Book Review: The Scout Mindset
8th October 2021
You tried Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, but the replication crisis crushed your faith. You tried Mike Cernovich’s Gorilla Mindset, but your neighbors all took out restraining orders against you. And yet, without a mindset, what separates you from the beasts? Just in time, Julia Galef brings us The Scout Mindset (subtitle: “Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t).
I have read this book, and it has a lot of useful stuff.
Reading between the lines, I think she learned pretty much the same thing a lot of the rest of us learned during the grim years of the last decade. Of the fifty-odd biases discovered by Kahneman, Tversky, and their successors, forty-nine are cute quirks, and one is destroying civilization. This last one is confirmation bias – our tendency to interpret evidence as confirming our pre-existing beliefs instead of changing our minds. This is the bias that explains why your political opponents continue to be your political opponents, instead of converting to your obviously superior beliefs. And so on to religion, pseudoscience, and all the other scourges of the intellectual world.
But she also learned that just telling people “Hey, avoid confirmation bias!” doesn’t work, even if you explain things very well and give lots of examples. What does work? Research is still ongoing, but the book concentrates on emotional and identity-related thought processes. Above, I made fun of everyone and their brother having a “mindset”, but this book uses the term deliberately: thinking clearly is about installing an entirely new mindset in yourself in a bunch of different ways.