The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't

Here's a way to tell scientific intelligence from legal intelligence. Both may start from the idea that something cannot be done and think up arguments to explain why. However, the scientist may discover a flaw in the argument that leads him change his mind and to discover a way to do it...

The legal thinker will merely try to patch the flaw in the argument, because, once he has chosen a side, all his intelligence is devoted to finding arguments for that side.

Here's a way to tell scientific intelligence from legal intelligence. Both may start from the idea that something cannot be done and think up arguments to explain why. However, the scientist may discover a flaw in the argument that leads him change his mind and to discover a way to do it...

The legal thinker will merely try to patch the flaw in the argument, because, once he has chosen a side, all his intelligence is devoted to finding arguments for that side.

We talk about our beliefs as if they're military positions, or even fortresses, built to resist attack. Beliefs can be deep-rooted, well-grounded, built on fact, and backed up by arguments. They rest on solid foundations. We might hold a firm conviction or a strong opinion, be secure in our beliefs or have unshakeable faith in something.

Arguments are either forms of attack or forms of defense. If we're not careful, someone might poke holes in our logic or shoot down our ideas. We might encounter a knock-down argument against something we believe. Our positions might get challenged, destroyed, undermined, or weakened. So we look for evidence to support, bolster, or buttress our position. Over time, our views become reinforced, fortified, and cemented. And we become entrenched in our beliefs, like soldiers holed up in a trench, safe from the enemy's volleys.

And if we do change our minds? That's surrender. If a fact is inescapable, we might admit, grant, or allow it, as if we're letting it inside our walls. If we realize our position is indefensible, we might abandon it, give it up, or concede a point, as if we're ceding ground in a battle.

Even words that don't seem to have any connection to the defensive combat metaphor often reveal one when you dig into their origins. To rebut a claim is to argue that it's untrue, but the word originally referred to repelling an attack. Have you heard of someone being a staunch believer? A staunch is a solidly constructed wall. Or perhaps you've heard of someone being adamant in their beliefs, a word that once referred to a mythical unbreakable stone.

This book is informative and mind-opening. A kind of “how to” not a “why” book trying to redeem your “scout mindset” (curious and researching) from your “soldier mindset” (defensive and biased).

1- Bias: Counting the exact number of real life soldier and scout mindset

This book is informative and mind-opening. A kind of “how to” not a “why” book trying to redeem your “scout mindset” (curious and researching) from your “soldier mindset” (defensive and biased).

1- Bias: Counting the exact number of real life soldier and scout mindset examples of the book is a hard task, because many of the instances are unknown people. However, among well-known characters, most of scouts are liberals (or conservatives who, due to scout mindset, behave like liberals) and as you can guess, soldiers are mostly conservatives. The most iconic scouts introduced in this book are: Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk (who is difficult to categorize but it is hard to label him a conservative), Barry Goldwater (once a conservative but inclined to some liberal causes in his later life), Susan Blackmore, Jerry Taylor(advocate of climate change), Joshua Harris author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye: A New Attitude Toward Relationships and Romance (at first a soldier then after repenting for his conservative book became a scout), and Humane League (an animal rights group). Most of them were liberal (by the standard of the time) or conservative who became liberal. What about liberal soldiers? I could find just Lyndon Johnson, and physicist Lawrence Krauss.

By reading Julia Galef's book, I can conclude (of course implicitly) there is a strong association between liberalism (mainly atheism) and scout mindset.

2- Shallowness: By this I mean some hasty information which does not seem to be well-researched. For example, In chapter 12 she tries to debunk the “team of rivals” myth. I quote the exact paragraphs:

“When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860, he reached out to the men who had been his main opponents for the Republican nomination—Simon Cameron, Edward Bates, Salmon Chase, and William Seward—and offered them all positions in his cabinet. That story was immortalized by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in her bestselling 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln’s “team of rivals” is now a standard example cited in books and articles urging people to expose themselves to diverse opinions. “Lincoln self-consciously chose diverse people who could challenge his inclinations and test one another’s arguments in the interest of producing the most sensible judgments,” wrote Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein in his book Going to Extremes. Barack Obama cited Team of Rivals as inspiration for his own presidency, praising Lincoln for being “confident enough to be willing to have these dissenting voices” in his cabinet.
This is the account I had heard as well, before I began researching this book. But it turns out that the full story yields a more complicated moral. Out of the four “rivals” Lincoln invited into his cabinet—Cameron, Bates, Chase, and Seward—three left early, after an unsuccessful tenure.”

