I am rather good at not applying judgment to e.g. children or dogs, but relatedly have a very strong intuitive agent /patient split, which I understand doesn’t actually match reality.
At the same time, I am rightfully frustrated by the self-serving picking and choosing of when to use an agentic frame v when to use a moral patient frame.
This is great and I want more.
I really resonated with a part of it. Building up a scaffolding of “morality” or “self-righteous Protestant work ethic” both allows me to function in a reasonable way at all, but also has a side effect of feeling strongly morally judgmental towards others. I do think a large underlining part of that is this need-to-distance.
Low-level specific recommendation: Here is a really great calculator for splitting rents for different rooms. You enter in some basic info (total rent, number of rooms), and it continuously adjust room rents and asks individuals what their preferred room would be at different rent splits until it finds a rent split at which everyone would prefer different rooms. You can keep running it a few rounds past that to refine the answer more too.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/science/rent-division-calculator.html
I know it’s a decade old now, but I still love Vi Hart’s stuff on YouTube (less complex topics than the ones you listed though)
The Existential Giraffe is a pretty amusing primer on Cartesian doubt, but I don’t know how much a young kid actually “gets” of it. (But I’ve still had kids who particularly enjoy it as a book).
It has such entertaining lines as “The possibility of not really existing made Sammy very, very sad.”
https://youtu.be/e0AwVbfau8s
The same author also wrote the Moribund Mouse (a mouse learns he is going to die and so finally starts “living” but then goes back to his boring cubicle life when he learns the doctor was lying) and the Perspicacious Penguin (a penguin really likes green even though God himself has proclaimed that blue is superior)
Frog and Toad books are among my favorites.
https://daily.jstor.org/frog-and-toad-attend-a-philosophy-class/
I am super-duper surprised she says it took a few weeks to teach the Outside button! It took about… 15 minutes to teach my dog to use her Food bell. And then the Outside bell and Treat bells were similarly fast. I don’t think button pressing is inherently harder than bell ringing, so that shouldn’t make a difference.
I guess if the dog was starting at zero training it would take two weeks. (Robin already knew how to Target an item, which she learned after learning hand Touch, which she learned as part of the process of teaching how clicker-like training with positive reinforcers works in the first place. )
I can imagine abstract words like “Tomorrow” and “Where” taking a whole lot longer, but the words that are just ways to obtain concrete things are extremely easy to teach. Outside bells are a very well-known and frequently-done thing. Look them up on Amazon and you’ll see about 20 options for sale.
My dog does this unusual roundhouse butt attack when she’s playing with other dogs. It’s unusual enough that people comment on it.
I’ve definitely noticed other dogs start doing it too after playing with her a bunch.
There also SEEMS to be a thing where in e.g. Berkeley the dogs at the park play quietly. I wondered how they taught their dogs not to bark while playing, because this is NOT the case in midwest dog parks. But apparently it’s “cultural”. If the dogs don’t bark at the dog park you frequent, your dog will also not bark.
I’d do this! Right now my dog is my accountability partner, but she adjusts to waking up later herself! :) I’m in Pacific timezone
You can simplify the problem into straight behaviorism.… I’d have to look up which book I read this in (Don’t Shoot the Dog, maybe?), but there is a game you can teach dogs, dolphins, etc where you give them a box or something, and only reward them for novel behavior. So you reward them the first time they push it with their nose, but not any subsequent times. This seems to “teach” creativity, in that animals that play this game regularly get good at quickly coming up with unusual actions.
Note: I’m not saying the CORRECT thing to do is ignore all the substeps, conditions, pre-requisites, etc and go straight to “just reward the thing you want”. It was just a cute anecdote that seemed relevant.
But they’d probably have to have years and years of correctly predicted boring missions to make up for the amount of incorrect 99% predictions, right?
Maybe the Star Trek universe has low key solved aging, so even though it doesn’t seem like years between episodes, it really is. :P
There’s the counter-identity of scorning people who “pick stuff up and put it down again” and calling all sports “sportsball”, etc.
I think it’s related to what Julia mentioned about having an identity that’s just against some other group.
Thanks! (Updating accordingly)
Oh wow. There is an example of a person who used to be certain they didn’t want kids and changed their mind later, but felt awkward about it because older people used to be very patronizing about her desire to not have kids and would assure her that she’d change her mind when she got older.
This is me. Practically word for word how I’ve written about it. I would be certain this was literally me if it weren’t for the fact that I’d expect Julia to have mentioned if she were using me as an example. And I know Scott Alexander has talked about really common issues amongst his clients that feel personal enough that he thinks if his clients read them they’d think they were talking about them in particular as opposed to a general thing. And it’s probably not an uncommon thought to express.
But it’s the most I’ve ever felt that feeling of “that is literally me being quoted there” before. And I feel like maybe I’m a paranoid person.
Chapter 2: What the Soldier Mindset Protects
Comfort, Self esteem, Morale, Pursuasion, Self Esteem, Belonging
Chapter 1: Two Types of Thinking
Motivated Reasoning
“Can I believe this?” (searching for evidence something is true) v “Must I believe this?” (searching for evidence something is false)
Introduction:
Scout Mindset is the ability to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.
“Was I in the wrong in that argument?”
How do we NOT self-decieve?
Realize that truth isn’t in conflict with your other goals
Learn tools that make it easier to see clearly, e.g. the Outsider Test
Appreciate the emotional rewards of Scout Mindset
I expect this book to be well-written and have interesting examples, but I expect it will mostly cover ground I’m already familiar with. That’s okay with me, the more I go over things, the more they get into my head and new examples help internalize thoughts in a way factual knowledge doesn’t.
I expect I will learn at least one new thing that isn’t just an example.
I expect that after listening to this book these ideas will be more in my head for the next week or month and so I will notice relevant issues and opportunities in my own life, which will help further internalize the ideas. But I also expect that big “in my head”-ness will diminish after a week or two.
Meta—I often relate to things with personal examples, so that might be a lot of my commentary.
The title and cover image reminds me of my grandfather who had been a Soviet scout in WW2. His job was to go far ahead closer to enemy lines, and radio back how to adjust their artillery fire to hit more accurately. He got shot out of a tree when the Germans saw the glint off his binoculars. Being a scout can be dangerous!
Meta Thread
I agree. I think the IVF number is just plain wrong. I’m getting ready to have IVF myself and the total bill will be well over $25k even if we succeed in the first round, which is only 65% likely.
Maybe he researched the cost of “IVF” itself, but didn’t think to add on the cost of implantation, injectable drugs, etc. which is a huge percentage of the cost.