As much as he might wish there were a bridge in a strategic spot, he knows that wishing cannot make it so. Many people treat “reasoning as defensive combat,” the hallmark of what Galef calls “soldier mindset.” Its converse is “scout mindset.” The soldier seeks to defend his position at all costs, while the scout surveys and reports what he sees. But after a few years teaching these workshops, Galef concluded that knowledge of common logical fallacies and biases, while helpful, is not enough. Galef is the host of the podcast “Rationally Speaking” and a co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, which holds workshops on rational thinking and avoiding cognitive biases. The solution is not mere knowledge, but mindset cultivated into habit “In contrast to directionally motivated reasoning,” Galef remarks, he was led by “accuracy motivated reasoning,” which “evaluates ideas through the lens of ‘Is it true?’” This focus enabled Picquart-a man of heroic intellectual honesty, who endured years of personal suffering in the process-to reverse Dreyfus’s conviction and obtain his freedom.Ģ. The man who exonerated Dreyfus, Colonel Georges Picquart, approached the investigation with an entirely different modus operandi. From their perspective, they were conducting an objective investigation of the evidence, and the evidence pointed to Dreyfus.” “It might not look this way,” writes Galef, “but the officers who arrested Dreyfus had not set out to frame an innocent man. But when confronted by contrary evidence, they sought excuses to dismiss or discount it. When the investigators found evidence that appeared to confirm Dreyfus’s guilt, they sought grounds for believing it. This, Galef points out, was a classic case of “motivated reasoning” employed to defend pre-existing beliefs and conclusions. When the treasonous letters leaking secrets to the Germans resumed, Dreyfus’s prosecutors reasoned that a new traitor had appeared who happened to have similar handwriting. Dreyfus was publicly shamed, stripped of his rank, and sent to a penal colony on the aptly named Devil’s Island for a life of solitary confinement. When a second expert contradicted the first, investigators found that the second had connections to Jewish bankers and decided he could not be trusted. Witnesses came forward to report that they had heard Dreyfus praise the German Empire, that they’d seen him gambling, that he kept mistresses despite being married and a handwriting expert matched Dreyfus’s scrawl to a damning piece of evidence. As the only high-ranking Jewish officer in the French military during the early 1890s, a particularly antisemitic period in France’s history, suspicion immediately fell on him when it was learned that a traitor had been leaking military secrets to the Germans. Some prior conviction concealed a blind spot and kept him from asking pertinent questions.Īlfred Dreyfus lost five years of his life to such a mistake.
It’s a tale as old as time: A man thinks he’s being evenhanded in assessing something, only to later learn that bias had disfigured his evaluation. It’s easier than you think to fall into motivated reasoning Here are five more from Galef’s latest, The Scout Mindset.ġ. Among them are Stephen Hicks and Helen Pluckrose, for mucking around in the sewers of postmodernism and cataloging the causes of our predicament Virginia Postrel, Johan Norberg, Matt Ridley, and Steven Pinker, for reminding us of the importance of dynamism, the open society, progress, and enlightenment and more recently, social scientists and practitioners such as Adam Grant and Julia Galef for their tips and techniques on cultivating and preserving objectivity.Ī few months back, I shared six important lessons from Grant’s latest book, Think Again.
Those few who are working to diagnose and cure our culture deserve our attention and appreciation. After decades of decay in our academic training grounds, radical identitarianism and other irrationalities are spreading with accelerating speed, and we are woefully short of thinkers capable of fighting them. Increasingly, the barbarians are not merely at the gates, but running the show in a vast swathe of humanities departments. University professors resign in frustration from what were once our bastions of rationality. Respect for reason has waxed and waned throughout history.
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