But he also had a much stronger drive to recognize and pursue the truth than his fellow officers did. He didn’t like Dreyfus and he had all of the same biases that his fellow officers did. That was just kind of the norm in France at the time. His name is Colonel Picquart and he is anti-Semitic, just like his fellow officers were. But then another officer gets promoted to the head of this investigative department. So they convicted Dreyfus in this “soldier mindset”-filled investigation.ĭreyfus gets imprisoned on Devil’s Island. They ignored testimony from experts who said that Dreyfus’s handwriting didn’t match the memo, and they only trusted the experts who said the handwriting did match the memo. But their investigation, if you look at it from the outside, was incredibly slanted. The officers who prosecuted Dreyfus genuinely believed that he was the spy. They quickly converged on this high-ranking officer named Alfred Dreyfus, who was the only Jewish member in the top ranks of the French army. The French army realized they had a spy in their ranks and launched an investigation. A memo was found in a wastebasket written by someone in the French army, addressed to the Germans, divulging a bunch of top-secret military plans. So in the late 19th century in France there was what’s called the Dreyfus Affair. He’s a kind of loathsome guy in some ways, but admirable in others. You have a lot of examples of “scout mindset” in the book, and one of my favorites was the French Colonel Georges Picquart in the late 19th, early 20th century. It’s a different way of thinking about what to believe or thinking about what’s true. I call this “soldier mindset,” and “scout mindset” is an alternative to that. We try to “shoot down” opposing arguments and we try to “poke holes” in the other side. We try to “shore up” our beliefs, “support them” and “buttress them” as if they’re fortresses. I adopted this term because the way that we talk about reasoning in the English language is through militaristic metaphor. Rationalization, motivated reasoning, wishful thinking: these are all facets of what I’m calling a soldier mindset. It’s my term for the motivation to see things as they are and not as you wish they were, being or trying to be intellectually honest, objective, or fair minded, and curious about what’s actually true.īy default, a lot of the time we humans are in what I call “soldier mindset,” in which our motivation is to defend our beliefs against any evidence or arguments that might threaten them. Walk me through what you mean by “scout mindset.” What does it mean to have it? How do you know if you have it? Julia Galef
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |