There are times when the world seems more than usually out of control. Why are humans so destructive, acting against our better interests and the greater good? Have we lost our collective ability to analyze information and make decisions? Can we change?  

Michael Lewis is a financial journalist whose numerous books include “Liar’s Poker,” about Wall Street in the greedy and boorish 1980s; and “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,” about the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis and resulting Great Recession. Sean Illing, the host of Vox Conversations, writes about political philosophy and is the co-author (with Zac Gershberg) of “The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion.”

Recently they explored the state of the nation by asking “Why don’t Americans trust the experts?” Among their observations: the sheer volume of information available on the internet creates the illusion that anyone can be an expert, blurring the difference between a quick read and years of scholarship. As a result, we’ve lost the balance between healthy skepticism and the appreciation of genuine knowledge, between questioning authority and following advice that can save our lives. 

In addition, the hierarchical nature of our social, government and corporate structures creates artificial barriers and leads us to overvalue people with high perceived status and undervalue those a few rungs down who have more hands-on knowledge. 

Regarding our apparent collective inability to differentiate good information from bad, Lewis cites the highly questionable and largely anecdotal stories about COVID that spread exponentially and were exploited to persuade millions of people to act recklessly by refusing to get vaccinated or comply with basic preventive actions. He zeroes in on innumeracy as a defining problem. “If I could do anything, I’d probably start with making everyone take a basic course in statistics. Everybody would have to learn a little bit about data and probabilities, just so they understand the notion of a small sample size, especially a sample size of one.”

Julia Galef is the co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Applied Rationality and the author of “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t.” She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in statistics before embarking on a quest for ways we can improve our reasoning and decision-making skills. 

To capture the key attributes of effective reasoning, Galef contrasts two metaphorical frames of mind. The “soldier” mindset promotes and defends one’s established beliefs and debunks opposing views. The “scout” ventures out to get the lay of the land, collects information and creates an accurate map so that effective strategies can be devised. Soldiers can lapse into tribalism and self-deception when their beliefs are challenged, while “scouts” are characterized by openness to new ideas and to the possibility of being wrong and admitting error. The truth may be unwelcome or inconvenient, but we can only make good decisions when we operate as truth-seekers.

One of Galef’s key observations is that most of us who think about thinking tend to have a cognitive bias “blind spot”—we are quick to detect faulty thinking in others and not so good at correcting our own biases. Her remedy is to keep a “surprise journal” where she takes note of situations in which her expectations have been shown to be wrong. Galef closed her 2016 TED talk by talking about the skill set of a scout, abilities more grounded in emotional efficacy and personal vision than in academic ability or IQ: “What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?”

I think we need more scouts.