Star Codex podcast, which was the worst thing to listen to it on because it's just somebody reading off statistics.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 44:31Chris Williamson?

  It's a 15 minute, it's a 15 minute bar chart graph. Like thing that he was reading through.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  At least they didn't try to narrate the graph that he drew of his calibration. And then there's a data point.

• 44:44Chris Williamson?

  No, no, he does. He tries to, but it's anyway. Yeah, it's slightly ugly. But yeah, I like thinking about things in terms of that. You also talk about beliefs and identities. And I suppose that this adds sort of a psychological layer on top of this. The fact that you can wrap the person that you believe that you are around being right or another group being wrong so tightly that this further creates more self deception or more murky waters to see rationality through.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Right, in that noticing that you were wrong about some, you know, maybe random political or ideological intellectual issue can be a blow to your identity just because you pride yourself on being the kind of person who's always right. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah, I think it's very important to kind of tie your identity not to having the right beliefs, because then you're never allowed to change the beliefs. But instead tie your identity to taking the right actions. And by the right actions, I mean things that actually help you improve over time or help you make your map of the world more accurate over time. And so, you know, I would put things in that category like being able to say that you

• 46:03Speaker 00

  were wrong or being able to understand the views of people who disagree with you, like being able to accurately represent the opposing perspective, you know, fairly and charitably enough that people on the other side go, yes, thank you, that is what we believe, as opposed to a straw man of the other side. And so I think if you pride yourself on being able to do things like that, to change your mind and understand opposing views, then over time, you're incentivizing yourself to do the things that make you stronger and more accurate over the long term, as opposed to priding yourself on holding a particular view that you then can't let go of.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  It's inevitable that you're going to have to loosen your grip on your identity if you are constantly seeking out counterpoints to your position, right? You can't be a good faith actor intellectually in any kind of discourse and steel man somebody else's position properly without thinking, well, this, this actually does mean that I need to let go of the identity that I have that's wrapped around my particular ideology or my particular viewpoint a little bit. It has to. And I think, um, thinking about it from a competitive advantage standpoint, there are so many ideologically bound bad

• 47:17Chris Williamson?

  actors that are just sort of dogmatic, single track thinkers now, especially in 2021 with social media and sort of extremism out to both sides, et cetera.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Now more than ever.

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. You can stand out from the crowd by being radically reasonable, far more reasonable, far more easily than you can by trying to be an extremist.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  Like this is the, the

• 47:42Speaker 00

  I think it's an underrated niche, honestly.

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  Honestly, an extreme centrist is a really radical position to hold now, surprisingly. I did this video about Sam Harris a few months ago where I said that, um, what you do by holding a nuanced viewpoint that is non-typical and also somewhere in the middle, you're paying a high cost because you guarantee disagreement from both sides. By being in the middle, you guarantee disagreement from both. At least when you're out on one extreme, you know that you're going to be agreed with by that group, right?

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Right, right, right.

• 48:15Chris Williamson?

  So what it is, it's a hard to fake signal of intellectual honesty because you need to pay a very high price to be in that middle. And what are you signaling? I am the sort of person who has thoroughly thought through his ideas. I am the sort of person who's prepared to take slack, uh, flak from both sides, simply because I want to be right here, even though it would be easier for me to be out towards the edges. And, um, if people want to separate themselves out from the pack, I think that's quite, again, you can gamify the system and you can purposefully choose to have a nuanced viewpoint and always talk about how you, oh, it's always a both, both sides thing, mate. Um, but overall, I think, yeah, sitting in the middle makes a lot of sense.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I, I think, uh, that's, that's very well put. And I think, um, you know, You're never going to appeal to everyone. And so, you know, you just have to decide like, what kind of audience am I optimizing for impressing and winning the respect of? And, you know, you could optimize for winning the respect of the audience that just like passionately believes one thing and they just want to hear you say that and reaffirm it. Um, that's like a choice you could make. Um, but you could also optimize for winning the respect of the audience that is like more discerning and cares a little bit more about what's actually true and is more, uh, more interested in hearing challenges to the things that they believe. Um, and, you know, it's not a tiny fraction.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  Like it's a minority of the overall population, but I don't think it's a small minority. Um, and this, I think this nuance like tends to get washed out sometimes when people say things like, "Oh, no one wants nuance or no one wants to hear uncertainty." No, actually a lot of people do. Um, not like 90%, but like a lot of people. And in my experience, the subsection of the population that appreciates the nuance and the, and the, you know, challenge to their views is kind of a cooler subset than most of the other subsets.

• 50:16Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I agree completely.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is something that I was, uh, on my podcast a few months ago, I was talking to Vitalik Buterin. He's a co-founder of Ethereum. And he, he's someone I reached out to. I've been following for years and, um, and always admired his kind of intellectual honesty and his commitment to talking about things that he now thinks he was wrong about with respect to Ethereum. Or, you know, acknowledging the downsides of the plan, the direction that he's chosen. Um, and saying, you know, "This is what I think is best overall, but I agree it has some downsides." Or, you know, yeah, acknowledging, acknowledging his uncertainty about different aspects of the future of the currency. And so I asked him like, "Has that had downsides for you?" Like that intellectual honesty? And he said, "Well, you know, in some ways, yes."

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Like sometimes journalists will, will take a quote out of context to make it sound like I'm, you know, not, "I have no faith in Ethereum" or something like that. "But it's a conscious strategy I've chosen," he said. "Because the kind of people who, who like that intellectual honesty are the kind of people who I think are going to make Ethereum a stronger community, the kind of people I like and whose respect I care about. And I think they just, yeah, make for a stronger community, building what I want to build." And so that's kind of how I feel too. Um, that I, I just, that's the kind of people I want to optimize for, even if they're not a majority.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  If it's good enough for the guy that founded Ethereum, I think it's good enough for the rest of us. Julia Galef, ladies and gentlemen, the scout mindset will be linked in the show notes below why some people see things clearly and others don't. If people want to check out more of your stuff, where should they go?

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Well, my website's julia-galif.com and you can also follow me on Twitter. I'm just Julia Galef. I'm the only Julia Galef in the world, so I'm not hard to find. And you can, you can join the, you know, I like to talk about these ideas on Twitter and especially kind of hash out some of the, the ideas around the edges that I'm less confident about or, you know, think I might be wrong about. And so, you know, come join the fun.

• 52:11Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Thank you, Julia.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Thank you, Chris. This was so much fun.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company for me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering the tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death. That's what?

• 52:36Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 52:39Chris Williamson?

  I'm not the first then.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.