I haven’t read Galef’s book, so I don’t know if Kahneman’s work has any bearing on it. But it’s worth mentioning that much of Kahneman’s behavioural economics writing is based on experiments that repeatedly fail to replicate. It is, unfortunately, mostly bullshit.
I work in behavioural economics on the psychology side and sadly I think you're right. The replication crisis hit that field particularly badly. There's also evidence of complete data incompetence, at best, by other big names like Dan ariely. I don't recommend kahnemans book anymore.
Extremely on point. It probably is, more or less, an addiction to the dopamine rush that you get when you *feel* you have figured out how to solve a problem, and a corresponding disinterest in the boring parts of solving non-theoretical problems.
This was my problem with the religion of my childhood. I enjoyed the philosophy of it, the intellectual exercise. I was even asked to be a Sunday school teacher (and considered good, in all humility) because of my grasp and ability to communicate the concepts.
But it was all head and no heart. I understood things, but felt nothing. The only times my beliefs led my actions was through white-knuckled willpower. Even after years, the heart never followed. I eventually realized I was fooling myself.
(Bonus evidence for your point: I also majored in philosophy in college :P )
thought-terminating cliche, i just want to say that this was an inspiring comment, in that it inspired me to write a paper journal entry about the difference between puzzle-solvers and problem-solvers, a "there are two kinds of people dichotomy" which is at least as real as Scouts versus Soldiers.
A lot of problem solvers in real life often build a prototype, or two or more, before getting to their final solution. There's also the feedback issue that many "problems" are actually non-solvable human issues, which require constant small adjustments, like driving.
Driving's a good example/metaphor. There's literally no way to "solve" it. The way you say this makes me think of what my friend who studied public policy said about Vox.com and "policy wonk" journalists... basically that they look at problems which happen because there's a solution but there's human resistance to it, but then they say "maybe this hasn't been fixed yet because we haven't thrown an innovative-enough person at the problem."
The metaphor that really matches our defensive stance to existing beliefs is that of our home. That's where we put down roots - literally, in agrarian communities. We want our house on a firm foundation, and to be unshakeable if the wind blows or the earth quakes. And yes, we want to defend it against attackers, which is where the soldiers come in. Someone defending an existing opinion is like someone defending a brother who's behaved badly - deep down they may know he's at fault but the instinct is too strong.
To use this metaphor, of course, Galef would have to make 'rational thinking' the analogue of 'betraying the family', which obviously wouldn't sell well, bu I do think 'defending the hearth' is what underlies the soldier metaphor.
I was thinking more of the "cocking a BB gun and growling 'this is my house. I have to defend it!'” bit. Violence is definitely a guy thing compared to a gal thing.
Isn't it defended identities? And in this time of the culture wars, everything get subsumed in identities.
I've assumed for a while that humans have some weird innate tendency to never let something that's become part of their identity to be questioned. IDK how true that is.
If we dropped all the doubtful projects, like trying to help people be more rational, what would we have left? Consider health and fitness, for example.
If you restrict your definition of "martial" metaphors to medieval siege warfare, or perhaps World War 1 trench warfare (lots of structural engineering in both) then the metaphors become more apt.
The problem is that they aren't really just martial. Most of those terms were just as apt in normal everyday building. I think war is a metaphor one could use for argumentation (and many do), because both are conflicts -- the "battle lines" in a debate, but many of the chosen terms apply as much to contests or sports as they do to military. And that's because they share a common root: conflict / contest.
Basically, the reinforcement of the soldier metaphor by manners-of-speech seems relatively weak.
I've recently noticed other new nonfiction books that seem to have been similarly lazily edited. I wonder if some books are being fast-tracked for release in order to take advantage of the author's relevancy or capture a cultural moment and the editors end up letting a lot of things slide.
I disagree with your first two nitpicks so strongly that I'm committing the probably fatal mistake of jumping straight into the comments section before reading the rest of the piece.
"We talk about our beliefs as if they’re military positions, OR EVEN FORTRESSES, built to resist attack," she says, listing construction-related words used to describe ideas. She's not focusing on martial terms because she's discussing assessments of positions, buildings, or fortresses, not of militaries more generally. If I had a nitpick here, it's that these we're not spending much time thinking about how people refuse to think deeper because they're "entrenched" in their well-worn Lay-z-boy recliner.
