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.
― John McCarthy
I was a bit of a legalist as a young man: completely gripped by what Galef calls the "soldier mindset", the urge to win arguments and cling to your positions, rather than find the truth. I was a philosophy student. Philosophy is supposed to be dispassionate and open-minded, but in fact the sheer number of degrees of freedom in it, and the absence of conclusive evidence lead to the usual bias and inertia. (We can name positions after philosophers because so few change their minds.) A certain level of intelligence and knowledge of say logical fallacies can end up trapping you, since you can usually improvise a fix for the deadly new fact, or anyway say "you too!".
Or not. This is an uplifting and useful set of stories about moving from the (pretty diseased) default mode of thinking to be, on average, less deluded and unfair. If you spend much time looking at internet arguments, or TV news debates, or other kinds of stupid war then you'll be cheered, and - who knows - healed, by Galef's examples of people changing their minds and running the numbers, against their current narrowly construed interests.
Galef is a master of this, as you can see from basically any of her radio episodes.
This would have helped the young legalist realise what he was doing, and might have sped him on the road.
Much more like a normal business book than I expected, with three-sentence stories of [random CEO]'s [triumph | desolation], and with more references to other self-help books. I'll accept this as airport bookshop camouflage. It is a friendly first step into honest reason.
The principles are not new, but the illustrating anecdotes are, and the writing is utterly, crashingly accessible in the Bestseller Nonfiction style, and it's short and sunny, and anyway it is a vital public service to redo Plato / Laplace / Schopenhauer / Peirce / Russell / Kahneman / Hanson / Yudkowsky / Galef, every say two years til the end of time.
News to me:
* The London Homeopathic Hospital had the best results during the Victorian cholera epidemic, for reasons unrelated to homeopathy (clean sheets and proto-rehydration therapy). Still dismal 18% mortality.
* Spock has a Brier score above 0.5: way worse than the average forecaster on low-stakes internet platforms (0.25), and somewhat worse than a flipping coin.
* An author of the Christian abstinence craze was persuaded that his book (advising that teens not even date other teens) was harmful, and stopped selling it.
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Galef type:
Data #2: surprising case studies
Theory #2: models of what makes something succeed or fail
Theory #5: a general lens you can use to analyze many different things
Values #1: an explicit argument about values
Thinking #1: teach principles of thinking directly