Thread by @polina_marinova

.@juliagalef is the president and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, a non-profit organization devoted to training people in strategies for reasoning and decision-making.

She's the rare type of person who takes pride in changing her mind.

Check out her story 👇

She wants you to imagine for a moment that you're a soldier in the midst of battle.

You attack, you defend, you protect, but mostly you want to win.

Now, imagine playing a different role: a scout. Unlike the soldier, your goal as a scout isn't to defend one side over the other.

Instead, you're there to understand, survey the terrain, identify threats and obstacles ahead & come back with a map that's as accurate as possible.

She often uses the "soldier" and "scout" roles as metaphors for how all of us process information and ideas in our daily lives.

The two mindsets demonstrate how clearly we see the world.

"Some pieces of information feel like our allies — we want them to win; we want to defend them. And other pieces of information are the enemy, and we want to shoot them down.

"Scout mindset means seeing what’s there as accurately as you can, even if it’s not pleasant."

Galef sees herself as an ambassador to the rationalist movement & believes we can use reason to improve our judgment.

"The question you need to consider is: What do you most yearn for — to defend your own beliefs or to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?"

She says we should congratulate ourselves when we've evaluated an argument as dispassionately and fairly as possible instead of congratulating ourselves on simply being right.

One is driven by emotion, the other is driven by rational thought.

Here's what we can learn from Galef about the art of changing our minds and upgrading our beliefs.

👇👇👇

theprofile.substack.com/p/julia-galef