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Julia Galef on Scout Mindset (Episode 36)
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In this conversation, Michael speaks with Julia Galef, author of The Scout Mindset.
Julia is a modern advocate for what the Stoics argued: improving our reason and learning to pursue the truth. Michael and Julia discuss her arguments for the scout mindset as compared to the soldier mindset.
(01:28) Scout Mindset
(10:25) The Case For Scout Mindset
(21:50) Sophism
(28:37) True vs Fake Scout Mindset
(38:06) Choosing Reasoning Processes
(41:15) Epistemology
(46:36) What Does This Mean For The Good Life?
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Transcript
Recognizing Past Mistakes
00:00:00
Speaker
I think it really helps to look ahead towards the future and focus on how much stronger and smarter and better able to navigate the world you're going to be if you're able to notice and acknowledge the things that you were wrong about
Introduction to Stoicism Podcast
00:00:14
Speaker
in the past.
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an expert.
Julia Galef and Rational Thinking
00:00:32
Speaker
And in this conversation, Michael speaks with Julia Galef.
00:00:40
Speaker
This conversation is with Julia Galif, host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast and author of The Scout Mindset. Julia is a specialist in rational thinking and helping people to remove biases, lean into uncertainty, and see the world as it is, not as we want it to be.
Scout vs. Soldier Mindset
00:00:57
Speaker
In this conversation, we discuss Julia's arguments for the Scout Mindset as compared to the Soldier Mindset. The Scout Mindset is one where we use reason to map the world and see it as it is.
00:01:09
Speaker
The soldier mindset is one where we use reason to defend positions, which make us feel good and disprove positions that make us uncomfortable. Julia is a modern advocate for what the Stoics argued that we should improve our reason and learn to pursue the truth. So hi, Julia. Thanks so much for coming on. Hey, Michael, great to be here.
00:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate it. So what I wanted to talk about today is primarily your new book and this kind of project around the scout mindset. So briefly for those that don't know, could you talk about what the scout mindset is and how it differs from the soldier mindset?
Defense Mechanisms of Soldier Mindset
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah, so the soldier and scout mindsets are my kind of metaphors for these two different ways of thinking, two different motivations that guide the way we think and how we evaluate arguments and evidence and the conclusions that we form. And so I'll start with soldier mindset. In soldier mindset, our goal, well, our unconscious goal, we're mostly not aware that we're doing this kind of in the background of our minds.
00:02:06
Speaker
But in Soldier Mindset, our goal is to defend some pre-existing belief or defend some belief that we want to hold against any evidence that might threaten it. And so in Soldier Mindset, we're motivated to shoot down opposing arguments or poke holes in or find weaknesses, weak spots in opposing positions and seek out any evidence that might help bolster or buttress our own position.
00:02:33
Speaker
And you'll notice I'm using a lot of kind of militaristic words here to describe this reasoning process, which is why I called it soldier mindset.
Benefits of Scout Mindset
00:02:40
Speaker
The more official term for it in cognitive science is directionally motivated reasoning, reasoning that's kind of intended to reach some predetermined conclusion. And my favorite summary of how this tends to work in practice is that
00:02:52
Speaker
in soldier mindset or when we're engaging in directionally motivated reasoning, we evaluate things that we want to believe through the lens of, can I accept this? So we're looking for any excuse to accept or believe it. Whereas when we're evaluating something we don't want to believe, we're instead looking at it through the lens of, must I believe this? So instead we're searching for any excuse to dismiss it or reject it.
00:03:17
Speaker
So that's soldier mindset. And there's been a lot of books written about soldier mindset and our bias brains and how irrational we are, et cetera, our, you know, tribal or politically motivated reasoning. But instead my book focuses on this alternative to soldier mindset that I call scout mindset. And in scout mindset.
00:03:34
Speaker
The scout, unlike the soldier, is not going out to attack and defend things. The scout's role is to go out and survey the landscape, survey the situation, see things as clearly as possible, and just form as accurate a map of a situation or an issue as possible, including all of the uncertainties. The scout, figuratively speaking, draws their map in pencil, not in pen. The idea is always that you're hoping to learn more that might help you make your map more accurate.
00:04:03
Speaker
learning that some belief you previously held is wrong is not a failure or defeat. It's a good thing you're making your map more accurate. And so the more official term for scout mindset would be accuracy motivated reasoning, reasoning that's motivated by a desire for an accurate view of some issue. And it's more colloquially just being motivated to see things as they really are, not as you wish they were, and trying to be as objective and fair minded as possible and just curious about what's actually true.
Long-term Life Building with Scout Mindset
00:04:32
Speaker
Great. That was really succinct. I want to head to the, this kind of positive project of the scout mindset, but I want to sit in the, in the soldier mindset a little bit longer because I think it's, it's helpful for people to frame, especially if they haven't thought about it in these two ways before. So one thing that I thought was interesting was this idea of this kind of varying bars of acceptance or varying kind of standards by which you accept something. So if you're resistant to something, there's this really high standard of proof. And then if you're, if you want something, there's like a.
00:05:00
Speaker
really high standard to disprove it. I thought that was very interesting. Another thing that you mentioned was that we're trying to defend something. So there's this militaristic metaphor. I think often in stoicism or often just in general, we think of that thing as the ego sometimes is one of those things you might defend. And I know you talk in the book about identity
00:05:19
Speaker
and kind of reshaping your relationship with identity.
Identity and Soldier Mindset
00:05:22
Speaker
I guess if you could speak a bit more about what people are trying to defend and if you think identity is one of the biggest parts of that and they employ a soldier mindset.
00:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, so there are a lot of reasons why we so often default to soldier mindset. And I should just clarify right now before we go any further that it's not like some people are soldiers and some people are scouts. It's a spectrum and we're all sometimes in soldier mindset and sometimes in scout mindset. And we might shift between the two mindsets depending on what topic we're thinking about or our mood or who we're talking to. Maybe there are some people who
00:05:58
Speaker
tend to put you more in soldier mindset than other people. But that said, I think some people are in general better at being in scout mindset in situations or about topics where other people tend to default to soldier mindset. So to go back to your question, what are we trying to defend when we're in soldier mindset? I like to group
00:06:19
Speaker
our goals or the purposes of soldier mindset into two categories. I call it looking good and feeling good. So feeling good would include things like using soldier mindset to reassure ourselves that no, we didn't do anything wrong or we're the victim here, not the perpetrator or things are going to work out okay or whatever. There's a lot of narratives, different narratives that we might really want to believe because they make us feel better about ourselves or our lives.
