- Books
- by Julia Galef
- Learn to see and think clearly without self deception
- Soldier vs Scout Mindset
- Soldier mindset is attractive because it protects us
- "Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper."
- use intelligence and knowledge as tools to see the world clearly
- Build habits to be a scout
- verify facts before citing it
- Signals of being in scout mindset / pushing to one
- choosing goals ahead of time
- having reasonable critics
- test reasoning against a counterfactual world
- does the same reasoning apply to me / an outsider?
- Can work against the urge to believe something by making a plan in case it's false
- Types of behavior:
- pay attention to when you're wrong and learn from them
- be comfortable accepting that you were wrong: "updating"
- Lean into confusion
- Dig into anytime there's a puzzling observation
- Can lead to a paradigm shift
- Collect additional pieces of evidence and see how well they're explained
- Leaving your echo chamber doesn't work by default
- need to argue in good faith
- no point in arguing with the extremes – find the most reasonable opponents to actually learn and understand something
- Learning from opposing views is hard because
- we misunderstand each other's views
- bad arguments inoculate us against good arguments
- our beliefs tend to be interconnected: changing one requires changing several baseline assumptions
- Dissociating identity from facts
- being under attack solidifies beliefs
- and also while feeling proud
- hold identity lightly, see if you can argue from the other side convincingly