TDLR: A good book with mass appeal to help people care more about being accurate. Fairly easy to read, which makes it easy to recommend to many people.
I’ve met Julia a few times and am friendly with her. I’d be happy if this book does well, and expect that to lead to a (slightly) more reasonable world.
That said, in the interest of having a Scout Mindset, I want to be honest about my impression.
The Scout Mindset is the sort of book I’m both happy with and frustrated by. I’m frustrated because this is a relatively casual overview of what I wish were a thorough Academic specialty. I felt similarly with The Life You Can Save when that was released.
Another way of putting this is that I was sort of hoping for an academic work, but instead, think of this more as a journalistic work. It reminds me of Vice Documentaries (which I like a lot) and Malcolm Gladwell (in a nice way), instead of Superforecasting or The Elephant in the Brain. That said, journalistic works have their unique contributions in the literature, it’s just a very different sort of work.
I just read through the book on Audible and don’t have notes. To write a really solid review would take more time than I have now, so instead, I’ll leave scattered thoughts.
1. The main theme of the book is the dichotomy of “The Scout Mindset” vs. “The Soldier Mindset”, and more specifically, why the Scout Mindset is (almost always?) better than the Solider Mindset. Put differently, we have a bunch of books about “how to think accurately”, but surprisingly few on “you should even try thinking accurately.” Sadly, this latter part has to be stated, but that’s how things are.
2. I was expecting a lot of references to scientific studies, but there seemed to be a lot more text on stories and a few specific anecdotes. The main studies I recall were a very few seemingly small psychological studies, which at this point I’m fairly suspect of. One small note: I found it odd that Elon Musk was described multiple times as something like an exemplar of honesty. I agree with the particular examples pointed to, but I believe Elon Musk is notorious for making explicit overconfident statements.
3. Motivated reasoning is a substantial and profound topic. I believe it already has many books detailing not only that it exists, but why it’s beneficial and harmful in different settings. The Scout Mindset didn’t seem to engage with much of this literature. It argued that “The Scout Mindset is better than the Soldier Mindset”, but that seems like an intense simplification of the landscape. Lies are a much more integral part of society than I think they are given credit for here, and removing them would be a very radical action. If you could go back in time and strongly convince particular people to be atheistic, that could be fatal.
4. The most novel part to me was the last few chapters, on “Rethinking Identity”. This section seems particularly inspired by the blog post Keep Your Identity Small by Paul Graham, but of course, goes into more detail. I found the mentioned stories to be a solid illustration of the key points and will dwell on these more.
5. People close to Julia’s work have heard much of this before, but maybe half or so seemed rather new to me.
6. As a small point, if the theme of the book is about the benefits of always being honest, the marketing seemed fairly traditionally deceiving. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the cover and quotes. I could easily see potential readers getting the wrong impression looking at the marketing materials, and there seems to be little work to directly make the actual value of the book more clear. There’s nothing up front that reads, “This book is aiming to achieve X, but doesn’t do Y and Z, which you might have been expecting.” I guess that Julia didn’t have control over the marketing.
I originally hoped to write a more “scholarly” book, but I spent months reading the literature on motivated reasoning and thought it was mostly pretty bad, and anyway not the actual cause of my confidence in the core claims of the book such as “You should be in scout mindset more often.” So instead I focused on the goal of giving lots of examples of scout mindset in different domains, and addressing some of the common objections to scout mindset, in hopes of inspiring people to practice it more often.
I left in a handful of studies that I had greater-than-average confidence in (for various reasons, which I might elaborate on in a blog post – e.g. I felt they had good external validity and no obvious methodological flaws). But I tried not to make it sound like those studies were definitive, nor that they were the main cause of my belief in my claims.
Ultimately I’m pretty happy with my choice. I understand why it might be disappointing for someone expecting a lot of research… but I think it’s an unfortunate reality, given the current state of the social sciences, that books which cite a lot of social science studies tend to give off an impression of rigor that is not deserved.
I am really glad about this choice, and also made similar epistemic updates over the last few years, and my guess is if I was to write a book, I would probably make a similar choice (though probably with more first-principles reasoning and a lot more fermi-estimates, though the latter sure sounds like it would cut into my sales :P).
Thanks! I do also rely to some extent on reasoning… for example, Chapter 3 is my argument for why we should expect to be better off with (on the margin) more scout mindset and less soldier mindset, compared to our default settings. I point out some basic facts about human psychology (e.g., the fact that we over-weight immediate consequences relative to delayed consequences) and explain why it seems to me those facts imply that we would have a tendency to use scout mindset less often than we should, even just for our own self interest.
The nice thing about argumentation (as compared to citing studies) is that it’s pretty transparent—the reader can evaluate my logic for themselves and decide if they buy it.