00:06:46
Speaker
Feeling good would also include things like motivating ourselves to take risks or try hard things like starting a company, something like that. We might be motivated to convince ourselves that we're definitely going to succeed as long as we try hard. Even though in reality, there's a lot of uncertainty and you know, we can't actually guarantee that no matter how smart or how hardworking you are.
Accurate Maps for Life Navigation
00:07:06
Speaker
And then to go to the other side of the equation, the looking good side, we're often motivated to hold certain beliefs because they help us give off a certain image to the people around us. So there are beliefs like my company is definitely going to succeed, which not only can make us feel good and motivated, but also help us
00:07:26
Speaker
give off this air of confidence and success and charisma to people around us. If we seem really confident in our project's success, then that might help make other people confident that we're going to succeed too and be more willing to follow us and invest in us. And then another example of a motivation to believe things in order to look good is there are a lot of beliefs that seem really important to hold in order to fit into your social, your peer group or your
00:07:54
Speaker
family or your workplace or your country. And this often includes political beliefs. Like if you held a completely contrarian view of climate change or of gender relations or religion, that could be a problem for you in terms of acceptance in your social group. And so on some level, we're very aware of this when we're evaluating evidence and we kind of know that, oh, if I get the, you know, if I conclude the opposite on this issue,
00:08:21
Speaker
then people might hate me. And so that's another very strong motivation to believe certain things, regardless of the evidence. So identity, you brought up identity, and this is also a central theme of my book.
00:08:37
Speaker
identity kind of falls in both categories. So we might feel really good about ourselves if we hold certain beliefs. So like, this may not be representative for your typical audience member, but I have a lot of friends in the tech world and I perceive
00:08:56
Speaker
that a lot of people like being the kind of person who's really optimistic about tech or the future. Kind of irrespective of the evidence about a particular technology, they seem to me to get a lot of positive emotional rewards out of
00:09:13
Speaker
feeling good about the future and just being the kind of person who's optimistic. The way people talk about optimism is as a virtue. It makes you a good person to be optimistic about the future. Also, it's going to make other people around you like you more. People like optimists, especially in the tech world, maybe not so much in other circles.
Balancing Scout and Soldier Mindsets
00:09:33
Speaker
It's very context dependent. In some circles, being pessimistic makes you seem wise and sophisticated.
00:09:40
Speaker
And, you know, other people are going to like you more because of that. So it depends on your context, but your identity can be, can work, I think, on both sides of the equation, the looking good and feeling good sides. For my context, I spend a lot of time in the sport world and the particularly the martial arts world and the MMA and spaces like this. And there is such a, you know, this kind of virtue to optimism is something you absolutely see in sport, right? And there's this kind of idea that
00:10:08
Speaker
not only, you know, that you will perform better if you just have this kind of irrational positive self belief, you know, and that is kind of this, this, this like talent to cultivate and the people that have it are just better than the people that don't.
00:10:22
Speaker
Right. You see that in entrepreneurial advice too. Oh, yeah. And then there's a lot of crossover in those spaces. I bet. Yeah. Which is obviously great until it isn't, right? Those things. But one way to look at it, I guess you talked a bit about the positives to the soldier mindset. Like, look, sometimes when you employ this, you can feel good and you can look good. And that does function in certain cases. But what would be then the positive case for switching to the scout mindset then?
00:10:51
Speaker
So the point of having an accurate map of a situation or reality is to help you navigate the world better. The Scout doesn't want an accurate map just because an accurate map is inherently valuable in its own right. No, you want to know, is there a bridge crossing the river where I want to cross? And you want to know that because you want to get across the river. And it might make you feel good to draw a bridge on your map where there isn't one in reality.
00:11:21
Speaker
you know, when you get to the river and there's no bridge there, you're going to be up a creek, so to speak. So to pop out of the metaphor for a moment, the ultimate goal of having an accurate map of reality, generally speaking, and that could be an accurate
00:11:36
Speaker
map of yourself, your own strengths and weaknesses, and what makes you happy, what you're good at, what things you can improve on with work, and what things you can't really improve on with work. Also an accurate map of how the world works. What kinds of traits do people tend to reward in business or in romantic partners? How can you effectively get ahead? How much risk can you afford to take?
00:11:58
Speaker
in different parts of your life, like your health or your career, these are all, they're very complicated questions and there's no one clear objective right answer to them, but you can be
00:12:11
Speaker
You can be more or less honest with yourself in your attempts to see those questions clearly. And the more accurate you are in your perception of yourself and the world and the better your chances of making choices that help you get where you want to go and help you have the life you want to lead and cause the change you want to cause in the world.
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah, so I don't want to, I don't want to simplify it to just one point, but I think you mentioned this in the book. There's this kind of, with the soldier mindset, there's this overemphasis on the present, right? It's like, I'm going to feel good now. I'm going to look good now. And the scout mindset is kind of this, this, perhaps this long-term project.
00:12:47
Speaker
of, you know, building the kind of life you want. Maybe when you look at like, you know, entering that, that meeting or that job interview, there, there's some space for like looking good and feeling good. And you can see this kind of short-term value, but if you get caught up in that, it limits your capacity to, to kind of build over time the kind of life you want for yourself, because you're not aware of your weaknesses as an employee, or you're not aware of your strengths, things like this. Is that part of it?
00:13:13
Speaker
Yeah, so a kind of central argument that I make in the book that I think a lot of people missed, and maybe I should have tried to make, to underline more in the way I wrote the book. So I
Present Bias in Decision-Making
00:13:24
Speaker
can't claim that Scout Mindset is always better for you than Soldier Mindset. I just don't see how we could possibly know that. That's a very complicated empirical question. Anyone who tells you that Scout Mindset is always better for you than Soldier Mindset, I think is
00:13:40
Speaker
is kind of full of it because we can't know that. But what I do think we can be confident of and what I do argue in the book is that on the margin, we would be better off shifting towards scout mindset and away from soldier mindset. So we'd be better off with more scout mindset relative to our default setting, so to speak. And the phenomenon you brought up
00:14:02
Speaker
of how we overvalue these immediate rewards is one big reason why I think we tend to overvalue soldier mindset relative to scout mindset. So I'm sure people are very familiar, maybe all too familiar with this phenomenon, this property of our psychology where we
00:14:19
Speaker
tend to overvalue immediate rewards over longer term rewards. For example, you might value being healthy and fit or slim or whatever more than you value eating a cupcake. But the cupcake you get right now and the healthy and fit and slim, et cetera, you don't get that until the future. And so even if in theory you value being healthy and fit more, you still often reach for the cupcake because you get it right now. So that's just a very common
00:14:47
Speaker
a recognizable example of this ubiquitous phenomenon that psychologists call present bias. What I wanted to point out in the book is something I think is a really underappreciated feature of present bias, which is that it doesn't just affect the choices we make about how to behave. It also affects the choices we make unconsciously about what to believe. So some beliefs are just more immediately rewarding than other beliefs. So the belief that, you know, I didn't do anything wrong and that screw up at work wasn't actually my fault.
