![]() But being able to identify when we’re believing in and defending things that just aren’t true means we can find the truth and confront it no matter how uncomfortable it may be. Wishful thinking is as much a part of human nature as loving and wanting to be loved. How often have you caught yourself defending something you wanted so badly to believe was true, only to discover that reality painted a far less flattering truth than that desired belief? We’ve all been there. Like this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! How your brain matches arguments you misunderstand with ones you’ve already decided you don’t agree with - and what to do about it.The best ways to manage and respond to uncertainty.How to tell if you’re making reasonable mistakes or foolhardy leaps of faith that carry consequences far outweighing the value of the lesson.The difference between having a soldier mindset that defends whatever you want to be true, and a scout mindset that’s motivated to seek out the truth regardless of how unpleasant it might be (and which you should try to cultivate).How to spot bad arguments and faulty thinking - even when the source is you.Within a few years, he had figured out the beginnings of a compelling answer.Julia Galef ( is the host of the Rationally Speaking podcast, co-founder of The Center for Applied Rationality, and author of The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. How could it possibly be consistent with natural selection? Therefore, even though the peacock’s tail made him anxious, Darwin couldn’t stop puzzling over it. whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. He followed what he called a “golden rule” to fight against motivated reasoning: Ever since he could remember, he had been driven to make sense of the world around him. Nevertheless, Darwin felt that he made up for those shortcomings with a crucial strength: his urge to figure out how reality worked. His memory was poor, and he couldn’t follow long mathematical arguments. “Darwin didn’t consider himself a quick or highly analytical thinker. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't If you find out you were wrong about something, great-you’ve improved your map, and that can only help you.” In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs. ![]() And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. Of course, all maps are imperfect simplifications of reality, as a scout well knows. Being in scout mindset means wanting your “map”-your perception of yourself and the world-to be as accurate as possible. But above all, he wants to learn what’s really there, not fool himself into drawing a bridge on his map where there isn’t one in real life. ![]() A scout might hope to learn that the path is safe, that the other side is weak, or that there’s a bridge conveniently located where his forces need to cross the river.
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