That’s good to hear! I haven’t yet gotten super far into the book, so can’t judge for myself yet, and my guess about doing more first-principles reasoning was mostly based on priors.
Reviewing works can be tricky, because I’d focus on very different aspects when targeting different people. When describing books to potential readers, I’d focus on very different aspects than when trying to comment on how good of a job the author did to advance the topic.
In this case the main issue is that I wasn’t sure what kind of book to expect, so wanted to make that clear to other potential readers. It’s like when a movie has really scary trailers but winds up being being a nice romantic drama.
Some natural comparison books in this category are Superforecasting and Thinking Fast and Slow, where the authors basically took information from decades of their own original research. Of course, this is an insanely high bar and really demands an entire career. I’m curious how you would categorize The Scout Mindset. (“Journalistic?” Sorry if the examples I pointed to seemed negative)
I think you specifically did a really good job given the time you wanted to allocate to it (you probably didn’t want to wait another 30 years to publish), but that specific question isn’t particularly relevant to potential readers, so it’s tricky to talk about all things at once.
I’d also note that I think there’s also a lot of non-experimental work that could be done in the area, similar to The Elephant in the Brain, or many Philosophical works (I imagine habryka thinks similarly). This sort of work would probably sell much worse, but is another avenue I’m interested in for future research.
(About The Village, I just bring this up because it was particularly noted for people having different expectations from what the movie really was. I think many critics really like it at this point.)
Fwiw I basically expected the book to be more in the Malcolm Gladwell genre (and I don’t say that pejoratively – it’s generally seemed to me that Julia’s strength and area of focus is in communicating concepts to a wider audience).
… By the way, you might’ve misunderstood the point of the Elon Musk examples. The point wasn’t that he’s some exemplar of honesty. It was that he was motivated to try to make his companies succeed despite believing that the most likely outcome was failure. (i.e., he is a counterexample to the common claim “Entrepreneurs have to believe they are going to succeed, or else they won’t be motivated to try”)
I guess that Julia didn’t have control over the marketing.
I’m sure she could have taken control, e.g. by self publishing. Which, if the book has a theme of pro-honesty, and if the marketing is deceptive in ways contra that theme, I do think we should look on this state of affairs with some amount of suspicion, which might then turn out to be unfounded. (I haven’t read the book, and I don’t know if either of those premises is true.)
(I originally posted this to Goodreads)
TDLR: A good book with mass appeal to help people care more about being accurate. Fairly easy to read, which makes it easy to recommend to many people.
I’ve met Julia a few times and am friendly with her. I’d be happy if this book does well, and expect that to lead to a (slightly) more reasonable world.
That said, in the interest of having a Scout Mindset, I want to be honest about my impression.
The Scout Mindset is the sort of book I’m both happy with and frustrated by. I’m frustrated because this is a relatively casual overview of what I wish were a thorough Academic specialty. I felt similarly with The Life You Can Save when that was released.
Another way of putting this is that I was sort of hoping for an academic work, but instead, think of this more as a journalistic work. It reminds me of Vice Documentaries (which I like a lot) and Malcolm Gladwell (in a nice way), instead of Superforecasting or The Elephant in the Brain. That said, journalistic works have their unique contributions in the literature, it’s just a very different sort of work.
I just read through the book on Audible and don’t have notes. To write a really solid review would take more time than I have now, so instead, I’ll leave scattered thoughts.
1. The main theme of the book is the dichotomy of “The Scout Mindset” vs. “The Soldier Mindset”, and more specifically, why the Scout Mindset is (almost always?) better than the Solider Mindset. Put differently, we have a bunch of books about “how to think accurately”, but surprisingly few on “you should even try thinking accurately.” Sadly, this latter part has to be stated, but that’s how things are.
2. I was expecting a lot of references to scientific studies, but there seemed to be a lot more text on stories and a few specific anecdotes. The main studies I recall were a very few seemingly small psychological studies, which at this point I’m fairly suspect of. One small note: I found it odd that Elon Musk was described multiple times as something like an exemplar of honesty. I agree with the particular examples pointed to, but I believe Elon Musk is notorious for making explicit overconfident statements.
3. Motivated reasoning is a substantial and profound topic. I believe it already has many books detailing not only that it exists, but why it’s beneficial and harmful in different settings. The Scout Mindset didn’t seem to engage with much of this literature. It argued that “The Scout Mindset is better than the Soldier Mindset”, but that seems like an intense simplification of the landscape. Lies are a much more integral part of society than I think they are given credit for here, and removing them would be a very radical action. If you could go back in time and strongly convince particular people to be atheistic, that could be fatal.