00:15:17
Speaker
That gives you instant reassurance. Whereas the belief that, yeah, actually I did do something wrong and I'm going to have to fix my process so this doesn't happen again. That does not give you immediate rewards. That gives you kind of an immediate punishment, emotionally speaking. But it's the kind of thing that gives you the long-term benefit of getting better at avoiding these mistakes and fixing your process in the future.
00:15:40
Speaker
I'm kind of pointing at this parallel between, on the one hand, Scout and Soldier mindset and the kind of asymmetry of
00:15:48
Speaker
when you get the rewards of each one, on the one hand. And this very familiar phenomenon of present bias where we tend to reach for the cupcake or procrastinate, even though on some level we know that it's bad for our long-term goals. And so the fact that we know we have this bias towards present rewards or immediate rewards, even at the expense of our overall happiness, is I think one reason we should expect that
00:16:13
Speaker
By default, we're reaching for soldier mindset more often than we should just for our own happiness and success. Or like, for the purpose of our happiness and success, we are overvaluing soldier mindset relative to scout mindset.
00:16:27
Speaker
Yeah, great. I think that's like more of a subtle point and because it can be nice to go into this kind of black and white about B Scout all the time. I think you're making a more subtle point, which is less simple, but probably more likely to be accurate, which which is great. I did try. Yeah, like it really it annoyed me when I would read other.
00:16:45
Speaker
kind of proponents of something like Scout Mindset, like Bertrand Russell. He wrote this book, maybe some of your audience have read it. I'm now forgetting which book it was, but he's talking about self-deception and he says, self-deception is never a good idea. It is always better to see things clearly and learn to deal with them. And I read that and I'm like, how do
00:17:03
Speaker
You know, like, doesn't this just depend on a lot of factors? Like, doesn't it depend on how painful the truth is and how much opportunity you have to act on the truth and how possible it is to make yourself feel better about the truth? And there's all these parameters that their values could be such that you're not better off. So my claim is, yeah, it's the more subtle one that on average you should expect to be better off with more scout mindset and less soldier mindset.
00:17:30
Speaker
Yeah, this is great. There's a couple of directions I want to go with this. Another thing I want to say is this kind of stuff just pumps me up. I think this is just, this is just exciting. I use a lot of physical metaphors in my own thinking, but you know, we spend so much time worrying about like weightlifting, our physical techniques, or what's the right combination or our diet. And so little time thinking about.
00:17:51
Speaker
You know, the way that we reason and then, and as you, as you highlighted, rather than the biases or the mistakes that are kind of interesting to reflect upon these kind of this active positive picture of how we, what we should be moving towards. And I think it's a really inspiring productive project.
00:18:07
Speaker
In terms of that, I was thinking, A, in political philosophy, there's this distinction between kind of ideal theory and then kind of practical theory, right? And you can have this kind of ideal theory about, you know, if everybody was perfect, this is how the state should be set up. And you can think of that maybe at scout mindset about like, you know, if everything was perfect, everybody should think scout all the time, but clearly not everybody's perfect. So there's this room for this ambiguity in this movement. I think that makes a lot of sense.
00:18:31
Speaker
Another thing I think about, you know, for example, if you're in a terrible environment and you're kind of a child and you need to kind of adopt a perspective that allows you to survive and navigate that environment to survive. And you might need to take on a soldier mindset until you have kind of the health and stability to move towards kind of a scout perspective.
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah, someone, another interviewer was pressing me for cases where a soldier mindset might be better. And the example he gave was, well, what if you're on your deathbed and you could, you're confronted with evidence that your whole life was a lie. Should you accept the truth or should you continue to be deceived? And I was like, well, I don't know, maybe you're better off.
Contextual Selection of Mindsets
00:19:11
Speaker
The problem though, and sorry to derail you, I know you were going to ask a question, but the problem is you can't actually pick and choose like, okay, in this situation, I'm going to deceive myself. And on that other topic, I'm going to know the truth. If you were able to think about it that consciously, it wouldn't be self-deception anymore. And so I do think there is a case for just cultivating the general habit of scout mindset.
00:19:34
Speaker
because you can't choose. My guess, although I don't think I can prove this, is that you're better off having this general habit of scout mindset rather than not having it and allowing your unconscious to make the decisions about when you deceive yourself or not.
00:19:49
Speaker
I think that's a really great point and something I didn't think about, you know, if these were tools you could put down and pick up to, you know, continuing these metaphors. Right. Which is how people tend to talk about them, but that's not how it works. They're not right. Yeah, exactly. They're like, again, using an athletic metaphor, your body is now built for it to deadlift a lot, or now your body is built to run marathons. And you can like, once you build your body to function a certain way, it's going to have difficulty doing the other one. This is, this is the picture you're providing that we should all. Right.
00:20:17
Speaker
get a little bit better at running or whatever the metaphor is. I'll leave the sports and athletics as the metaphors to you. That is not my strong suit. I can see that clearly. It's helpful for me.
00:20:29
Speaker
And then another thing I was thinking, I mean, I don't, I want to move on. I don't want to get too much into this. When do you soldier? What do you scout? Cause I think there's other interesting things to talk about, but another thing I see in teams is then because it's difficult to do both, you then get specialization, right? And I think about like an athlete and a coach and the coach's role is to be the scout, you know, and then the athlete's role is to be the soldier and just to have unreflective self belief in their excellence. And then.
00:20:56
Speaker
somebody else is able to identify because the athlete isn't able to do both because they can't do both successfully. They adopt the soldier. And then the scout is, I mean, it's not perhaps a counter example. I think the point about generally as a society, we should move towards scout is totally correct. But I think that's kind of an interesting, once we recognize these as, as, as ways of thinking and applying, we can see how people can combine them to achieve kind of goals and teams.
00:21:22
Speaker
Yeah, and if you had someone in your life, like a coach, just for your life in general, who you knew was very smart and had your best interests at heart and was very clear-eyed and scout-like, and you could just completely delegate all the decision-making to them, then maybe you should be a soldier. I just don't think the situation really exists. Like, you have to be scout-like enough to figure out whether your coach is actually trustworthy and whether you should be deferring to him. Totally.
Socratic Truth and Social Risks
00:21:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. So bringing this a bit into the ancient philosophy stuff, if you bear with me on that end, I was thinking about this, this ancient Greek division between Sophism and kind of Plato and Socrates, right? Are you familiar with that at all? Sophism, not in terms of a division between Plato and Socrates.
