For effective altruists, I think (based on the topic and execution) it’s straightforwardly the #1 book you should use when you want to recruit new people to EA.
I really liked the book, and think it’s an important read for folks early in their EA journey but I want to quickly say that I disagree with this claim. The book “doesn’t actually talk much about EA”, so it’d be surprising if it was the best introduction to a field. Statistics is a useful field for understanding and contributing to social science, but it’d be surprising if it was straightforwardly the #1 book to recommend to someone wanting to learn social science.
If someone’s specifically looking for a book about EA, I wouldn’t give them Scout Mindset and say ‘this is a great introduction to EA’—it’s not! Riffing on your analogy, it’s more like a world where:
There’s a book about statistics (or whatever) that happens to be especially useful as a prereq for social science resources—e.g., it provides the core tools for evaluating social-science claims, even if it doesn’t discuss social science on the object level.
Social science departments end up healthier when they filter on the kind of person who’s interested in the stats book and reads that book, vs. filtering on a social science book.
Compared to the content of the stats book, the basics of social science are sufficiently ‘in the water’, or sufficiently easy to pick up via conversation and scattered blog posts, that there’s less lost from soaking it up informally.
It’s more important that a critical mass of social scientists have the stats book’s concepts as cultural touchstones / common language / shared standards / etc., than that they have that for any given social science book’s concepts.
People who almost go into social science (but decide to do something else instead) end up doing much more useful work if they read the stats book than if they read a social science book (assuming they only read one). (Note that this might make the stats book better consequentially even if it means that fewer people end up doing social science work—maximizing EA’s growth isn’t identical to maximizing EA’s impact-mediated-by-people-we-court.)
I could of course just be wrong about this. But that’s the shape of my view.
Thanks for the great summary!
I really liked the book, and think it’s an important read for folks early in their EA journey but I want to quickly say that I disagree with this claim. The book “doesn’t actually talk much about EA”, so it’d be surprising if it was the best introduction to a field. Statistics is a useful field for understanding and contributing to social science, but it’d be surprising if it was straightforwardly the #1 book to recommend to someone wanting to learn social science.
If someone’s specifically looking for a book about EA, I wouldn’t give them Scout Mindset and say ‘this is a great introduction to EA’—it’s not! Riffing on your analogy, it’s more like a world where:
There’s a book about statistics (or whatever) that happens to be especially useful as a prereq for social science resources—e.g., it provides the core tools for evaluating social-science claims, even if it doesn’t discuss social science on the object level.
Social science departments end up healthier when they filter on the kind of person who’s interested in the stats book and reads that book, vs. filtering on a social science book.
Compared to the content of the stats book, the basics of social science are sufficiently ‘in the water’, or sufficiently easy to pick up via conversation and scattered blog posts, that there’s less lost from soaking it up informally.
It’s more important that a critical mass of social scientists have the stats book’s concepts as cultural touchstones / common language / shared standards / etc., than that they have that for any given social science book’s concepts.
People who almost go into social science (but decide to do something else instead) end up doing much more useful work if they read the stats book than if they read a social science book (assuming they only read one). (Note that this might make the stats book better consequentially even if it means that fewer people end up doing social science work—maximizing EA’s growth isn’t identical to maximizing EA’s impact-mediated-by-people-we-court.)
I could of course just be wrong about this. But that’s the shape of my view.