Miguel Lima

“Not all overconfidence is due to motivated reasoning. Sometimes we simply don’t realize how complicated a topic is, so we overestimate how easy it is to get the right answer. But a large portion of overconfidence stems from a desire to feel certain. Certainty is simple. Certainty is comfortable. Certainty makes us feel smart and competent.”
― Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often

“None of these approaches have shown much promise in changing people’s thinking in the long run or outside of the classroom. And that should not surprise us. We use motivated reasoning not because we don’t know any better, but because we’re trying to protect things that are vitally important to us—our ability to feel good about our lives and ourselves, our motivation to try hard things and stick with them, our ability to look good and persuade, and our acceptance in our communities.”
― Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often

“Of course, all maps are imperfect simplifications of reality, as a scout well knows. Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs.”
― Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often

“As the late physicist Richard Feynman once said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: The Perils of Defensive Thinking and How to Be Right More Often