“In my own effort to illuminate the character and career of Abraham Lincoln, I have coupled the account of his life with the stories of the remarkable men who were his rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination—New York senator William H. Seward, Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase, and Missouri’s distinguished elder statesman Edward Bates.”

“With Seward, Stanton, and Welles secure in their cabinet places, the resignation of Edward Bates provided the only opening for change in the immediate aftermath of the election. The seventy-one-year-old Bates had contemplated resigning the previous spring, after suffering through a winter of chronic illness. In May, his son Barton had pleaded with him to return to St. Louis. “The situation of affairs is such that you are not required to sacrifice your health and comfort for any good which you may possibly do,” urged Barton. “As to pecuniary matters, I know well that you have but little to fall back on…for the present at least make your home at my house & Julian’s, going from one to the other as suits your convenience…. You’ve done your share of work anyhow, & it is time the youngsters were working for you. If you had nothing at all, Julian and I could continue to take good care of you and Ma and the girls; & you know that we would do it as cheerfully as you ever worked for us, and we would greatly prefer to do it rather than you should be wearing yourself out as now with labor and cares unsuited to your age.”
The prospect of going home to children and grandchildren was attractive, especially to Julia Bates, whose wishes remained paramount with her husband after forty-one years of marriage. On their anniversary in late May, Bates happily noted that “our mutual affection is as warm, and our mutual confidence far stronger, than in the first week of marriage. This is god’s blessing.”
However, during the dark period that preceded the fall of Atlanta, when Bates believed “the fate of the nation hung, in doubt & gloom,” he did not feel he could leave his post. Nor did he wish to depart until Lincoln’s reelection was assured. “Now, on the contrary,” he wrote to Lincoln on November 24, 1864, ‘the affairs of the Government display a brighter aspect; and to you, as head & leader of the Government all the honor & good fortune that we hoped for, has come. And it seems to me, under these altered circumstances, that the time has come, when I may, without dereliction of duty, ask leave to retire to private life.’”

“Bates resigned after becoming increasingly detached from his work. He had little influence in the administration; Lincoln didn’t request his counsel very often, and Bates didn’t offer it.”

I am not an expert in American history, but I think the author analyzed Lincoln’s cabinet according to her soldier mindset. In addition, you can find some minor mistakes in the Dreyfus affair part of this book.

3- Variance: In chapter 6 there is a section with the title “Quantifying Your Uncertainty”. To test yourself on measuring your uncertainty (or certainty) numerically, 40 short questions are provided. You should answer them with a certain degree of certainty (55%, 65%, 75%, 85%, and 95%). After checking the answers you should calculate the percentage of correct answers for each degree of certainty and draw a graph of calibration. The perfect calibration is the one which for example, if you answered 12 of the questions with 75% certainty 9 of them should be correct which means exactly 75%. The lower the difference between your assumed certainty and the actual result, the better your prediction.

Aside from just containing four categories of questions instead of random domain questions, the problem with this approach is simply eliminating the effect of variance. For instance, in my case, I answered 3 questions with 75% certainty, all of them correctly. Therefore, my error is 100 – 75 = 25%. For 85% level, I answered 8 questions, 6 of them correct. So, my error would be 85 – 75 = 10%. According to the book, I performed better in 85% level than 75%. But this is not exactly true. You can imagine answering questions like flipping an unfair coin which one side is more probable (let’s assume your answers are independent of each other). In 75% case, I flipped the coin 3 times, and the probability of answering all of them correctly is 0.75 ^ 3 = 42%. In the 85% case, the probability is around 24%. So, to wrap it up, we can conclude that answering 3 out of 3 questions correctly with 75% certainty is more probable than answering 6 out of 8 questions correctly with certainty of 85%. Due to variance, my more erroneous answer is more probable than the other one.

To make the calibration more robust, there should be more random questions, and either calculate variance or eliminate answers with frequency less than a predetermined number.

Despite aforementioned issues, I recommend this book to anyone interested in psychology or decision-making strategies. Other more useful candidates in the same fields are: Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction and Thinking, Fast and Slow.