Learn To Improve Your Decision Making - Julia Galef | Modern Wisdom Podcast 332

Soldier mindset is my term for this often unconscious motivation that's guiding your thinking when you're reading an article or listening to an argument, where the motivation in the back of your mind is trying to defend your preexisting beliefs, or trying to defend things that you want to believe against any evidence that might threaten those beliefs. And so you're gonna be much more accepting of evidence if it supports what you already believe or want to believe, and you're gonna be much more motivated to find flaws in evidence that goes against your beliefs. Rationalizing or wishful thinking or self-justification, those are all facets of what I call soldier mindset.

Is being as rational as possible something that everyone should aim to do all the time?

(laughs) Well, so, like any philosophy nerd, I wanna immediately define all of the terms that you just used in that sentence so we can understand how we're using different words. Um, but I'll just ... I'll start with the idea of being rational. Um, I think a lot of people hear that word and they think of being like Spock from Star Trek, where you're not allowed to have any emotion and you're only allowed to do things that you can justify in dollars and cents (laughs) or in time efficiency or something like that. That's not actually, um, th- that's not how academics use the word rational. It's not how I'm used to thinking of the word rational. Um, rationality is just about, uh, forming beliefs that are as accurate as you can. That's one kind of rationality. And another kind is just making decisions that, um, that, that help you achieve your goals, whatever those goals might be. Those goals could be helping people you care about or it could be enjoying life or, uh, or, you know, succeeding at whatever you want. But, um, but the goal of, of being more rational is to just, uh, find more effective ways to get those goals for lower, um, lower s- cost or sacrifice. So, um, defined that way, uh, I think it's harder to argue that being rational is, uh, is not something we should strive for. Um, and so yes, I think, uh, improving your, your, they're called epistemic and instrumental irrationalities, is a really valuable goal. And, um, and I tend to argue that, uh, improving your ability to see things clearly and have accurate beliefs actually is a really good way to achieve your goals, to be more instrumentally rational, and that there's a, there's a real, um, a real synergy between those two kinds of rationality that I think people should be more aware of.

The problem is that most people aren't aware of just how irrational they are being. Most people presume that the decisions that they're making are going to take them towards their goals, right? If they have goals, they don't purposefully make decisions that don't take them toward them. But it's kind of like the emperor has no clothes in a weird way. They don't know that the things that they're doing are irrational.