4. The most novel part to me was the last few chapters, on “Rethinking Identity”. This section seems particularly inspired by the blog post Keep Your Identity Small by Paul Graham, but of course, goes into more detail. I found the mentioned stories to be a solid illustration of the key points and will dwell on these more.
5. People close to Julia’s work have heard much of this before, but maybe half or so seemed rather new to me.
6. As a small point, if the theme of the book is about the benefits of always being honest, the marketing seemed fairly traditionally deceiving. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the cover and quotes. I could easily see potential readers getting the wrong impression looking at the marketing materials, and there seems to be little work to directly make the actual value of the book more clear. There’s nothing up front that reads, “This book is aiming to achieve X, but doesn’t do Y and Z, which you might have been expecting.” I guess that Julia didn’t have control over the marketing.
Hey Ozzie! Thanks for reading / reviewing.
I originally hoped to write a more “scholarly” book, but I spent months reading the literature on motivated reasoning and thought it was mostly pretty bad, and anyway not the actual cause of my confidence in the core claims of the book such as “You should be in scout mindset more often.” So instead I focused on the goal of giving lots of examples of scout mindset in different domains, and addressing some of the common objections to scout mindset, in hopes of inspiring people to practice it more often.
I left in a handful of studies that I had greater-than-average confidence in (for various reasons, which I might elaborate on in a blog post – e.g. I felt they had good external validity and no obvious methodological flaws). But I tried not to make it sound like those studies were definitive, nor that they were the main cause of my belief in my claims.
Ultimately I’m pretty happy with my choice. I understand why it might be disappointing for someone expecting a lot of research… but I think it’s an unfortunate reality, given the current state of the social sciences, that books which cite a lot of social science studies tend to give off an impression of rigor that is not deserved.
I am really glad about this choice, and also made similar epistemic updates over the last few years, and my guess is if I was to write a book, I would probably make a similar choice (though probably with more first-principles reasoning and a lot more fermi-estimates, though the latter sure sounds like it would cut into my sales :P).
Thanks! I do also rely to some extent on reasoning… for example, Chapter 3 is my argument for why we should expect to be better off with (on the margin) more scout mindset and less soldier mindset, compared to our default settings. I point out some basic facts about human psychology (e.g., the fact that we over-weight immediate consequences relative to delayed consequences) and explain why it seems to me those facts imply that we would have a tendency to use scout mindset less often than we should, even just for our own self interest.
The nice thing about argumentation (as compared to citing studies) is that it’s pretty transparent—the reader can evaluate my logic for themselves and decide if they buy it.
That’s good to hear! I haven’t yet gotten super far into the book, so can’t judge for myself yet, and my guess about doing more first-principles reasoning was mostly based on priors.
Thanks so much, that makes a lot of sense.
Reviewing works can be tricky, because I’d focus on very different aspects when targeting different people. When describing books to potential readers, I’d focus on very different aspects than when trying to comment on how good of a job the author did to advance the topic.
In this case the main issue is that I wasn’t sure what kind of book to expect, so wanted to make that clear to other potential readers. It’s like when a movie has really scary trailers but winds up being being a nice romantic drama.
Some natural comparison books in this category are Superforecasting and Thinking Fast and Slow, where the authors basically took information from decades of their own original research. Of course, this is an insanely high bar and really demands an entire career. I’m curious how you would categorize The Scout Mindset. (“Journalistic?” Sorry if the examples I pointed to seemed negative)
I think you specifically did a really good job given the time you wanted to allocate to it (you probably didn’t want to wait another 30 years to publish), but that specific question isn’t particularly relevant to potential readers, so it’s tricky to talk about all things at once.
I’d also note that I think there’s also a lot of non-experimental work that could be done in the area, similar to The Elephant in the Brain, or many Philosophical works (I imagine habryka thinks similarly). This sort of work would probably sell much worse, but is another avenue I’m interested in for future research.
(About The Village, I just bring this up because it was particularly noted for people having different expectations from what the movie really was. I think many critics really like it at this point.)
Fwiw I basically expected the book to be more in the Malcolm Gladwell genre (and I don’t say that pejoratively – it’s generally seemed to me that Julia’s strength and area of focus is in communicating concepts to a wider audience).
… By the way, you might’ve misunderstood the point of the Elon Musk examples. The point wasn’t that he’s some exemplar of honesty. It was that he was motivated to try to make his companies succeed despite believing that the most likely outcome was failure. (i.e., he is a counterexample to the common claim “Entrepreneurs have to believe they are going to succeed, or else they won’t be motivated to try”)
I’m sure she could have taken control, e.g. by self publishing. Which, if the book has a theme of pro-honesty, and if the marketing is deceptive in ways contra that theme, I do think we should look on this state of affairs with some amount of suspicion, which might then turn out to be unfounded. (I haven’t read the book, and I don’t know if either of those premises is true.)