Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef (2021)

In this book, The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef explains that we see what we want to see when it comes to what we believe. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset.

From tribalism and wishful thinking to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe — and shoot down those we don't.

But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a "scout" mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true.

 
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