The Scout Mindset (as reviewed by a Soldier)

I. Introduction

“Post-truth” seems to be the defining phrase of the 21st century. The digital revolution seems to have unleashed a Misinformation Age. Medical science, urban planning, climate change, transport design, economic theory - the range of fields where the truth is impossible to ascertain seems to expand with every tweet. Into this battlefield marches Julia Galef with her plan to stop the fighting: The Scout Mindset, a well-argued plea to seek truth instead of war.

Galef is not the first author to propose a better way of thinking - she admits as much in the first few pages of the book. Most of us have heard a TED talk or read a pop-psych book on the various forms of cognitive bias that lead us astray. But Galef has realised that knowing that we’re biased doesn’t necessarily help us become any less biased. Intelligence and education don’t seem to protect us from irrationality - indeed, sometimes it reinforces the problem. So she takes a different approach from the Malcolm Gladwells of the world: rather than telling us how we’re failing to think rationally, she dedicates much of her book to telling us why we should think rationally instead.

Her book leans heavily on one metaphor: the idea of the “soldier mindset” versus the “scout mindset”. The “scout mindset” that Galef wants to promote is the mindset of seeking truth, of being motivated to understand the world as it truly is. Galef describes it thus:

Scout mindset is what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course. It’s what prompts you to honestly ask yourself questions like “Was I at fault in that argument?” or “Is this risk worth it?” or “How would I react if someone from the other political party did the same thing”.

The inverse is the “soldier mindset”: the intellectual approach that focuses on protecting our views and defeating our opponents. It is the framework that guides motivated reasoning - using our powers of logic and deduction to protect a belief we already hold, rather than explore and probe new ideas. Galef doesn’t dismiss this approach out of hand - she spends several chapters outlining the benefits of the soldier mindset. And she’s wise to do so - the benefits of the soldier mindset are all too clear to people like me.

II. My Life As A Soldier

My job is being a partisan political adviser. I don’t spend my whole day engaged in intellectual warfare with my political foes, but I probably spend more than most. While we all regularly resort to the soldier mindset, people like me are even more prone to it.

Prior to working as a political adviser, I had worked for years as an apolitical public servant, employed by a conservative government that I regularly disagreed with. My approach to excellence in that job had been to think of myself as a knight in a grey suit, following a code of honour. I served the government of the day as well as I possibly could - not because I agreed with their politics, but because I agreed with the broader principle of an apolitical public service serving a democratically elected government.

In becoming a political partisan, I needed a new mindset. Even though it wasn’t a perfect fit, I agreed far more with the Labor Party I now served than the conservative government who ruled the country. I was no longer serving an abstract principle out of a sense of honour, but an actual existing party of people who I desperately wanted to see in power.

Under the circumstances, the benefits of becoming a hardcore Labor partisan seemed clear. Galef categorises the benefits of the soldier mindset into six broad categories: comfort, self-esteem, morale, persuasion, image, and belonging - and that’s more or less how I saw it. By adopting a “my party, right-or-wrong” view, I would feel better about the early starts and late nights spent at the office. I would worry less about how to be right, and more about how to be on the winning side. My loyalty would not be questioned. My capacity to persuade would be enhanced by my confidence.

And I wasn’t wrong. My morale improved. My capacity to work hard was enhanced. I felt a strong sense of pride and belonging within the party. I felt more confident about my decisions. The immediate benefits seemed clear, and prompted me to continue down that path.

III. The Virtues of Scouting

Galef doesn’t dismiss these benefits. She argues instead that we minimise the costs and overstate the benefits of the soldier mindset - that we are not “rationally irrational” in choosing the soldier mindset. Her argument is that in choosing the soldier mindset, we are falling victim to a cognitive bias: present bias, or the tendency to care too much about short-term consequences and too little about long-term consequences. 

Taking our beliefs as given, rather than questioning the facts and spending time observing the terrain, saves us time and effort. It gives us an instant hit of confidence and esteem, which can propel us over obstacles that are immediately in our path. But Galef notes that these benefits come with costs that will accrue over time: every time we choose to act without thinking, we build up a habit. Even if we start with a sensible mental map, when we stop observing the terrain, reality will swiftly diverge.