00:22:08
Speaker
Okay, great. So Sophism was this ancient school and their intention was to kind of use words to achieve goals, right? So they would be hired by the politicians and they would write speeches and they would attempt to persuade like sophistry. Exactly. Right. They were, they were really valued in their capacity to achieve something.
00:22:27
Speaker
And Plato's position was like, this is the worst thing because now you're using words instrumentally instead of using words and thinking to find the truth, right? To kind of achieve this end. So I see this kind of division already taking place in ancient Greece.
00:22:42
Speaker
But I guess the direction I was interested in going with it was that Socrates, who represents the pursuit of truth, the love of knowledge, and he's fighting against the sophist, Socrates was hated and he was killed. People didn't like it. You take on the soldier mindset to feel good and to look good, and somebody goes around and makes you feel bad and look bad.
00:23:03
Speaker
So I guess this is probably close to your heart. How do you achieve the project of promoting the Scout mindset excessively and in a way that, you know, is comfortable for people and is actually helpful rather than just upsetting people? So the first thing I'll say is that there's a distinction between trying to see things clearly in the privacy of your own mind on the one hand and on the other hand,
00:23:26
Speaker
blurting out the truth and confronting everyone with what you think that they're wrong about. And so in theory, you could be a perfect scout and try to view every single political and controversial issue as clearly as possible, including coming to a contrarian conclusion on a lot of things where you disagree with the people around you. In theory, you could do that perfectly in the privacy of your own mind and then lie to everyone and claim to believe something you don't actually believe. I think in practice, we don't see that that much.
00:23:56
Speaker
There is a correlation between people who are trying to be good scouts in the privacy of their own mind and how they express themselves to other people and that scouts do tend to be more honest or do tend to be willing to disagree with the consensus more than soldiers to simplify. I just want to point out that that's not a necessary logical connection. That's just in practice, there tends to be a correlation.
00:24:21
Speaker
Part of being a successful scout in the world is having more kind of social and emotional awareness and savvy and knowing how to be diplomatic and knowing which battles to pick and which to, you know, avoid. Understanding that you don't have to get into an argument with everyone who you think is wrong about something.
00:24:45
Speaker
And also, this is something that I actively try to do a lot in my public conversations with people, trying to go out of your way to show agreeableness while still disagreeing with people.
00:24:59
Speaker
If it does seem worth it to me to be in a conversation where I'm going to push back against someone, which is not all the time, but sometimes, I will go out of my way to kind of try to signal to them that I'm not just trying to take them down. I'm not disagreeing with them just to disagree or just to be a troll. And there are a lot of ways to do that. One is just to go out and bend over backwards to not
00:25:21
Speaker
be a jerk in the way you phrase things. And it's hard, you know, when you think someone is wrong about something important, the impulse is usually to phrase your disagreement in a really irritated way. So I try really hard not to do that. I bend over backward to look for charitable interpretations of what they're saying instead of reaching for the uncharitable one. So I might ask, like, I'm not sure I agree. Do you mean XYZ? Maybe they don't, and they'll tell me if they don't. But at least I've tried to look for
00:25:49
Speaker
a charitable interpretation of what they said. And I go out of my way to agree with things that I can agree with, honestly, while still saying, you know, I still don't quite buy whatever their main argument is. So anyway, I think there's a lot of that that you can do to disagree with people without coming off as, without them trying to force-feed you hemlock, basically.
00:26:12
Speaker
And that just seems very reasonable. And I think I had quite taken, which is that part of the scale mindset is to kind of understand, you know, the context, when it's appropriate to bring these things up and when they're productive and when they're not. Not just this kind of pool hardy pursuit of truth at the expense of, you know, other people, you know, being unproductive in that goal because you're, you're alienating people. Right.
00:26:34
Speaker
I know in my own experience as a philosophy student, when I learned logic, when I took a logic course, I actually was able to have better conversations with people for the exact reasons you were mentioning, which is like, here are your premises. And as I understand them, like your chair of the reconstructing, then you're like, I agree with these three. We only disagree on this fourth one. And that kind of common ground has been really effective. So I agree with, with the strategies you were describing being very helpful.
00:27:01
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't want to oversell this like it is still unavoidably true that if you there are many people in the world who if you don't
00:27:09
Speaker
wholeheartedly agree with them about everything. They're going to be annoyed at you and not want to be friends with you or whatever. So that is, I'm not saying there's no cost to stepping out of line to breaking with the consensus on really heated or ideological topics. There can be a cost.
Authentic Scout Mindset Exploration
00:27:25
Speaker
I just think that we tend to overestimate how big or bad that cost is. And we tend to underestimate the benefits of being able to
00:27:34
Speaker
step outside the consensus and notice where you disagree. And one of those benefits, honestly, is I think there are a lot of people who would just be happier if they allowed themselves to notice that they disagree with the core beliefs of their, you know, the social circle where they grew up or the peer group they happened to fall into, noticing that they disagree and they don't share those same values about, you know, religion or gender roles or politics and finding a different
00:28:02
Speaker
group of close friends. Again, this takes some time. This is not a short-term approach. But in order to find a group of, like a peer group, social group, or a friend group that you really vibe with better, you have to first be able to notice that you don't vibe with your current group. And I think a lot of people don't take that first step because
00:28:22
Speaker
The consequences in the short term are more painful and more inconvenient and the benefits only come later. So that's like another example of the present bias that I was talking about earlier, which is a reason why we tend to default to soldier mindset more often than we should. This is kind of a related question, but it might be a difficult one. I mean, maybe not. Maybe you have a great answer to it, but in, in my experience, I see a lot of people I'm trying to not
00:28:48
Speaker
But I'm trying to practice humility and not be like, I'm right and other people are wrong and I can see other people being wrong. But I see people attempting that I think are quite wrong, attempting to employ a scout mindset, a kind of perverted scout mindset. Right. So like you might see this in kind of like.
00:29:04
Speaker
some sort of science denial of like, I'm, you know, I'm not falling into the bias of trusting the experts, right? I'm conducting my own research or I'm being comfortable being alienated from my beliefs. People are criticizing me for my anti conformist beliefs, but I'm practicing a scout mindset by being comfortable, nonconforming and pursuing truth. And again, practicing humility and not saying that I'm right about all of this because I'm sure I do the same thing sometimes too.
00:29:32
Speaker
I guess that kind of next question of how do you differentiate between kind of a perverted scout mindset or a scout mindset that's leading to false beliefs and a scout mindset that's leading to true beliefs? Yeah, I totally recognize the phenomenon you're talking about. And I think it's kind of a close cousin of this phenomenon of people defaulting to the most negative interpretation of themselves or the world.
