Thread by @danluu

I finally got around to reading Julia Galef's book on how to think clearly, Scout Mindset.

I liked it more than I expected to despite expecting to be highly biased towards liking it since it describes approaches I appreciate.

amzn.to/32TUucm

One thing I really liked about it was that it suggests/summarizes actionable ways to check your own thinking, which I found useful even when it was discussing a way of thinking that I've had since I was a kid since I still mess up all the time and having concrete checks helps.

Another is that it does a really good job of laying out the case for various ways of thinking. There are 6 blog posts that were on my to-do list that I think I don't need to write anymore since the book describes what I wanted to describe, but better than I would've done it.

For example, a counter-argument to the idea that one needs to be hyper-optimistic and not acknowledge realistic probabilities of failure to be successful.

Julia's chapter on this uses a broader array of examples than I would've and is written to appeal to a wider audience

, but, in appealing to a broader audience, the chapter doesn't sacrifice intellectual rigorousness.

When that's possible, I view that as basically strictly better than how I write and I would write that way if I knew how in a time-efficient way.

One thing I find amusing is that a lot of the negative reviews on Amazon seem to conflate having a difficult to read style with rigor and they knock the book for being unscientific or shallow because it's easy to read, like

https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1129519029192757249