Julia Galef's "The Scout Mindset": Unlocking Clarity and Insight to See Things Differently

Ace Ventura: Possessed of a rare clarity, this book should be handed out as a user manual before anyone is allowed to access twitter or facebook.

United Kingdom on Jun 13, 2023

Gökhan Bozkurt: The ink and the paper quality is very low. The text is kind of rubber out. At one point I thought if they sent me a pirated book... The content of the book is good, it gives general advices on how to see/look for things differently.

Germany on Apr 17, 2023

Hande Z: The subtitle of this book is ‘Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t’, an alternative text could be, ‘Why smart people do dumb things’. What such people lack, according to Galef, is ‘the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish them to be’. This is related to but slightly different from the problem of self-deception. The scout-mindset, as Galef calls the positive way of thinking, is more than self-deception (which is hiding truth from ourselves) but it is also about confronting truth – and having the good sense to admit that we are wrong.

This book provides the means of testing whether we have the scout mindset, and the methods by which we can train our minds to acquire it. Good lawyers are not those who are supremely confident of their case, but those who are wary of the weaknesses in it. They strive to see what the opposing side has and how that might affect the case in case.

Part of the methodology requires one to examine the reasons and explanations of the subject under contemplation. Galef explains the rule known as ‘Chesterton’s Fence’. It appeared in G K Chesterton’s essay in 1929. There Chesterton describes a...

United States on Jan 01, 2023

Arthur: The item conforms to the description of the item purchased.
When will a French version be available?
This kind of intellectual honesty and coherence is missing in France (so one star less ^^)

France on May 11, 2022

Brandon Porter: A scout wants to understand. A soldier wants to defend. This is the extended metaphor author Julia Galef uses in her book, The Scout Mindset. Galef encourages readers to think more like scouts asking "Is this true?" and less like soldiers who ask "Do I like this belief?"

We believe that we are smart and other people are dumb. We believe that our tribe is moral and other tribes are immoral. We believe our ideas are rational and other ideas are irrational. The Scout Mindset is about the need to see the world clearly, rather than allowing our cognitive biases to distort our vision.

I've lost count of how many books I have read on myside bias, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, self-serving bias, etc. Galef does do some things better than any other, though.

While other books in this genre will state that the bias to believe what one wants to be true is an unconscious process, they rarely expound upon that fact more than passing mentions, they never explain how the unconscious mind accomplishes this without our awareness, and they almost always make it seem as though one must simply think slower or think again or check oneself for bias in order to overcome...

United States on Jun 10, 2021

ntevanzi: Nothing to do with boyscouts, this is a nicely crafted rationalist manifesto from the boss of the consistently good Rationally Speaking podcast. Galef characterizes rationalists as military scouts, whose job it is to understand the lay of the land, not to tell beguiling stories about it. This is a useful caricature, but even more useful (because it's more common and insidious) is that of the soldier: loyal, unquestioning, and easily led. We're all soldiers when we ignore inconvenient geographical features in favour of comfortable stories that answer all our questions. Galef lists a few useful rationalist inquiriy tools to help us recognize the soldier in us. The hope is that we'll be able to resist the temptation to let someone do our thinking for us, and become better scouts. This is important in the new age of polarization.

The question is whether it is tractable. Galef is ipso facto preaching to the converted. To a would-be rationalist, or a sceptic, or an epistemological minimalist, the appeal of learning to recognize your own biddability, gullibility and inflexibility is obvious. At the margin, the techniques and observations she presents are all useful buttresses...

Germany on May 30, 2021

Niall O'Connor: The themes are not new.

As I read through this book I am reminded of the writing of Homer on motivated reasoning (Strong emotions drive attentional focus and contribute to motivated reasoning); Quine, on the fact that our beliefs cohere; Mintzberg on the need for an incrementalist approach to strategy; O'Connor on the fact that delusions are a bet the veracity of which can never be called into question; Rumi on the fact that we should set our life on fire and seek those that fan our flames: Adam Philips on the fact that core beliefs are always self-reinforcing and that we unconsciously seek out confirmatory evidence that is consistent with them, quickly moving to discount, ignore and distort disconfirmatory evidence; Tim Harford on the fact that we should learn to listen to, engage with and embrace the beliefs of those that we disagree with; Nate Silver on the need to obtain a sophisticated grasp of which models and idealisations are adequate for the reality that they attempt to describe; Nietzsche on the fact that all knowledge is perspectical; the teachings of the followers of Pyrrhonism.

As with Harford's recent book we get the de rigueur hat tip to the so-called...

United Kingdom on May 01, 2021

Glenn Campbell: I've been a Superfan of the author for several months now, so don't call me unbiased. How Superfan? I had the author read me her book while I drove cross-country, and I LIVE-TWEETED my real-time reactions. (Amazon won't let me link to the thread, but you can find it if you're clever.)

I have always considered myself a "Scout", but I didn't have a word for it. That's one of the most valuable gifts of the author: attaching words and concrete examples to concepts I've only known intuitively. Since I consider myself "there" already, I wouldn't say this book changed my thinking or behavior, but it gave me lots of new tools for my toolbox.

The most powerful tool is the title. The term "soldier mindset" predates the author, but Scout Mindset is the author's own creation. It describes a role in life: that of a military scout who goes out into the world to discover how it actually is. A soldier believes what they need to believe to defend themselves and their tribe, but the Scout is concerned with objective truth. How many troops does the enemy have? Where are the bridges and barriers? For the ultimate benefit of themselves and their tribe, the Scout needs to know what's...

United States on Apr 18, 2021