00:29:55
Speaker
Oh, I'm, I'm a loser and I'm never going to succeed at anything and people are all terrible and everyone's out to get you. Uh, and they feel like they're pulling the wool off or what's the expression? The scales are falling from their eyes. They feel like they're cutting through all the BS and trying to see things as clearly as possible, but in practice, they're actually just always defaulting to the worst possible explanation. And I think that can often be.
00:30:19
Speaker
It's a form of soldier mindset kind of in disguise. And I think there's various reasons for it. But one reason is that, you know, the worse you see things, the less chance you can be disappointed. And so you might default to just believing that no one actually likes you because then you don't run the risk of thinking that someone likes you and then finding out they didn't and being horribly disappointed. But you kind of, you frame that in your mind as scout mindset that I'm, I'm facing the harsh reality that no one likes me and I'll never succeeded anything.
00:30:49
Speaker
So I think the example you gave, the trope you described of someone who kind of reflexively rejects whatever the mainstream view is and calls that in their own minds, they call that scout mindset. I think those are kind of two sides of the same coin. Now to actually answer your question or try to, how do you notice if you're doing that versus actually engaging in genuine scout mindset? I think
00:31:14
Speaker
There's this whole class of things I call thought experiments, or sorry, other people call them thought experiments too, and I'm sure as an audience, well-versed in philosophy, they're familiar with thought experiments, but there's this whole subset of thought experiments that I think are really useful to kind of check yourself for whether you're
00:31:31
Speaker
whether you're actually engaging in Scout mindset. And so for the example of someone who, I don't know, let's take, I've been having conversations with people about ivermectin recently, which is the drug that a lot of people think helps prevent bad outcomes from COVID. And they're really angry that the mainstream medical community doesn't agree with them and is trying to stop doctors from prescribing ivermectin, et cetera.
00:31:57
Speaker
So someone who thinks that they're being a good scout by rejecting the mainstream medical opinion about ivermectin and that they're going out and doing their own research and figuring things out for themselves and uncovering the truth, I think they could do the thought experiment of
00:32:12
Speaker
If there's a study that they poked holes in that found that ivermectin didn't work, which is something that critics often do, like they'll take a study that found ivermectin didn't work, and they'll say, OK, well, it had these flaws. It didn't have this. Sample size was too small, et cetera, et cetera. If you imagine that the study had found that ivermectin did work, so you flip around the result in your mind, would you then think that the flaws in the study were so terrible?
00:32:41
Speaker
And in practice, you often don't even need to do this as a thought experiment. In practice, you can actually just look at the other studies that support ivermectin and see if you can find similarly bad flaws in those studies as in the ones that you dismissed because they didn't support your belief. So you may not actually need to do a thought experiment, but the goal basically is to figure out if you're applying a different standard of evidence or standard of rigor to studies that support your current preferred view versus studies that don't.
Practical Thought Experiments
00:33:10
Speaker
And you used this example in your book and it was like a stab to my heart. I was like, oh, I think you were talking to your cousin and they were like, I love this song. And you're like, I also think this is a great song. Your cousin was like, I lied. I think it's a terrible song. You're like, I'm stuck. To be fair, she was like nine. And it was New Kids on the Block to give you a sense of my age.
00:33:36
Speaker
But it's like a stab to the heart because I think we've all been there and there's this idea of, and I think the point that you raised that was really, really helpful was you were not trying to fit in. You genuinely thought that New Kid on the Block song was great. And that's because your desire to fit in and to feel good, I suppose, would be the reading, are actually distorting what you think is true and actually influencing that.
00:34:00
Speaker
So that kind of relationship, and I think we've, we've, we've all been guilty of that. And there's a very personal example, but, and then that's kind of, this is kind of backing up and just saying, you know,
00:34:11
Speaker
If somebody was to say the opposite or if, you know, the source that I'm believing, you know, I'm like, I trust this quality of journal because it's producing something that I believe in. Now the same quality of journal, imagine it was saying the opposite, would I endorse it? That's one really helpful strategy. It's something I try to apply. I guess in my application of it, I end up in kind of a paralyzation in things that I'm not
00:34:38
Speaker
confident enough in. So one of the things I learned doing my PhD, which is a real skill, a real value, but I learned how little I know about anything because I spent, you know, seven years of grad school becoming a specialist on something and you could still submit a paper and people will be like, this is garbage. We're not going to publish this because you don't know what you're talking about. And it's like, I don't know what I'm talking about. You know, when I'm talking about the thing I wrote my dissertation on, I definitely don't know what I'm talking about for anything else. So I guess, yeah, to bring that back to a question.
00:35:07
Speaker
When you apply these kind of tools, how do you get over the kind of, yeah, you might be paralyzed because you're not perhaps a good enough of a scout or you don't know enough in that certain area to act and how do you respond to those kinds of situations?
00:35:22
Speaker
So I think for many things, maybe most things in the world, the conclusion that you form from a realistic amount of research is, I don't know. It should be, I don't know. And that in order to be justifiably confident in your view about something,
00:35:39
Speaker
most topics are just very complicated and it just takes a lot of time and effort and research to form a conclusion you can be justifiably confident in. So I think it helps with that feeling of paralysis to understand a priori that just for most things
00:35:55
Speaker
the justified conclusion should just be, yeah, I don't know. And in practice, the way people, you know, good scouts tend to deal with that is by just having some heuristics that they use. Like, well, you know, I'm sure this heuristic isn't going to always be right, but it's probably the best I can do. You know, under most circumstances, my heuristic is going to be if scientists say such and such, and there's, you know, there seems to be a consensus among the scientists and, you know, no strong
00:36:21
Speaker
There's not really, I don't really notice much dissent among the scientists about this, then I'm just going to assume they're probably right. And, you know, that's, that heuristic is not going to always be accurate because scientific consensus can be wrong sometimes, but as a practical strategy for making decisions about what to do, this heuristic is probably the best I can do if I'm not willing to spend a ton of time and effort researching this. So you could, I mean, someone could object, well, maybe that soldier mindset, you're deceiving yourself into believing they're right, even though you can't justify that.
00:36:51
Speaker
But in practice, it's not. You're understanding that this rule is going to fail sometimes, but as a practical decision rule, it's kind of the best you can do.
00:36:59
Speaker
And I think for personal decision making about, say you have a startup and you have to make a bunch of decisions all the time about where to spend your time and effort and what features to tweak on the product that you're putting out, et cetera, there's just always going to be a ton of uncertainty in that. And you nevertheless have to act. You can't wait until you have all the information before putting something out. You'll just immediately fail.
