I have started reading Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset. She depicts a dichotomy between: scout mindset, in which you continually test your beliefs in pursuit of truth; and soldier mindset, in which you put up defenses against changing your mind.
My Fantasy Intellectual Teams project tries to use metrics to reward the scout mindset. In contrast, Twitter’s metrics of likes, shares, and followers tend to reward the soldier’s mindset. How many times have you seen someone “like” a tweet that expresses a view with which they disagree?
Last night on Clubhouse with Erik Torenberg, a couple of April’s FITs owners and I talked about how paying attention to the metrics that we use can change the way you look at pundits. You see that some of the commentators you like operate in soldier mindset, and you start to raise your evaluation of commentators who do a better job of remaining in scout mindset.
For more about the FITs project, see this essay as well as some of the other essays at my substack site.
If you would like to help with the project, leave a comment here to that effect.
If you are interested in following the project to see how it goes, subscribe to me on substack (free).
I have a question about FIT scoring- in terms of thinking in bets can’t I just draft Jim Cramer and walk away with a W in that category? Everyday he tosses out ‘buy/sell/hold’ positions on dozens of stocks. Does this count as ‘thinking in bets’ since each one of those positions is a bet on the future price of a security?
I wonder if there is a way to make “Skin-in-the-Game” a score-able metric for FITs?
My immediate reaction to your post is: Obviously that violates the spirit of the game because Cramer CLEARLY just tosses our random numbers every day because that’s what he gets paid to do. He has no stake, reputational or otherwise, in any of his plays ever.
Including the widely circulated video of him bragging about illegal trades.
Right, choosing Cramer makes it appear obvious that the answer should be ‘no, this is not allowed’, but what if I had chosen a better financial advisor? Someone I follow and respect is Keith McCullough and he thinks and discusses investing in a very structured way and is constantly thinking in bets, in risk reward and has a mission to help people (and himself in the process) learn about investing better.
My first instinct is that picking someone like McCullough is cheating- his whole job is making bets. On the other hand that is the sort of approach that FITs are trying to promote, someone who has a rigorous framework and has outcomes that can inform his future decisions about and within that framework.
But of course again if you picked him and no one else selected a stock picker you probably win total bets with one person even if none of your other 14 picks make a single bet.
More on the idea of making Skin-in-the-Game (SITG) a FIT metric, it feels like it could be like “Thinking in Bets” only better.
Scoring points for:
-Showing / proving a real Prediction Market bet
-Showing / proving a real market position and reasons for taking that position
-Publicly explaining a personal or professional position. “My company acquired X because Y” or “I purchase C security because D reasons”
– Publishing a reputation net-negative article or video in spite of the costs
Negatives:
– Scoring this might be hard, people often explain reasons why they did something – it doesn’t make them good reasons
-All of these explanations might be post-hoc rationalization bias?
Am a few pages now into FH Buckley’s new book Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life, and it strikes me that curiosity and the scout mindset overlap quite a bit. It might be interesting to compare and contrast the two.
Buckley warns against smugness which seems like another word for the soldier mindset: “Smug, self-satisfied people aren’t curious about what they ought to do. They don’t feel the need, because they’re sure they’re right.They don’t have to think about how they might have wounded other people…”
I have yet to read Scout, but interestingly the book I am most reminded of reading Buckley is novelist Isabel Colegate’s nonfiction book about hermits A Pelican in the Wilderness. Steel-manning seems to be the exercise of curiosity and the scout mindset and there is no better practice than reading or writing a good novel.
I think there is a contradiction – or at least some tension – between this metaphorical framing of being a ‘scout’ and your conception of ‘social epistemology’.
Consider: how does a scout know she is testing herself well enough and overcoming bias? It’s easy to fool oneself, that, unlike those people over there, you have been a fair judge and considered *all* the evidence from a rational, objective, and disinterested point of view. Especially if all your like-minded friends act to socially reinforce your self-assessment. The thing about self-deception is that you are not conscious of it.
That is, how unless one is accountable – rewarded for being right and penalized for being wrong – and exposing oneself to capable people “in the arena” who are incentivized to obey rules of good sportsmanship and closely review, scrutinize, and try and find and demonstrate the errors in your map? If someone comes back to you and says, “I am a good scout, trust me,” and they hand you their map, how can you have confidence that they were really being a good scout?
The ‘scout’ metaphor is extremely individualistic. A scout discovers things for herself, and is competent to do the job by simply exploring the terrain, surveying it with reliable tools, and recording observations honestly into a ‘map’. But we must learn most things from other people because we aren’t competent to do it ourselves, and we tend to trust the claims of other people about even nearly all the things we could find out by ourselves, if we wanted to.
Instead of a scout it is more like you are a foreigner unfamiliar with the country and traveling between villages, and when you get to a village, you just ask somebody about the lay of the land, because, you figure reasonable, a local is bound to know their local area pretty well. The local tells you *their* map, but unless you are able and willing to verify it for yourself, how do you know if you can trust it? Maybe it is out of date, because the beaver dam which made a huge lake collapsed a month ago, and now the area is passable. Or maybe they are trying to mislead you, a foreigner, lest you are working for an invading army, or might discover the hiding place of their secret hoards. Maybe you are getting it second or third-hand via hearsay of people writing books embellishing their tales.
The point is, the social basis and influence on our attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs is such a core element to our learning process that one should presume one simply cannot extricate oneself from it and decontaminate one’s views from error-biasing influences on most matters.