And for the second one, maybe I should be forgiving you for not being much of a math guy, but the entire point is that we're talking about a set within a set. The outer circle is a bucket, and we only want these things from within it, and we don't need to grab this other stuff. The other stuff is also in the bucket. Making a two-column list is not the right way to clearly show that all the stuff is in the same bucket.
"the entire point is that we're talking about a set within a set"
I do not personally believe that the average reader needs a diagram to understand the concept of a set within a set, nor do I think that it helps them to realize that this set within a set is also contraposed against a separate contrasting set. That's my two cents.
I must admit that even though you seem to not be recommending this book, your review almost had me ordering it on Kindle. I didn't even graduate college so I doubt her bad use of metaphors would bug me as much as it bugs you. But despite my less than stellar education I am a curious person who is slightly captured by the Sam Harris / Astral Codex wing of the "Rational" movement. So I thought I might give this book a shot. Until that last couple of paragraphs.
You bring up a great point. Basically, you're saying it might be irrational for us to think we can overcome our inherent irrationality. So why bother trying? I know you're not being that binary about it, but you do make a good point. At some time in our lives we, as sentient, feeling, empathetic but basically irrational beings, have to come to terms with the fact that we're gonna' make bad decisions. That we're gonna' die no matter how much exercise we get. That humans are gonna' destroy the earth no matter who we vote for. Etc. etc.
Whatever you think of Sam Harris, he had a short podcast right after the election where he had an epiphany about why Trump, who he hates (which is why I still like Sam) is so appealing to not just ignoramuses but also to many otherwise intelligent seeming people.
Trump tapped into that part of our brain that not only is irrational. But that wants to told that it's okay to be irrational. That it's okay to say "Fuck the nerds and the teachers! I'll do whatever the fuck I want!" He tapped into our idiot Captain Kirk. Who at least once every other episode (or sometimes Dr. McCoy) would scream something to Spock like "Can't you just feel something for once you cold Vulcan!"
To be clear, I'm NOT for embracing that part of our lizard brain. But pretending that we might be able to eventually defeat it seems like a fools errand too.
"Something to think about gentlemen. Warp factor one Mr. Sulu!" (Kirk gives a side eye smile to Bones, who chuckles quietly while Spock raises an eyebrow with his hands behind his back. Camera dolly's out to a wide shot of the bridge as we cue the "cute" music. Which then fades to the shows theme. Roll credits.)
Yes, he's pretty flawed as a person, character is zero, zip, zilch & nada. He fools around on his wives, incites men in debate by implicating their wives, gropes his groupies, ...
But, what is he good at? Well, for one, he heads an organization that has over five hundred entities, and twenty thousand employees. He was putting together big business deals as a lower division student. He negotiates to build resort complexes all over the world. According to Bari Weiss: Trump's golf courses in the North Eastern States were the first which welcomed Black people and Jews. Trump was a close friend and shopping buddy to the very gay & flamboyant singer Liberace. Trump was one of the very first public persona to advocate for gay marriage rights.
He's a flawed character, but a good administrator and good negotiator.
Trump won the election because he ran against an opponent who was a flawed character, bad administrator, bad negotiator, and very homophobic.
How much of the negotiation has Trump actually engaged in himself? I thought people with that amount of wealth had armies of accountants, publicists and lawyers to take care of such things. What Trump is good at is reading a room and convincing people that he's good at things he really isn't.
"He was putting together big business deals as a lower division student." LOL I'd have to see details on these deals. He had at his disposal great wealth and the aforementioned access to attorneys, bankers, lawyers and accountants even when he was in undergrad demonstrating his great intelligence.
Well, we probably won't ever know. But we do know that when he was in college, he negotiated a condo deal, that's pretty big for a college kid. Its a hella lot more than I ever did. He went to North Korea, and instead of offering Kim a welfare package, he offered him a business plan to turn his beautiful country into a vacation destination. No one ever had the guts to do that before. His administration put together some phenomenal peace treaties (The Abraham Accords) that were vastly under reported. What other administration put together multiple peace treaties between different Muslim nations and Israel?
And he didn't start any wars, which is a pleasant relief from the past 30 years.
