A Few Blurbs From Slatestarcodex’s Review of Scout Mindset

Link to the full review

Like – a big part of why so many people – the kind of people who would have read Predictably Irrational in 2008 or commented on Overcoming Bias in 2010 – moved on was because just learning that biases existed didn’t really seem to help much. CFAR wanted to find a way to teach people about biases that actually stuck and improved decision-making. To that end, they ran dozens of workshops over about a decade, testing various techniques and seeing which ones seemed to stick and make a difference. Galef is their co-founder and former president, and Scout Mindset is an attempt to write down what she learned.
Thinking clearly is about installing an entirely new mindset in yourself in a bunch of different ways. A Soldier’s goal is to win the argument, much as real soldiers want to win the war. Scout Mindset is the opposite. Even though a Scout is also at war, they want to figure out what’s true.
She avoids the “Scouts are better than Soldiers” dichotomy, instead, arguing that both these mindsets have their uses but right now we lean too hard in the direction of Soldier. One justification for Soldier mindset is that you are often very sure which side you want to win. Sometimes this is because the moral and empirical considerations are obvious. Other times it’s something as simple as “you work for this company so you would prefer they beat their competitors.” But even if you know which side you’re supporting, you need an accurate picture of the underlying terrain in order to set your strategy.
The book divides learning Scout Mindset into an intellectual half (Part II) and an emotional half (Part III – V). The intellectual half emphasizes probabilistic thinking and thought experiments.