One possible implication is that if one is trying to arrive at better beliefs, instead of just seeking to improve one’s own rigor and intellectual self-discipline in isolation – which is profoundly difficult and beyond the capability and inclination of most people – it is better to seek to improve the “Social Epistemic Security” (SES) of one’s cultural institutions that play key influential roles in the epistemological process. With better SES measures and “intellectual safety protocols” in place, one can reasonably place higher trust in the outcomes and claims generated by institutional processes. And maintaining fidelity to and bolstering the legitimacy, status, and support for the SES measures – and cooperating to thwart people from undermining them – is the most productive way to improve the accuracy of the maps one mostly receives from other people.
People who do this may not be “scouts”, they are more like “infrastructure custodians” – builders and maintainers of accumulated social capital. This is just like someone who is trying to maintain a “free, open, fair, lawful, and competitive” commercial marketplace. It’s not about picking winners or losers, or what is to be made and how much, it’s about the benefits of the institutional design in general. And the same goes for ideas and epistemology.
So, sure, individually, you should try to be a fair juror or judge (scout) instead of counsel (soldier) for a party in a suit. But the best way to *be* a fair juror or judge is to have two capable and resourced lawyers incentivized to go at it and give it all they’ve got, with equal opportunity to be heard, and also incentivized by professional considerations to follow rules of proper conduct.
In general, I think you are being unfair to the role, function and importance of responsible adversarialism and downplaying the benefits when the claims of influential individuals and institutions are exposed to – and feel compelled to address – fair but vigorous criticism (such as in the common law legal system of trials), by lumping it in with all the social media nastiness. I think the results are both superior and more inherently reliable, and that the long tradition of structured debate, bodies of negotiating representatives, advocacy in trials, and norms of scrutiny of claims in science in the traditions and triumphs of the English-speaking cultures weighs in favor of this point.
To me, it seems like rejecting certain good public intellectuals as being too combative and ‘solder-like’ is really throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It is like conflating the hyper-fanatical ‘ultras’ and hooligans in British football ‘firms’ with rule-respecting sportsmen on the field, who elevating the level of the game to the highest potential for excellence while keeping each other on their toes trying to score and defend goals.
Greenwald is a good example. What he does when he calls out and thoroughly documents and demonstrates media malpractice and mischief *is* part of our diminishing SES accountability infrastructural. Sure, that infrastructure is in bad shape, but there’s plenty of room for it to deteriorate even further, which it certainly would without people like him.
Scout vs Soldier is just the new P vs J. Boggled at how many people are bowled over by it.
From the Myers & Briggs Foundation:
Judging or Perceiving
This fourth preference pair describes how you like to live your outer life–what are the behaviors others tend to see? Do you prefer a more structured and decided lifestyle (Judging) or a more flexible and adaptable lifestyle (Perceiving)? This preference may also be thought of as your orientation to the outer world. …
Oh, man, MB geekout coming. Forgive me. I promise I don’t think it’s a personality test. But the original structures are Jungian. The fourth pole, (P vs J) was added and it became a corporate money maker, but that’s because they are useful for those people on extremes (raises hand). And if it’s a pseudo-science, well, so is the one under discussion.
So the MB poles are:
Orientation: Introversion vs Extraversion, which explains where energy is directed and replenished.
Perception: Sensing vs Intuition, best described for my purposes as “how you learn”.
Judgment: Thoughts vs Feeling, best described as “how you make decisions”.
And then the one added, which describes which of the previous two poles is extraverted to the outside world.
If you extravert judgment, well, the world is just a big series of decisions. If you extravert perception, well, the world is just a big collection of information to be considered and evaluated. P/J has nothing to do with being judgmental or perceptive.
The usual test questions are: do you consider a meeting successful when everything has been discussed or when everyone knows what to do? and when you learn of an upcoming event, months ahead, that you want to attend, do you instantly make reservations or are you reluctant to pull the trigger until the event gets closer (assuming you remember at all, instead of finding the flyer for the event three days after it happened).
(as always, people without a strong preference sneer at the questions, and people with a strong preference suddenly see a reason for otherwise inexplicable actions.)
Anyway, what she describes as “scout” is basically various forms of perceivers, people who are always looking for more information. What she describes as “soldier” is various forms of judgers.
The author is clearly writing a book for elites who will get off on explaining how they are “scouts”, and clearly superior to all the close-minded soldiers. Great sales strategy. You’re going to see a ton of articles from people boasting about what her book says about them.
“The author is clearly writing a book for elites who will get off on explaining how they are “scouts”, and clearly superior to all the close-minded soldiers.”
Right. She’s handing out plowshares, but people are going to beat them into swords anyway.
Status comes first. Whenever some terminology of a feature has a positive valence as a socially desirable quality, it can only be used to describe the people and ideas which are high status for one’s own team. So what might have started and been intended as a genuinely useful tool for progress will be warped and twisted to the extent necessary to turn it into a weapon.
She’s sincerely trying to convince people to be better. But, since they are already convinced they are being good and trusting good people, they will just use her words to distinguish goodthinkers like themselves from badthinkers like their opponents. And as such, she will be yet another unwitting enabler reinforcing the foundation that is the basis of precisely the kind of social polarization she wishes to see reduced.
Levin often talks about “needing new language” that will serve as conversational shorthand for explanations of what has gone wrong. Here, Galef is handing people those words, but instead of standing for the correct explanation, it will just be used as a language of delegitimation and translate as “Unlike us, our opponents don’t think straight.”
Frankly, it seems to me that any non-progressive who has been paying attention to things over the past decade or two would have some experience of what it’s like being on the receiving end of precisely this kind of unjust treatment and would thus recognize the inherent danger of extolling unobjectionable virtues.