Review: The Scout Mindset, by Julia Galef

A very good book

My objections to the rationalist community are fundamentally aesthetic. They’re a bunch of horny nerds, and I hate the way they write. The style, the swag, if you will, is missing. The way to think about rationalism is it’s a great example of how the wordcel will always beat the shape rotator.

For those unfamiliar, a joke that went gaga among a certain set of very online tech people is that there are two types of minds: the person who is good with words, and the person who is good with geometry and math. All the tech people flatter themselves to think they are in the latter category.

In actuality the story of Silicon Valley is the story of how the wordcels beat the shape rotators. When you have an agglomeration of nerds, send in a few savvy people who know how to speak in a scientific argot, and they will ride herd. When you look at the PayPal mafia, for instance, these are wordcels masquerading as shape rotators, it’s very obvious when you listen to them talk. Therefore, protecting America’s nerds from foreign exploitation and foreign influence is a national security problem.

Rationalists are another type of wordcel whose job it is to ride herd on the shape rotators. They so often end up rationalizing themselves back into what are fundamentally religious concepts. They have some self-awareness about this, but only in rare cases does it lead them to actually practice a religion. More often, the story of the rationalist polycule ends in a fairly typical way: heartbreak, sexual exploitation, and so forth.

That said, I am a big fan of Ms. Galef’s book, with the subtitle Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. I don’t care for the way she writes, but I just love the way she thinks. These funny books on the edge between pop-psychology and economics all have a flat, lifeless quality that I struggle with. It’s what people expect, so it’s hardly her fault. If one were to be optimistic, one might say the rationalists are engaged in slowly persuading people back to a religious sensibility. The opposite could be true, too. TBD. Maybe they only need a turning word, as the Buddhists say.

It is very interesting to look at this book now that both rationalism and effective altruism, which she references in here, have had a sort of fall from grace. While both movements have fallen, I think this book very much still stands up.

I think Galef is right about almost everything. All of her thoughts about identity, persuasion, how to get out of an echo chamber, reasons why you need to be open to unusual sources of knowledge, how not to deceive yourself, she’s right about all of it.

Her idea for a surprise journal is just wonderful, which she came up with some years before this book came out. It’s this: keep a record of all the times you’re surprised by something, and write them down. She suggests that one should use that to update your priors about the world. A lot of people could benefit from that.

She calls motivated reasoning soldier mindset: the way we come up with arguments to deflect from uncomfortable truths. As someone who’s argued in public with a lot of people, the idea of reasoning as defensive combat makes a lot of sense. A lot of political people do that, and it’s not wrong. It’s very human. The world needs soldiers.

In contrast, she poses the scout mindset, a person who searches for an accurate map of the territory. You do that by tracking those anomalies. Things that are supposed to make sense, but don’t. Things that should have happened, but didn’t. When you do that, you quickly find yourself not in the realm of psychology or economics, but anthropology, where the world is governed by social taboos: which ones get broken, who breaks, them, and why.

It seems clear to almost everyone at this point that we have a problem with identity discourse. The notion that the profusion of gender identities represents the imposition of a very male intelligence—with its tendency to categorize—on womanhood makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve been trying to avoid the TikTok two-minutes-hate scene, but I see these videos of young people with five or six gender or sexuality identifiers applied to themselves, and I see the logic of the Pokémon card. It disturbs me a little that so few people are uncomfortable to simply say “I am human.”

It’s gotten out of hand, and the soldiers of the right are out in force, ready to eviscerate as many of these gender-obsessed people as they can. This probably doesn’t work either, because, as Galef says, feeling embattled causes people to cling more tightly to their identities. You end up creating soldiers.

I think Galef just points to a better way, which probably will not be taken. She writes about how beliefs crystallize into identities, how a person should hold one’s identity lightly, and how that makes you better at persuasion. More than that, it’s just a great guide for how to think.