Adapting Strategies to Contexts
00:37:25
Speaker
So I do think there's an art to
00:37:29
Speaker
understanding that your map is in pencil and you're probably wrong about a bunch of things and just making the best decision you can with the evidence you have at the moment and just accepting that you can't be constantly reevaluating everything. You'll have to take a step back and reevaluate your business plan every two months or every
00:37:51
Speaker
time you get some significant piece of new information, like when you get the results from your beta test or something like that. But in between those moments of stepping back and reevaluating, you just kind of proceed as if your map is correct. Does that make sense?
00:38:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, it all sounds quite reasonable. So I'm trying to... I'm not necessarily be critical, but I find myself nodding along. You know, it's not necessarily sexy to be like, it's going to be context specific and you're not going to know and you're going to kind of have to maneuver as you go. But that's really the best.
00:38:28
Speaker
You know, the best heuristic that you could have. One thing in my own personal life that's been like, you know, you talk about these kinds of decision-making heuristics. I'm not sure if that was the terminology you used, but it's kind of ways of going about saying, this is a way that I make decisions and it's a tool that I try to apply consistently. One of the ones I recently had that was a big paradigm shift for me.
00:38:48
Speaker
was in this kind of thinking about investing in the financial world, there was this discussion how what makes a good decision is not the quality of the outcome. So you can make a bad decision that has a good outcome. Like you buy a lottery ticket that is statistically not likely to have returns and you can make a good decision that has a bad outcome. That was a real paradigm shift for me because I found myself
00:39:14
Speaker
working backwards, like, oh, those people said X, and then they turned out to be right, so they were right. They reflected well, I should copy something from that, and kind of making detaching from that and realizing, well, you know, even if they ended up being right, if they were right by accident, or they were right while they employed kind of for heuristics, it doesn't really matter.
Epistemology in Daily Life
00:39:35
Speaker
Right. And I think about this in the context of like advancing scientific discoveries. If you kind of adopt a skeptical outlook for poor reasons and you, you disagree with the status quo and then you turn up to you, you end up being right. If you weren't scientifically informed, you're just right by accident. That's not really like all that valuable.
00:39:52
Speaker
I think this is one reason people are often overconfident in their own scout mindset or their own reasoning ability. A lot of the time I think people, they do end up on the right side of some controversial issue, like some scientific, you know, there's some like
00:40:11
Speaker
consensus view that scientists put forward, and then there's people who disagree with it or deny it. Then there's other people who accept the scientific consensus. I think often the people who accept the scientific consensus do turn out to be right, but the process they followed isn't necessarily
00:40:31
Speaker
I guess it's complicated. If they said, look, I don't understand this, but I think scientists are usually right. So I'm going to assume they're probably right about this one, then fine. But often what they say is that, well, you know, the evidence, it's so clear, the evidence is obvious. And anyone who disagrees is just being a moron or a denialist or whatever. And maybe they do turn out to be right, but I don't think that that, I don't think that they should be super confident that their reasoning process was right because they
00:40:56
Speaker
When I look at their reasoning processes, I'm usually like, oh, I think you're really oversimplifying things. And you don't even look at the other side's arguments. And so I don't think the fact that you turned out to be right on this issue should. I don't think that it gives all that much support to you being good at reasoning about scientific issues. Sorry if that was too in the weeds.
00:41:15
Speaker
No, I think that's exactly right. This movement away just from being result oriented and then kind of this like post hoc justification of like how I got here was right because it turned out to be okay. We want to get away from that. One thing that I was kind of joking about before we started recording, but I think it's a valid question is epistemology, the more I think of the older I get, the more I value epistemology, the more I value questions about how we come to form beliefs. And the more I think it underlines all of our lives, it's one of the most important things.
00:41:44
Speaker
But it's not very cool. It's not very interesting or at least accessible to a popular audience. And I think what your book is doing is trying to make it popular and trying to make it accessible. It's not written for a small group of people. When did you decide to undertake an epistemological project instead of a moral project or something like this? When did you decide to focus in on this is the problem that I think needs to be solved and I'm the one that I think can help solve it?
00:42:13
Speaker
Why stay in that lane? Why take that as kind of your interest? Well, I've always been interested in epistemology. I remember even as a kid thinking a lot about, well, that person said such and such. How do they know that? And I've always also been kind of personally invested in trying to be objective and fair minded. In fact, I was just remembering the other day, I must have been in first grade, so like six or seven years old.
00:42:41
Speaker
And my best friend who was named Julie, I know that's confusing, but it was the 80s and there were a lot of Julie's and Julia's. Julie was making fun of this other girl in our class named Mary for not being able to do a cursive R, I guess. Like she didn't know cursive. So Julie was making fun of Mary for that. And I said to Julie, you know, I don't know how to do cursive R's either. And Julie was like, yeah, but I'm making fun of Mary.
00:43:07
Speaker
And because she was seven years old, she was just much more explicit about the fact that, of course, I'm using a different standard to judge her as opposed to you. As an adult, people would come up with some justification for why it makes sense to, well, she should because she is three months old or whatever. They'd have some excuse. But as a kid, Julie didn't have the
00:43:29
Speaker
the sense that she should try to come off as consistent and objective. But I remember being so indignant that Julie was using this different standard to judge Mary versus me, and that just seemed completely unfair. Anyway, so I've always been personally very passionate about this.
00:43:49
Speaker
For the last 10, 15 years of my career, I've been focused on this project of how to improve reasoning and judgment. It started increasingly to seem to me like the focus of that conversation in the broad
00:44:05
Speaker
conversation with the capital C sense was just misdirected and that the bulk of our attention, the bulk of the books and articles, blog posts, conversations online that people were having about reasoning and judgment was focused on this aspect of it that was just about
00:44:24
Speaker
irrationality and bias in what people are doing wrong. And it was focused also on trying to solve the problem by giving people more knowledge and training and education. Like we should educate people about cognitive biases. We should train people in recognizing logical fallacies. That's like my short summary of what the conversation has mostly been about. And this seemed to me to just be neglecting this huge, possibly more important pillar of good reasoning, which was the motivational aspect.
