Scouts and Power: A Response to Julia Galef

Julia Galef’s new book, The Scout Mindset, has been stuck in my craw for about a week. I mean that as a compliment.

Galef is the host of the Rationally Speaking podcast. She speaks and writes frequently on how, and why, distorted reasoning is so common. The book is her attempt to distinguish two different ways of dealing with uncertainty, and to figure out both why one way is so much more common than the other and what we can do about it.

The common way of dealing with uncertainty, in her telling, is to adopt the “soldier” mind-set. The soldier quickly discerns which “side” of a given question to be on and then sets about defending that position. Alternate ideas are taken as threats to be defeated. She’s particularly good in showing how military language creeps into discussions of contesting ideas: you fortify a position, the other side is entrenched, you drop "truth bombs" and so on.

The alternative to the soldier is the scout. The scout is less interested in taking a side than in mapping the territory. Scouts are more interested in getting the situation right than in winning the argument.

As she notes, both outlooks serve a purpose. But we tend to default to the soldier mind-set without even knowing it. Motivated reasoning, for instance, is a way that the soldier mind-set sneaks in unnoticed, at least to ourselves. (As with so many things, motivated reasoning is usually easier to spot in other people.) It happens for many reasons. For instance, beliefs are often interconnected, so changing one belief may involve bringing many others into question at the same time. That’s a lot to ask of anybody. In some cases, beliefs are required to maintain social belonging; the heretic risks excommunication. Relatedly, some beliefs become central to a person’s sense of identity; calling those beliefs into question can trigger a response seemingly far out of proportion to the question itself.

The problem with the soldier mind-set, of course, isn’t merely that it sometimes defends positions that are wrong or counterproductive; it’s that it struggles with any sort of adaptation to changed circumstances or facts. As Galef puts it, its views are inherently brittle. If any movement is interpreted as concession or surrender, then we can expect movement to be resisted.

Galef clearly sides with the scout, who is open to changing their findings as new information becomes available. Much of the book is devoted to helping people who agree with her find ways to check their own thinking and guard against backsliding.

So far, so good, even given the vaguely Calvinist overtones of watching oneself closely for signs of sin. But when the setting shifts from the personal to the interpersonal, Galef’s bifurcation becomes trickier.

To her credit, she addresses the common belief that if you want to make social change, you need followers, and people are likelier to follow confident leaders. Yes, she responds, but there are two kinds of confidence: epistemic confidence and social confidence. People respond much more strongly to the latter than to the former. Epistemic confidence amounts to certainty; social confidence is more like self-assurance. So for instance, a leader who says, “We don’t know when the next hurricane will hit, but we know that when it does, we’ll get through it just fine together” is blending epistemic humility -- “we don’t know when the next hurricane will hit” -- with social confidence. That can work.

To my frustration, though, Galef doesn’t flip her scenario around. Many leaders have been in the position of finding that followers crave epistemic certainty, even if it’s unwarranted. Demagoguery, for instance, can be read as the offering of a false certainty to a scared population. The persistent market for simplistic, us-against-them solutions suggests real dangers to leaders who fail to take the yearning for certainty seriously. Racism, for instance, fails hard when scored against the “intellectual honesty” test, but it does quite well in elections. Simple-minded narratives of good and evil, or us and them, persist because they work. (Put differently, they’re false, but they’re effective.) They work not because the masses are somehow bamboozled, but because those narratives serve other needs. Treating mind-set in isolation from circumstances will make it difficult to appreciate how useful certain kinds of stubbornness can be, at least for certain purposes. Mind-sets thrive, or not, in embedded situations. Self-scrutiny will go only so far. If we want the scout mind-set to thrive, we need to build a world in which it can. That’s a tall order.

Which is why Galef’s book stuck with me. It’s well written, sometimes funny and often wise. It takes a perspective with which I largely agree. It could make for amazing class assignments for certain kinds of courses. But building a world in which its recommendations are likely to get real traction requires a different set of questions altogether.