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).
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).