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GALEF

                                                        September 19, 2018

                              About Julia Galef's "Long Now" presentation
                              (Galef's book on the subject is not out yet.)

                                             [ref]
Julia Galef is interested in
"motivated reasoning" and the
possibility that we can learn              She doesn't consider the
to do better to overcome it                possibilities on the level
on an individual level.                    of group behavior at all,
                                           though mentions she'd like
  She, like me, is a believer in the       to cover this in her *next*
  true faith of Reason, and I think        book (not the upcoming one).
  some of her better material is
  arguing against the claim that                 FAST_SLOW_AND_SLOWER
  optimistic delusions are better
  than realistic appraisal.                I gather that "motivated reasoning"
                                           is a shorter and less contentious
  Julia Galef plays up the phrase "The     term for "ideological motivated
  Soldier and the Scout", arguing that     reasoning", but the phrase is
  we need to be more like scouts than      baffling when you first hear it:
  soldiers.                                what's wrong with having motives
                                           when you're trying to reason?  Maybe
  She's using what is admittedly an        you want to find something out, maybe
  oversimplified cartoon view of           you want to evaluate a theory...
  mental reasoning, where these are        who doesn't have motives?
  the two ways of thinking.  The
  "Scout" immediately makes sense:            Arguably we can use some better
  scouts are much like scientists,            terminology than this academic
  they want to know what's going on.          jargon, which is of course the
  Opposing this with the "Soldier" is         motivation for developing
  a little murky-- to my ear she has          something like the "soldier and
  to wave her hands somewhat to force         scout" labels.
  it to work.
                                                She calls soldier & scout
                                                "metaphors', and perhaps
To my ear, when she tries to                    unfortunately references
explain in detail why she                       Lakoff's "Metaphors We Live By".
uses the terms "soldier" and
"scout", she repeatedly gets                          GOLDLEAF_FRAME
tangled up--

This seems funny, because it               At her longnow talk, she mentioned
wouldn't be difficult to rescue it:        (but only mentioned) another common
                                           pairing: judge and lawyer.
I would think the idea would be
intuition vs reason: Soldiers
"think fast", Scouts are more      Another approach: scouts hang back and
careful.  One is biased toward     observe, soldiers try to engage and get
immediate action, the other is     something done.  Notably, she doesn't go
reflective.                        there-- she probably doesn't want to suggest
                                   that scouts are passive or ineffective.
  That would seem to be clear
  enough, but she really wants
  to connect it up to
  "motivated reasoning" very              [link]
  tightly, and often seems to
  get stuck.                              From an inteverview with Galef:

  I think the best I've heard             "I think probably the most important
  from her is that soldiers treat         cognitive bias for us to be aware of
  new information as either an            is what scientists call motivated
  ally or an enemy, and if it             cognition, and what I call soldier
  contradicts a belief, they go           mindset. ...  I call it a soldier
  on the attack-- scouts then,            mindset because it's very similar to
  are supposed to evaulate an             the way a soldier approaches other
  opposing position neutrally,            soldiers on the battlefield. Some
  estimating it's strength                ideas are friendly soldiers, they're
  accurately, even if this is             on our side, and we want to support
  news they didn't really want            them, defend them, and help them
  to hear.                                win. Other ideas are enemy soldiers
                                          and we're motivated to shoot them
  She sometimes seems to be hampered      down, attack them, and defend
  by a movie-goer's idea of what a        ourselves from them."
  soldier does-- at one point she was
  attributing some particularly           "On the one hand, reason helps us
  extreme behavior to "soldiers" and      figure out what's true; on the other
  Stewart Brand commented that that       hand, it also helps us defend ideas
  kind of soldier would end up in the     that are false yet strategically
  stockade.                               useful.  I'll explore these two
                                          different modes of thought-- I call
  I would think you need a more           them 'the scout' and 'the soldier'--"
  deft hand than this if you're
  going to deploy a metaphor                  When one thinks of soldiers,
  to try to simplify a discussion...          that's not the first thing
                                              that comes to mind--
     META4
                                                  "The politician and the
                 Though Thomas                    scientist" would be more
                 Friedman remains                 accurate, if not as catchy.
                 popular, so what                 (Less strategically useful?)
                 do I know?





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