By contrast, the truth-seekers will build a better map over time, leading them to greater success in the long run. By regularly updating our views, we are more likely to make good judgments about the world. She argues that the scout mindset is even more valuable in our complex, hard-to-understand modern world than it would have been in our evolutionary past - we exist today in a world where you can choose your social groups, and fix things about our lives, rather than at the mercy of nature and our birth.

It’s a compelling argument, and Galef backs it up with all the tools in the pop-psych toolkit. She spends pages debunking studies that show self-deception boosts happiness or performance. She devotes other pages to studies that show the rewards of seeing things clearly. She appeals to our understanding of our evolutionary past. And of course, she has a series of charming anecdotes that support her thesis - from Elon Musk launching Tesla Motors, to French officers admitting their failures in counter-espionage in the late 19th century.

IV. Where Scouts Fail

It would be too tempting to use these anecdotes to dismiss Galef’s book. Using Elon Musk as an example is a warning flag for any popular psychology book. Anyone who knows anything about statistics knows that anecdotes are never a substitute for real data. A book on the subject of rationality will never win us over to the cause with clever just-so stories.

You would be foolish to do so. The anecdotes are not the book. Galef has done her research, as the comprehensive footnotes show, and makes a logical case for her viewpoint. Anecdotes like this are what good writers use to get us to read the whole argument. Nevertheless, there are cases where adopting Galef’s preferred mode of permanent rational inquiry seems not to make sense, and I am not certain that the book addresses them in full.

Most obvious is the issue of bandwidth, and the cost of constantly questioning the world around us. We exist in an ever-more complex world, and we simply do not have the capacity to be constantly querying everything about us. We all know anti-vaxxers who have “done the research”. I don’t think it is sufficient to dismiss these people as irrational soldiers - many of them have genuinely done their best to find out the truth, taking a “scout mindset” to the best of their abilities. But they’d be happier and healthier if they didn’t, and simply accepted the pro-vaccine consensus around them.

To use a less explosive example - I work as a policy adviser on financial services policy for the Labor Party. The question of how financial services policy should be designed is complex in the extreme, as are most areas of policy. Taking a scout mindset approach to financial services policy makes sense for me - I have the time and effort to dedicate to it. But when it comes to other complex policy areas, it makes more sense for me to accept the views of people I trust rather than taking my own deep dives.

A less obvious but related issue is how scouts respond to genuinely hostile actors. While I don’t think it has done much for the overall rationality of the human race, the last century of psychological research has not gone nowhere. Advertising executives, social media consultants, and political operatives like me have weaponised psychology to a worrying degree, and often care little for the truth.

Galef’s book talks briefly about one key reason that it’s difficult for people to change their views on controversial issues: when you have a belief about one controversial issue, it is connected to a range of other interlocking beliefs. We talk about this in politics - what is the minimum viable change in a voter’s beliefs that will get them to switch their vote from one party to another. Someone with a more strongly held set of beliefs seems likely to be less vulnerable to motivated attacks on their worldview by hostile actors. In the modern world, these attacks are only increasing in scale, complexity, and number. 

V. Be A Scout Anyway

The real strength of Galef’s argument is that these failings do not hurt it. They can be true at times, and the case for being more rational and less dogmatic will remain strong. She is not arguing for us to question every single fact at every minute of every day. All she is arguing is that we should adopt the scout mindset more often than we do now.

I was already in the process of divorcing myself from the soldier mindset when I picked up this book. The costs of hyperpartisanship were becoming clearer to me. My capacity to interact with friends and colleagues who did not share my political beliefs was inhibited. More worryingly, the skills that got me the job - my ability to do research and make judgments about economic policies - were atrophying in favour of accepting a political status quo. Reading this book has helped me climb out of this rut.

I am not planning to stop being a political partisan. I am still convinced that the Australian Labor Party offers the best chance of building a better Australia. My conviction, however, arises not from some immortal Tree of Knowledge in far-off Queensland, but from my best assessment of the political terrain in which I operate.

I will try to build up the habits that Galef promotes in this book - seeing things clearly, looking at things from the other side, trying to prove myself wrong, applying rational tests to my thinking. The short-term benefits of not doing so are drowned by the long-term costs - something I know from experience.

This book is a must-read for anyone who thinks they’re being “rationally irrational” by committing to a soldier mindset. Galef’s book might be the motivation you need to get out of a partisan rut.

I may still be a soldier, but I hope to see a little more clearly now.