You lost me at the Abraham Accords. I actually know quite a bit about them and they're window dressing at best and a bad faith cynical PR stunt with severe real world consequences at worst.
The Gulf Monarchies, Morocco and Sudan "normalizing" relations with Israel is meaningless without fundamental concessions to the people who are actually under the Israelis' boot - the Palestinians.
Also, assassinating Soleimani was definitely an ATTEMPT to start a new shooting war but thankfully the Iranians are more logical and forward thinking and didn't take the bait in the way Trump and his favorite Mike Slimepeous would've liked.
I don’t wanna sully Freddie’s comments with a Trump debate. Yes cable news is obsessed with him (as well as helped create him) & wish they would shut the fuck up about it. And I don’t think he’s a Nazi or that most of his followers are terrible people. I won’t dehumanize those who fall prey to his con.
But suffice to say I have a drastically different view of him and his “accomplishments”. So drastic a discussion between us would be fruitless. (My brother was a Trump supporter. So I speak from experience.)
If you want to know my views of Trump listen to anything Sam Harris has said or written about him.
There is zero reason to speculate about what Trump might have done. We have his first term in the history books.
I think my conclusion would be that his rhetoric was extreme but his actual governance was pretty much completely conventional. In my book the real reason to support Trump is because the other side is worse--and again since his first term was completely conventional in terms of actual governance that is not a high bar to clear.
As a general aside: I like reviewers like Freddie, that can differentiate between "this is not for me" and "this is a bad work". Too often I see reviewers go to one extreme or the other.
Some decide anything they, personally don't like must be objectively terrible, usually with much showy ranting and mockery for the amusement of their audience. Others embrace a faux-intellectual aesthetic relativism that ends up being "I'm going to review this work's political content, rather than think about whether or not it succeeds at its goal" in practice.
Being able to step back and say, "this is very well put together and thoughtful, but didn't resonate with me personally because of artistic choices A and B, and minor flaws C and D that might not bother others", is a rare but important talent.
Rather than relying on our impressions of ambient rationality, there's good research on whether we're as cognitively broken as sometimes suggested by those who have focused on cognitive distortion effects as the basis for their research careers. Some of it gives reason to be hopeful and optimistic. Let me recommend two: Hugo Mercier's _Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe_ as well as Tom Stafford's work, including a substack: https://twitter.com/tomstafford/status/616144214003437568; https://tomstafford.substack.com/
Read this a couple of months ago. This would be a good place to start if you're unfamiliar with the 'rationalist' space. Galef's writing is clear, though (yes) there is a pedagogical tone, and at times, the book reaches a little too much on the self-help front.
The main difference I see between her scout and soldier mindset is what the rationalists call 'updating'. In the Bayesian sense, it means you approach a topic/problem with a prior (belief), examine evidence/whatever, and then choose whether or not to update to a new one. In this pursuit, you have to be able to detect certain forms of bias.
I don't think pure rationality is a good overall way of forming a political/social world view. At some point you have to recognize that you're reasoning from your own principles, and you hold those for reasons other than being able to prove them like a theorem. Also, if you're a dialectical materialist or other historicist, those types of "reason" act on different tenets, and in different ways than formal logic.
Your review was itself a recommendation of the theme of the book. Curious if you read "Thinking Fast and Slow" (I assume you did), what you thought of it, and whether you believe it gets at many of the same themes as the TSM.
Have not read the book. However, in reflecting on the concept of a "Scout" vs "Soldier" mindset, I would consider an attitude of a disciplined reconnaissance action to be valuable in that it has the potential to combine the best of both.
I haven’t read Galef’s book, so I don’t know if Kahneman’s work has any bearing on it. But it’s worth mentioning that much of Kahneman’s behavioural economics writing is based on experiments that repeatedly fail to replicate. It is, unfortunately, mostly bullshit.
I work in behavioural economics on the psychology side and sadly I think you're right. The replication crisis hit that field particularly badly. There's also evidence of complete data incompetence, at best, by other big names like Dan ariely. I don't recommend kahnemans book anymore.
Extremely on point. It probably is, more or less, an addiction to the dopamine rush that you get when you *feel* you have figured out how to solve a problem, and a corresponding disinterest in the boring parts of solving non-theoretical problems.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way! (My Marine Scout son)
Fish, or cut bait! (My Dad)
Shit or get off the pot! (Bars everywhere.)
