Why "scout mindset" is crucial to good judgment | Julia Galef | TEDxPSU

I consider myself close to rationality and EA, so maybe I have to explain myself here. First, I call myself rationalist because of the culture around the blog SlateStarCodex (and r/<same name>[1]), by Scott Alexander (now at AstralCodexTen[2] for interesting reasons), and a bit less lesswrong.com , and also a few sources like Julia Galef (which is popular for the Scout Mindset[3]) and some people around this movement. The ideas are fairly tame and simple around encouraging clear thinking and avoiding biases -- but they go fairly deep into promoting an understanding how our brains and minds work (frequently discussed in SSC). I am partly defined by this now, I learned a lot about myself and in some ways improved my writing and why not thinking (yes, thinking more effective in general terms is not as well defined as it seems, and not nearly as effective as it seems either -- but in a certain sense I think it's good). I have not went through EY's extensive work to critique or embrace it. I think this movement is partly a response to the very damaging ideological war environment of the late 2010s and still ongoing that creates divided societies and not bringing us closer to a move charitable, loving, understanding, good future (instead lost in endless culture wars -- that in a way became very real wars with millions of affected). EA is a nice sort of consensus result from (part?) of the community as how one should approach charity and ethics (but none of the original EAs came fro

As a queer person who uses TikTok, I think you should take some time to challenge your assumptions and get some more information. This video might be informative: ▶ this video I should correct a mistake I made earlier: all of my numbers cited are likes not views. The TikTok promoting vaccines was seen 3.5 Million times. There are many queer creators with videos in the millions of views, and many more with videos in the hundreds of thousands. Still, I don't think its reasonable to expect niche content from obese people to perform as well as generic content from normative people. I also don't think its reasonable to expect trans content to perform as well, given that a substantial portion of the US population still doesn't want to recognize or legalize their existence. Yet, there is an abundance of queer content (content that sought me out, I never told TikTok that I'm gay), much of it quite niche. TikTok sends me enough gay male twink armpit fetish content that I don't realistically think you can say they're making a serious effort to suppress it. If you're focusing on hashtags and not algorithm suggestions, I think you don't have a strong grasp of how TikTok works. All of the cited sources are quite old, so perhaps it was too early for folks to actually have time to use and understand the service. Your claim that there is nothing threatening to China or TikTok economically is suspect, given the algorithm has also suggested Uighur muslim genocide content: link - there are many mo

If you want to encourage people to be less tactful with you, there is a wrong way to do so and there is a right way to do so. The wrong way is to get impatient with their attempts at tact and act as if they would given additional time and patience, be more manipulative. This assumes that manipulation requires more space & time because it is highly intentional. In my experience, most manipulative speech is a fast emotional (perhaps system 1) reaction to a situation where a fearful speaker is desperately trying to establish control of the outcome of an interaction. It often strives to protect the speaker’s own ego. Tact is exerting the mental effort to be clear about what one is not trying to say about someone else's ego while being clear about what one is trying to say about the facts of a situation. If you try to get others to be tactless by impatience, their fact-clarity will drop alongside their ego-preservation. So if you wish another to speak with less tact, the right way to do that is to set them at ease by saying things that indicate you have a low ego attachment to the topic and that you are willing to re-think your own beliefs. Then, they can redirect their mental RAM to creating increased fact-clarity. In short: Send signals that you are in "scout mindset" ▶ this video .

To be clear: I was neither advocating for or against lockdowns. I'm advocating thoughtfulness of trade-offs, informed by (but not limited to) data; as opposed to rigid ideology, or knee-jerk gut reactions. And in particular: to recognize that even if one believes that the data of a specific real-world circumstance clearly favors one end of the spectrum, there are also circumstances where the data can break the other way. Therefore we need to be tolerant and open-minded to good-faith skepticism in either direction. The fact that a wrong answer can be fatal makes it all the more important to avoid what Daniel Schmachtenberger refers to as "limbic highjacking", or more colloquially, "being triggered" (which includes both fear of death, and fear of losing autonomy). > ends justifying the means... the trend of a growing security state It's also worth remembering that these are not mutually exclusive: that circumstances exist where the ends do justify the means, yet are also used as a cynical power grab with additional negative externalities. Again, the only way to know the difference is dispassionate discernment (what Julia Galef refers to as "scout mindset" rather than "soldier mindset" [0]). [0] ▶ this video