00:44:53
Speaker
the, how are you motivated to use your knowledge and cleverness? Are you motivated to use it to poke holes in other people's arguments? Or are you motivated to use it to turn that lens on yourself and try to figure out your own blind spots and what you might be wrong about? And just talking about biases and fallacies does not, doesn't address the motivational aspect of things. And then, you know, the other missing piece that I was noticing was this kind of positive epistemology that you were talking about where
00:45:23
Speaker
A lot of books have been written on bias and irrationality and the mistakes that the human brain makes. And I do think that's important. I don't, I'm not saying those books shouldn't have been written, but you know, it's not like we fail all the time. Sometimes we humans manage to notice when we're wrong and change our minds. Sometimes we manage to be objective and fair-minded even about things that we're personally invested in. And so I just felt
00:45:49
Speaker
We should be looking at those successes and asking when we get it right Why why do we get it right like those of us
Moral Implications of Scout Mindset
00:45:57
Speaker
who can sometimes be scouts? How are we doing it? And what can we learn from those successes? What makes scout minds that easier for some people in some contexts? So that was another big piece that I perceived to be missing And I don't know maybe temperamentally i'm like more the right person to write that book than the average person in in this conversation like I I don't actually
00:46:19
Speaker
I don't really like conflict and I don't really like being the person out there telling other people what they're wrong and biased about. I'm much more comfortable turning the lens on myself and trying to improve myself. So maybe that's why I ended up writing this book rather than someone else. Totally. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
00:46:38
Speaker
Also while you were talking, I thought about why this stuck out to me so well is that, or why I enjoyed your project so much is that I basically wrote my dissertation on Epictetus, who's a Stoic, his exercises for reasoning better. So it's kind of his kind of positive epistemological picture about how to reason correctly and his kind of strategies for doing so that he taught in his school. So it's still, it's very similar. And this was something the Stoics were very interested in. To bring it back to that really quickly.
00:47:07
Speaker
I guess my question is how this work connects in your eyes to morality or ethics. And I think there's a couple of ways we can think about that. So for the Stoics, epistemology was ethics, because if you knew what to do, you would do it, right? So virtue was just knowledge. It was knowledge of how to act properly. And people acted improperly because they were ignorant.
00:47:30
Speaker
And so that's one way that there's a very strong connection. Bear with me. I'll bring back to the question. Yeah, this is great. But another concern that I have is kind of what Kant talks about and kind of Kant's push back against some stoic thinking, which is that any kind of virtue, if it doesn't have a good will, can be used for evil. And Kant says, you know,
00:47:50
Speaker
We think about what's a virtual courage, you know, well, we don't want a very courageous bank robber. Okay. Well, you know, intelligence. Oh, you want like an intelligent criminal mastermind who's better able to, you know, there was a lot of intelligence used in coordinating very awful things. So to take that back a second, what do you see as the connection between the scout mindset and morality, if anything, and if nothing.
00:48:15
Speaker
Because you worded it as, you know, you're better able... I took it as kind of an instrumental argument, right? You're better able to build the kind of life you want. Well, does the Scout mindset have anything to say about, you know, the kinds of lives that are... What kind of life you should want? Yeah, worth living. And mistakes people make about that. So, it's such an interesting question. In theory,
00:48:38
Speaker
I think you could have a perfect scout who is also just a terrible, like Hitler, but with a perfect scout mindset and much better able to achieve his goals and achieve world domination and wipe out all the races he didn't like. That is in theory, my definition of scout mindset does not rule that out.
00:48:57
Speaker
So just to cut in really quickly, I'm glad you're willing to bite the bullet on that because I think if you're willing to bite the bullet on that, it gives you a lot more flexibility. But yeah, please continue. It is a tool, it doesn't have the morality built directly into it immediately. That's right. So a caveat to that is that I think in practice, a lot of the instances of people causing harm in the world
00:49:21
Speaker
are the result of them being confused about how to get what they want for a happy life. And that if they really did sit down and reflect honestly with as much information as they could get and think about that evidence as clearly as possible, they would conclude, you know, I don't actually need to destroy these people's lives in order to flourish myself.
00:49:47
Speaker
And the reasons that we don't sit down and reflect about that are, I mean, they're very similar to present bias and all the other kind of features of human psychology that I was talking about, that we have kind of quick, impulsive,
00:50:02
Speaker
default strategies that we reach for to get what we want. And they may not be the best strategy, but if we don't take the time to stop and reflect on whether there might be other strategies to get our goals, we just stick with our, our impulsive default one. And so I do think that there are a lot of instances of people causing harm in the world. It could be fixed if, if you could push a button and make everyone perfect Scouts.
00:50:25
Speaker
But I, I would be surprised if all of the instances of harm could be fixed by making people perfect Scouts. I suspect that there are, you know, there's just like inherent tension between people's goals for the world. And some people, you know, genuinely, if they stopped and reflected their goal would.
00:50:42
Speaker
require defeating some other group of people. And it's probably the case, you know, the world is not perfectly zero sun, but it's not completely positive. Some either is a short way of saying what I'm trying to say here. So I predict that if everyone took my book to heart and tried to become better scouts, that the net effect on the world would be good. But that is an empirical question and not a logical question.
00:51:06
Speaker
Great. I like that you're practicing the kind of humility as you go and are not just jumping straight from a epistemological to an ethical theory.
Embodying Scout Mindset
00:51:14
Speaker
You know, the standards for me being a good scout are much stricter now because otherwise I'm vulnerable to all these accusations of hypocrisy, et cetera, et cetera. So I really kind of bound myself to the mask there.
00:51:25
Speaker
They're very nervous when you're tweeting, I'm sure that you can't be, you can't be reactive. Yeah. Although it's sometimes, I mean, maybe people might say, well, she would say this, but I do feel like some people, sometimes people take that to an extreme where like anytime I disagree with anything, they're like, Oh, you're being a soldier. You, you want to win. Like, like you, you have to be able to have opinions. Um, it has to be the case that you look at the evidence and sometimes you form a certain opinion and that doesn't necessarily mean you're being unreasonable.
00:51:54
Speaker
People do this all the time in ethics too, right? Where there's this
00:51:58
Speaker
You know, you're, you're making a claim that like, Hey, more people should do this. It doesn't really have anything to do with you. I think if you can be a role model, that's very helpful. It doesn't really have a, you know, a lot of, a lot of great coaches back to the sport metaphor are really out of shape. And some of them never even were very good at the sport themselves. It doesn't make their advice any worse. People like role models and people like people that are able to practice and actualize. I think they take it as evidence to take it as kind of proof of concept. Right.
00:52:25
Speaker
I think in many contexts it is actually evidence, whether the person is practicing what they preach is evidence about the value of what they're preaching. Not always, but in many contexts. It's certainly perhaps evidence that you believe the value of it enough to act upon it.
00:52:42
Speaker
Right. Although in the case of ethics, which was your original example, someone could be reaching like XYZ is the ethical thing to do. I'm not doing it because it's really hard, but that doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. So I think that's perfectly internally consistent to say that something is right, but also you're not going to do it because it's hard. Well, but I guess, I guess I just thought that that absolutely applies to adopting a scout mindset as well. Right. Like.
