I don’t have an extensive list written down, and I’ll emphasize that I’m not saying it’s often best to use a pure soldier mindset. Still, here are some initial thoughts/examples of where hybrid or soldier-leaning mindsets might be better:
People suffering from depression or similar conditions
People who are not used to using a scout mindset and related tools of rationality (and thus, for example, may not be particularly skilled at applying it—which isn’t to say people should never start learning, but quitting cold turkey may not be a good idea either, especially in combination with other points here)
When you’ve established a “reputation”/habit of communicating with a soldier mindset, switching to scout-mindset communication may cause people to overfilter your statements (e.g., “Normally this person is really enthusiastic about things, but now they’re being extra uncertain, so they are probably just really skeptical). Also applies for communicating with friends in general that expect you to be supportive (at least when it comes to materially unimportant matters where their being wrong isn’t significant/bad). Also family: I recently witnessed some major family drama and recognized it would be insanely out of place to express caveats/thoughts in the way I might normally do so in a scout mindset.
Persuasion: speaking as someone who’s done lots of speech and debate—and is even a major advocate for the light side (truth-seeking/honest) of the persuasion force—I can say that if you want to be persuasive in some instances, it really helps to commit to the mindset “they are ultimately wrong.” Yes, you need to not be a blind donkey and assume literally everything you say is right—you need to understand how the audience and competitors are thinking and know your side’s weaknesses—but ultimately it helps to believe what you are saying when you actually get up to say what you’ve planned to say.
The rock climbing example (I’ll have to come back to this later and explain some details once I can review the book and my annotations there, I just seem to remember really disliking that example) -- UPDATE: This example is around pages 106–108 in my book. I might have slightly overestimated how much I disliked it when I first read it (based on my minor annotations), but I still think it’s a valid example of where you could get paralyzed by analysis. Of course, you should take some time to consider “what are my alternatives”, but from what I have heard (and just Google-skimmed), climbing down a mountain can often be harder than climbing up—sometimes it’s simply not a choice, unlike what Julia says. Alternatively, staying put might be another bad idea if the elements are threatening. The ultimate point being: yes, do consider alternatives, but if you judge that you have none (or they are all worse), then you may just have to really steel your nerves by adopting a soldier mindset to make the jump without flinching. Julia tries to explicitly respond to this sentiment in the next couple of vignettes/paragraphs, but I found the responses really lacking for that specific case (e.g., “there’s no clear divide between the ‘decision-making’ and ‘execution’ stages of pursuing a goal” [p. 110]—which definitely seems false for the example of “deciding to make the jump” vs. “making the jump”).
That’s definitely not an exhaustive list; just initial thoughts/examples that came to mind. And some of those were addressed in the book, but I feel like the emphasis was much more on “here are why those examples aren’t always justified” than on a more-balanced perspective.
Thanks! I notice that 1, 4, and 5 are examples where in some sense it’s clear what you need to do, and the difficulty is just actually doing it. IIRC Julia says somewhere in the book (perhaps in discussing the rock climbing example?) that this where the soldier mindset performs relatively well. I think I tentatively agree with this take, meaning that I agree with you that in some cases soldier is better probably.
(I updated my comment with some more details about the rock climbing example.)
I’ll just re-emphasize, though, that I do think that people tend to overuse the soldier mindset, and that there are good arguments to make for not using it as often. I mainly was just pushing back against the OP’s sentiment which felt so effusively positive. In the end, if you’re looking for a readable, slightly-soldier case for a scout mindset, I think her book is great. If you’re hoping for a rather nuanced analysis or lessons on why+when to be less scout-ish, I still think the book is good, but you’ll definitely want to treat it more as a foil for thought.
I don’t have an extensive list written down, and I’ll emphasize that I’m not saying it’s often best to use a pure soldier mindset. Still, here are some initial thoughts/examples of where hybrid or soldier-leaning mindsets might be better:
People suffering from depression or similar conditions
People who are not used to using a scout mindset and related tools of rationality (and thus, for example, may not be particularly skilled at applying it—which isn’t to say people should never start learning, but quitting cold turkey may not be a good idea either, especially in combination with other points here)
When you’ve established a “reputation”/habit of communicating with a soldier mindset, switching to scout-mindset communication may cause people to overfilter your statements (e.g., “Normally this person is really enthusiastic about things, but now they’re being extra uncertain, so they are probably just really skeptical). Also applies for communicating with friends in general that expect you to be supportive (at least when it comes to materially unimportant matters where their being wrong isn’t significant/bad). Also family: I recently witnessed some major family drama and recognized it would be insanely out of place to express caveats/thoughts in the way I might normally do so in a scout mindset.
Persuasion: speaking as someone who’s done lots of speech and debate—and is even a major advocate for the light side (truth-seeking/honest) of the persuasion force—I can say that if you want to be persuasive in some instances, it really helps to commit to the mindset “they are ultimately wrong.” Yes, you need to not be a blind donkey and assume literally everything you say is right—you need to understand how the audience and competitors are thinking and know your side’s weaknesses—but ultimately it helps to believe what you are saying when you actually get up to say what you’ve planned to say.
The rock climbing example (I’ll have to come back to this later and explain some details once I can review the book and my annotations there, I just seem to remember really disliking that example) -- UPDATE: This example is around pages 106–108 in my book. I might have slightly overestimated how much I disliked it when I first read it (based on my minor annotations), but I still think it’s a valid example of where you could get paralyzed by analysis. Of course, you should take some time to consider “what are my alternatives”, but from what I have heard (and just Google-skimmed), climbing down a mountain can often be harder than climbing up—sometimes it’s simply not a choice, unlike what Julia says. Alternatively, staying put might be another bad idea if the elements are threatening. The ultimate point being: yes, do consider alternatives, but if you judge that you have none (or they are all worse), then you may just have to really steel your nerves by adopting a soldier mindset to make the jump without flinching. Julia tries to explicitly respond to this sentiment in the next couple of vignettes/paragraphs, but I found the responses really lacking for that specific case (e.g., “there’s no clear divide between the ‘decision-making’ and ‘execution’ stages of pursuing a goal” [p. 110]—which definitely seems false for the example of “deciding to make the jump” vs. “making the jump”).
That’s definitely not an exhaustive list; just initial thoughts/examples that came to mind. And some of those were addressed in the book, but I feel like the emphasis was much more on “here are why those examples aren’t always justified” than on a more-balanced perspective.
Thanks! I notice that 1, 4, and 5 are examples where in some sense it’s clear what you need to do, and the difficulty is just actually doing it. IIRC Julia says somewhere in the book (perhaps in discussing the rock climbing example?) that this where the soldier mindset performs relatively well. I think I tentatively agree with this take, meaning that I agree with you that in some cases soldier is better probably.
(I updated my comment with some more details about the rock climbing example.) I’ll just re-emphasize, though, that I do think that people tend to overuse the soldier mindset, and that there are good arguments to make for not using it as often. I mainly was just pushing back against the OP’s sentiment which felt so effusively positive. In the end, if you’re looking for a readable, slightly-soldier case for a scout mindset, I think her book is great. If you’re hoping for a rather nuanced analysis or lessons on why+when to be less scout-ish, I still think the book is good, but you’ll definitely want to treat it more as a foil for thought.
I think I agree with this take. Thanks!