Heard it all before. (Amos Lee)
This was my problem with the religion of my childhood. I enjoyed the philosophy of it, the intellectual exercise. I was even asked to be a Sunday school teacher (and considered good, in all humility) because of my grasp and ability to communicate the concepts.
But it was all head and no heart. I understood things, but felt nothing. The only times my beliefs led my actions was through white-knuckled willpower. Even after years, the heart never followed. I eventually realized I was fooling myself.
(Bonus evidence for your point: I also majored in philosophy in college :P )
thought-terminating cliche, i just want to say that this was an inspiring comment, in that it inspired me to write a paper journal entry about the difference between puzzle-solvers and problem-solvers, a "there are two kinds of people dichotomy" which is at least as real as Scouts versus Soldiers.
I've never heard anybody say that on reddit. more appropriate would be to add an edit to say thanks for the gold kind stranger.
A lot of problem solvers in real life often build a prototype, or two or more, before getting to their final solution. There's also the feedback issue that many "problems" are actually non-solvable human issues, which require constant small adjustments, like driving.
Driving's a good example/metaphor. There's literally no way to "solve" it. The way you say this makes me think of what my friend who studied public policy said about Vox.com and "policy wonk" journalists... basically that they look at problems which happen because there's a solution but there's human resistance to it, but then they say "maybe this hasn't been fixed yet because we haven't thrown an innovative-enough person at the problem."
Extremely well-put.
The metaphor that really matches our defensive stance to existing beliefs is that of our home. That's where we put down roots - literally, in agrarian communities. We want our house on a firm foundation, and to be unshakeable if the wind blows or the earth quakes. And yes, we want to defend it against attackers, which is where the soldiers come in. Someone defending an existing opinion is like someone defending a brother who's behaved badly - deep down they may know he's at fault but the instinct is too strong.
To use this metaphor, of course, Galef would have to make 'rational thinking' the analogue of 'betraying the family', which obviously wouldn't sell well, bu I do think 'defending the hearth' is what underlies the soldier metaphor.
Great observation. I’m thinking of 8yo Macauley Culkin cocking a BB gun and growling “this is my house. I have to defend it!”
It's a guy thing. Genetic.
Not a joke. Just wrongthink.
Like it or not, testosterone is a thing.
I was thinking more of the "cocking a BB gun and growling 'this is my house. I have to defend it!'” bit. Violence is definitely a guy thing compared to a gal thing.
Isn't it defended identities? And in this time of the culture wars, everything get subsumed in identities.
I've assumed for a while that humans have some weird innate tendency to never let something that's become part of their identity to be questioned. IDK how true that is.
If we dropped all the doubtful projects, like trying to help people be more rational, what would we have left? Consider health and fitness, for example.
If you restrict your definition of "martial" metaphors to medieval siege warfare, or perhaps World War 1 trench warfare (lots of structural engineering in both) then the metaphors become more apt.
You’re right; but considering this is a book for a generalist audience, I wouldn’t consider medieval siege warfare the most useful metaphor.
The problem is that they aren't really just martial. Most of those terms were just as apt in normal everyday building. I think war is a metaphor one could use for argumentation (and many do), because both are conflicts -- the "battle lines" in a debate, but many of the chosen terms apply as much to contests or sports as they do to military. And that's because they share a common root: conflict / contest.
Basically, the reinforcement of the soldier metaphor by manners-of-speech seems relatively weak.
I've recently noticed other new nonfiction books that seem to have been similarly lazily edited. I wonder if some books are being fast-tracked for release in order to take advantage of the author's relevancy or capture a cultural moment and the editors end up letting a lot of things slide.
Funny enough I am also a bit too cynical for Julias approach, and I even prefer Eliezers pompous, writing.
I disagree with your first two nitpicks so strongly that I'm committing the probably fatal mistake of jumping straight into the comments section before reading the rest of the piece.
"We talk about our beliefs as if they’re military positions, OR EVEN FORTRESSES, built to resist attack," she says, listing construction-related words used to describe ideas. She's not focusing on martial terms because she's discussing assessments of positions, buildings, or fortresses, not of militaries more generally. If I had a nitpick here, it's that these we're not spending much time thinking about how people refuse to think deeper because they're "entrenched" in their well-worn Lay-z-boy recliner.
