When Certainty Becomes a Weapon

How epistemic soldiers conquered the discourse—and why civilization still depends on the scouts.

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Not really being a public intellectual—or a private one for that matter—my observations tend to be simple and often obvious. I have observed two kinds of people when it comes to ideology - there is one group that uses every morsel of information currently available to continuously interrogate their knowledge and beliefs and the second rejects any information that doesn’t confirm their biases. They then often use unrelated information that is often complete non sequitur to construct weak or false narratives they present as evidence of their “correctness”.

I have long toyed with the idea that while modern public life is typically divided primarily by ideology, class, or even party, it stopped being divided by those long ago and now is better understood as being segregated more by cognitive style—how people handle the modern deluge of information we all face.

As part of my ongoing self-managed continuing education, I went out looking for answers, and a while back, I found Julia Galef. Galef is the co-founder of the non-profit Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) and over the weekend, I finished her 2021 book called The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. In it, Galef distinguishes two contrasting approaches to belief and reasoning: a “scout mindset” and a “soldier mindset”—giving definition to the two groups I mentioned earlier.

Social scientists and commentators now use increasingly precise labels for these two archetypes. On one side are the reality-trackers—Julia Galef’s “scouts,” or what psychologists call actively open-minded thinkers. On the other are the epistemic soldiers—the “warriors,” otherwise known as motivated reasoners. Their conflict is not a metaphor. It is the defining intellectual struggle of our era.

Reality-trackers operate with an almost painful openness to being wrong. Their beliefs function as maps rather than identity markers, sketches that must be continually revised to match the terrain. When new data arrive—an unexpected study outcome, a leaked memo contradicting the preferred narrative, an uncomfortable fact about their own side—they wince, take a breath, and update. Their question is simple: What would have to be true for me to change my mind? And they try to answer it honestly.

This “scout mindset” is not relativism. It is fidelity to accuracy over allegiance. When a favored policy fails in Denmark, they do not declare Denmark irrelevant; they ask what they missed. When evidence undermines their priors, they adjust the priors instead of contorting the evidence. In an era of information warfare, these people are the closest thing we have to civic adults.

Epistemic soldiers, by contrast, treat doubt as treason. Their worldview is a fortress to be defended at any cost. Beliefs are badges of tribal membership, and contradictory evidence triggers not curiosity but a threat response. The same individual who demands randomized controlled trials before trusting a pharmaceutical study will treat a blurry screenshot from an anonymous account as conclusive proof if it strikes the right political target. Non sequiturs become knock-down arguments; the absence of evidence becomes evidence of cover-up; any data that challenges the overwrought narrative is automatically suspect.

These are people we refer to as “always wrong, but never in doubt.”

Motivated reasoning has always existed, but social media has turned soldiers into a dominant caste. The platforms reward certainty, outrage, and tribal display, not calibration or humility. A reality-tracker who admits error is mauled by the mob; an epistemic soldier who fabricates an inflammatory story—about immigrant crime, election conspiracies, or clandestine weather weapons—receives millions of impressions and sometimes a congratulatory call from the former president. Algorithms amplify the least inquisitive voices precisely because they are the loudest.

We are witness to how this makes civic consequences so devastating. Policy devolves into performance art—crafted for virality rather than viability. Institutions lose legitimacy when each half of the electorate believes the other half is either duped by propaganda or participating in a coordinated psy-op. The erosion of trust is now symmetrical even though the openness to evidence is not. A society dominated by soldiers becomes one in which arguments are interpreted as attacks, facts as affiliations, and errors as moral failings.

Yet the scout mindset is not naive idealism; it is historically indispensable. Every scientific breakthrough, every moral advance, every time a civilization clawed its way out of a period of dogma and decay, it did so because a small minority of reality-trackers refused to lie to themselves. They were denounced as heretics and traitors. History eventually called them pioneers.

The divide is not immutable. Soldiers sometimes convert—but rarely through direct confrontation. Argumentation feels like combat to them and only deepens their entrenchment. What changes them is quieter: repeated private encounters with predictive failure. When someone’s ideological fortress is breached over and over by events that were not supposed to happen, the drawbridge eventually lowers. Humility leaks in. The soldier steps, tentatively, into reality.

For now, the scouts remain outnumbered and out-amplified.

But they enjoy one decisive and permanent advantage: reality is not on the soldiers’ side. And reality, though sometimes painfully patient, always gets the last word.