


In this book, she explains how we can use the scout mindset and tools to see things as they are instead of how we want/expect them to be. The question is, when do we succumb to flawed thinking and when do we rise above them? What can we learn from our own successes and how can we multiply what works?įor years, Julia Galef searched for answers to these questions.

Yet, we can also acknowledge our flaws and errors, embrace change and be truthful with ourselves. Human beings often deny our mistakes and resist change. Unfortunately, understanding blind spots and biases won’t make you immune to them. There are now lots of research and books about human irrationality and cognitive biases. Do check out our book summary bundle in pdf/mp3 infographic, text and audio formats!
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In The Scout Mindset summary, you’ll learn how to develop a set of attitude and tools to see the world with more openness, curiosity and accuracy. In this book, Julia Galef explains why it’s so hard to overcome our cognitive biases and how we can learn to see the world more clearly. So the implicit question that I'm asking myself, that people ask themselves as they go through the world, is when I see new evidence, can this be explained with my theory? And if yes, then we stop there.Everyone suffers from mental biases and blind spots. And even more importantly, as you go through the world and encounter new ideas and new evidence, that level of confidence fluctuates as you encounter evidence for and against your beliefs.Īlso I think that many people, certainly including myself, have this default way of approaching the world in which we have our preexisting beliefs and we go through the world and we pretty much stick to our beliefs unless we encounter evidence that's so overwhelmingly inconsistent with our beliefs about the world that it forces us to change our minds and, you know, adopt a new theory of how the world works. That you have levels of confidence in your beliefs about how the world works that are less than one hundred percent but greater than zero percent. For example, you become much more aware that your beliefs are grayscale, they're not black and white. And being able to use those principles in your own reasoning.Īfter you've been steeped in Bayes' Rule for a little while, it starts to produce some fundamental changes to your thinking. So what's really important is internalizing the intuitions behind Bayes' Rule and some of the general reasoning principles that fall out of the math. But then when they leave the lab and go home, they think like non-Bayesians just like the rest of us. In fact, there are plenty of people who use Bayes' Rule on a daily basis in their jobs - statisticians and scientists for example. And I don't think that the math behind - the math of Bayes' Rule is crucial to getting benefit out of it in your own reasoning or decision making. In other words, Bayes' Rule is a formalization of how to change your mind when you learn new information about the world or have new experiences. You don't see signs of a cover up, well that just proves that the cover up runs even deeper than we previously suspected.īayes' Rule is probably the best way to think about evidence. You see signs of a cover up - well, that just proves that I was right all along about the cover up. So this pattern of reasoning is what sustains most conspiracy theories.

And this convinces me even more that the Japanese Americans are a threat." This is an even more ominous sign because that indicates that they're probably planning some major secret timed to attack á la Pearl Harbor. And Warren responded that, "Ah, this makes me even more suspicious. And as he was testifying as much to Congress, someone brought up the fact that, you know, we haven't seen any signs of subterfuge from the Japanese American community. Back in the Second World War the then governor of California, Earl Warren, believed that Japanese Americans constituted a grave threat to our national security. I'd like to introduce you to a particularly powerful paradigm for thinking called Bayes' Rule. Bayes' Rule is a formalization of how to change your mind when you learn new information about the world or have new experiences.