And for the second one, maybe I should be forgiving you for not being much of a math guy, but the entire point is that we're talking about a set within a set. The outer circle is a bucket, and we only want these things from within it, and we don't need to grab this other stuff. The other stuff is also in the bucket. Making a two-column list is not the right way to clearly show that all the stuff is in the same bucket.
"the entire point is that we're talking about a set within a set"
I do not personally believe that the average reader needs a diagram to understand the concept of a set within a set, nor do I think that it helps them to realize that this set within a set is also contraposed against a separate contrasting set. That's my two cents.
I honestly didn't see it as a Venn diagram, just a cheap rendering of an overhead view of nested buckets.
I must admit that even though you seem to not be recommending this book, your review almost had me ordering it on Kindle. I didn't even graduate college so I doubt her bad use of metaphors would bug me as much as it bugs you. But despite my less than stellar education I am a curious person who is slightly captured by the Sam Harris / Astral Codex wing of the "Rational" movement. So I thought I might give this book a shot. Until that last couple of paragraphs.
You bring up a great point. Basically, you're saying it might be irrational for us to think we can overcome our inherent irrationality. So why bother trying? I know you're not being that binary about it, but you do make a good point. At some time in our lives we, as sentient, feeling, empathetic but basically irrational beings, have to come to terms with the fact that we're gonna' make bad decisions. That we're gonna' die no matter how much exercise we get. That humans are gonna' destroy the earth no matter who we vote for. Etc. etc.
Whatever you think of Sam Harris, he had a short podcast right after the election where he had an epiphany about why Trump, who he hates (which is why I still like Sam) is so appealing to not just ignoramuses but also to many otherwise intelligent seeming people.
Trump tapped into that part of our brain that not only is irrational. But that wants to told that it's okay to be irrational. That it's okay to say "Fuck the nerds and the teachers! I'll do whatever the fuck I want!" He tapped into our idiot Captain Kirk. Who at least once every other episode (or sometimes Dr. McCoy) would scream something to Spock like "Can't you just feel something for once you cold Vulcan!"
To be clear, I'm NOT for embracing that part of our lizard brain. But pretending that we might be able to eventually defeat it seems like a fools errand too.
"Something to think about gentlemen. Warp factor one Mr. Sulu!" (Kirk gives a side eye smile to Bones, who chuckles quietly while Spock raises an eyebrow with his hands behind his back. Camera dolly's out to a wide shot of the bridge as we cue the "cute" music. Which then fades to the shows theme. Roll credits.)
I think I am recommending it, just to a different audience than me.
Point taken. I might be that audience. Ha!
Let's apply Scout Mindset to Trump.
Yes, he's pretty flawed as a person, character is zero, zip, zilch & nada. He fools around on his wives, incites men in debate by implicating their wives, gropes his groupies, ...
But, what is he good at? Well, for one, he heads an organization that has over five hundred entities, and twenty thousand employees. He was putting together big business deals as a lower division student. He negotiates to build resort complexes all over the world. According to Bari Weiss: Trump's golf courses in the North Eastern States were the first which welcomed Black people and Jews. Trump was a close friend and shopping buddy to the very gay & flamboyant singer Liberace. Trump was one of the very first public persona to advocate for gay marriage rights.
He's a flawed character, but a good administrator and good negotiator.
Trump won the election because he ran against an opponent who was a flawed character, bad administrator, bad negotiator, and very homophobic.
That’s called a Pragmatic Mindset.
How much of the negotiation has Trump actually engaged in himself? I thought people with that amount of wealth had armies of accountants, publicists and lawyers to take care of such things. What Trump is good at is reading a room and convincing people that he's good at things he really isn't.
"He was putting together big business deals as a lower division student." LOL I'd have to see details on these deals. He had at his disposal great wealth and the aforementioned access to attorneys, bankers, lawyers and accountants even when he was in undergrad demonstrating his great intelligence.