00:53:09
Speaker
It's hard. Right. I want to be conscious of your time, but I have one more question, which was about this last part, which is that, you know, if the soldier is that you feel good and you have a chapter about leading into confusion, how do you get people to feel bad? How do we motivate? What are the strategies for motivating people to feel shitty as they adopt a scout mindset? And the better of a scout you are, the easier it will be. Right. I think about this. Wait, sorry. You're asking what are the strategies for making people feel bad?
00:53:36
Speaker
for helping people to be okay with feeling bad as they evaluate how horribly they were reasoning in the past. Oh, I see. So there's that kind of transition stage where you go from an unreflective soldier, your seven-year-old schoolmate gets pulled aside and says, hey, that's kind of unfair what you were doing. And for them to look that in the face, they have to kind of feel bad and be like, wow, I was applying kind of a different standard about cursive writing.
00:54:04
Speaker
Yeah. What are some of the strategies? I mean, you talk, you talk about leading to confusion. So there you have some of these strategies and maybe you could speak to a bit of the way people can become comfortable of being uncomfortable as they undergo this process.
00:54:17
Speaker
Yeah. So one thing that I think helps a lot is just to recognize that just because you are explicitly noticing and acknowledging your mistakes or failings and many other people aren't, doesn't mean that they don't have those failings and doesn't mean that they're not making those mistakes. You're just acknowledging yours. And so, you know, I think a lot of the feeling bad comes from feeling like having acknowledged the mistake,
00:54:44
Speaker
makes you worse compared to the people who aren't acknowledging their mistakes, but it doesn't. You're just acknowledging yours and they're not.
00:54:55
Speaker
And another kind of like background premise that I think is really important is recognizing just how messy and complex reality is and how impossible it is for even the most brilliant person spending far more time than is actually feasible trying to figure stuff out. Even they are going to be wrong about a ton of stuff because it's just not possible to be right about everything.
00:55:18
Speaker
And maybe, I don't know, I think some people might actually just disagree with that and just insist that, no, the world is simple and clear. And like, it's easy to get the right answer if you want to. I think they're wrong. But then there are a lot of people who I think maybe would kind of intellectually acknowledge like, yeah, of course the world is messy and things are complicated, but they, on a gut level, they still kind of really feel bad about themselves anytime they get anything wrong. Because on a gut level, they feel like, well, I should have been able to get this right. And then the fact that I didn't means I screwed up somehow.
00:55:47
Speaker
And I think to go back to your excellent point earlier about when you make a mistake or when things go badly, you should look at the process that you used to make that decision and try to evaluate
00:56:00
Speaker
was there anything wrong with my process? Did I get unlucky despite using a good process or was I using a bad process? And I think the same thing applies to when you, you get a wrong answer. Like when you turn out to have been wrong about something, you know, a decision you made in life or, or about some like political issue or something, it turns out later that you, yeah, you misperceived things. You can look back at your process and ask yourself like,
00:56:24
Speaker
You know, was I, was I being willfully ignorant or stubborn or was I just like forming the best conclusion I could with the facts I had available to me, you know, given like a realistic amount of time, I'm not going to spend my entire life figuring out this one question. And sometimes I think, yeah, people are.
00:56:40
Speaker
an honest evaluation of their process would reveal that they were being sloppy. I think I mentioned this in the book. I got something wrong on Twitter. I was defending someone against criticism. And then I actually watched the video that people were complaining about and realized, oh, actually they were right. I assumed this person was being more reasonable than they were.
00:57:03
Speaker
But when I watch the video, I shouldn't be defending them. I think I did slip up there because I shouldn't, I know better than to defend someone without actually watching the video and, you know, looking at the record. And so there I had to acknowledge, yeah, okay, I was wrong because I failed at something. But much of the time, maybe most of the time, we're wrong just because reality is messy and we have limited facts. And so in those cases, when you turn out to be wrong, I think you should just
00:57:28
Speaker
If you really appreciate how messy reality is on a gut level, you won't feel bad at all when you realize you're wrong. Based on a realistic picture of the world, forgiveness is often even too strong.
00:57:47
Speaker
If someone puts the keys, moves the keys from where I placed them, and I opened the drawer where I thought they were and they're not there, I was wrong, but I don't need to forgive myself for
Conclusion and Projects
00:57:57
Speaker
being wrong. It's like, of course it was reasonable for me to think the keys would be in that drawer, you know? That's the kind of matter of fact attitude that I think people should be taking more about being wrong, that like, okay, yeah, I formed a wrong conclusion based on the facts I had. Yeah, great.
00:58:14
Speaker
I guess the link it back to Socrates a little bit, just to, just to conclude, there's this maxim of, you know, I, cause he gets told he's the smartest person in Athens and he's like, how am I the smartest person? I don't know anything. You know, I'm this like skeptic. I don't know what's that, what's the, what's going on? What's the, what's the oracle talking about? He's like, Oh, well, at least I realize I know nothing. So I'm the smartest person because I have, I know one thing, which is that I know nothing, which is kind of a little trick, but.
00:58:41
Speaker
I think this connects, I might be, I might be speaking for you a bit, or I'm not sure if this, this totally graphs what you were saying, but at the very least when we're beginning to adopt a stout mindset, you already done something wrong. And if you now look at it and realize it's wrong, you know, you've progressed, you've become better. You haven't become worse as you kind of take on that perspective that, you know, you could improve and you could do better. I think that's important to keep in mind.
00:59:06
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, I think it really helps to look ahead towards the future and focus on how much stronger and smarter and better able to navigate the world you're going to be if you're able to notice and acknowledge the things that you were wrong about in the past. Totally. Well, thanks so much, Julia. We're at time, but is there anything you wanted to share, people who listen to this and are like, oh, wow, I, you know, I want to, I want to learn more about what Julia is up to and what she's doing, any kind of projects you want to share, talk about?
00:59:36
Speaker
I, well, I have a podcast of my own called Rationally Speaking. That's at rationallyspeakingpodcast.org. And, uh, I'd encourage your listeners who found this conversation interesting to follow me on Twitter. I'm just Julia Galif on Twitter. I'm the only Julia Galif in the world as it happens. So I got the handle myself.
00:59:55
Speaker
And yeah, I do, I do really enjoy wrestling with a lot of the interesting nuances and edge cases of this topic. And so I'll often try to hash some of that stuff out on Twitter. It's where, where I do a lot of my thinking. And so come join me. Right. Well, thanks so much. My pleasure. It was a great conversation. Thanks, Michael.
01:00:16
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Stoic Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
01:00:31
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.