Well, we probably won't ever know. But we do know that when he was in college, he negotiated a condo deal, that's pretty big for a college kid. Its a hella lot more than I ever did. He went to North Korea, and instead of offering Kim a welfare package, he offered him a business plan to turn his beautiful country into a vacation destination. No one ever had the guts to do that before. His administration put together some phenomenal peace treaties (The Abraham Accords) that were vastly under reported. What other administration put together multiple peace treaties between different Muslim nations and Israel?
And he didn't start any wars, which is a pleasant relief from the past 30 years.
You lost me at the Abraham Accords. I actually know quite a bit about them and they're window dressing at best and a bad faith cynical PR stunt with severe real world consequences at worst.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2021-09-15/false-promise-abraham-accords
The Gulf Monarchies, Morocco and Sudan "normalizing" relations with Israel is meaningless without fundamental concessions to the people who are actually under the Israelis' boot - the Palestinians.
Also, assassinating Soleimani was definitely an ATTEMPT to start a new shooting war but thankfully the Iranians are more logical and forward thinking and didn't take the bait in the way Trump and his favorite Mike Slimepeous would've liked.
I don’t wanna sully Freddie’s comments with a Trump debate. Yes cable news is obsessed with him (as well as helped create him) & wish they would shut the fuck up about it. And I don’t think he’s a Nazi or that most of his followers are terrible people. I won’t dehumanize those who fall prey to his con.
But suffice to say I have a drastically different view of him and his “accomplishments”. So drastic a discussion between us would be fruitless. (My brother was a Trump supporter. So I speak from experience.)
If you want to know my views of Trump listen to anything Sam Harris has said or written about him.
There is zero reason to speculate about what Trump might have done. We have his first term in the history books.
I think my conclusion would be that his rhetoric was extreme but his actual governance was pretty much completely conventional. In my book the real reason to support Trump is because the other side is worse--and again since his first term was completely conventional in terms of actual governance that is not a high bar to clear.
As a general aside: I like reviewers like Freddie, that can differentiate between "this is not for me" and "this is a bad work". Too often I see reviewers go to one extreme or the other.
Some decide anything they, personally don't like must be objectively terrible, usually with much showy ranting and mockery for the amusement of their audience. Others embrace a faux-intellectual aesthetic relativism that ends up being "I'm going to review this work's political content, rather than think about whether or not it succeeds at its goal" in practice.
Being able to step back and say, "this is very well put together and thoughtful, but didn't resonate with me personally because of artistic choices A and B, and minor flaws C and D that might not bother others", is a rare but important talent.
So are you saying FdB is using the "scout" mindset? ;-)
Rather than relying on our impressions of ambient rationality, there's good research on whether we're as cognitively broken as sometimes suggested by those who have focused on cognitive distortion effects as the basis for their research careers. Some of it gives reason to be hopeful and optimistic. Let me recommend two: Hugo Mercier's _Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe_ as well as Tom Stafford's work, including a substack: https://twitter.com/tomstafford/status/616144214003437568; https://tomstafford.substack.com/
Oh thanks!!! I used to be a big fan of mindhacks and I'd don't know he was doing a substack
Re "Scout" vs Soldier" as a mindset, for me, an action ofreconnaissance
Read this a couple of months ago. This would be a good place to start if you're unfamiliar with the 'rationalist' space. Galef's writing is clear, though (yes) there is a pedagogical tone, and at times, the book reaches a little too much on the self-help front.
The main difference I see between her scout and soldier mindset is what the rationalists call 'updating'. In the Bayesian sense, it means you approach a topic/problem with a prior (belief), examine evidence/whatever, and then choose whether or not to update to a new one. In this pursuit, you have to be able to detect certain forms of bias.
I don't think pure rationality is a good overall way of forming a political/social world view. At some point you have to recognize that you're reasoning from your own principles, and you hold those for reasons other than being able to prove them like a theorem. Also, if you're a dialectical materialist or other historicist, those types of "reason" act on different tenets, and in different ways than formal logic.
Your review was itself a recommendation of the theme of the book. Curious if you read "Thinking Fast and Slow" (I assume you did), what you thought of it, and whether you believe it gets at many of the same themes as the TSM.
Have not read the book. However, in reflecting on the concept of a "Scout" vs "Soldier" mindset, I would consider an attitude of a disciplined reconnaissance action to be valuable in that it has the potential to combine the best of both.
You write very well.