Scout Guide Log Book Notes
Billie Kjergaard
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While you can search for titles of Saved Replies directly within the conversation and chat editor, you can search for text within the body of each Saved Reply directly from the Saved Replies settings page in a given Mailbox. This trick comes in handy for those times I remember the contents of a reply but not the title.
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Beyond providing an easy resource for your customers, Docs + Beacon has another exciting benefit. Beacon history tracks which web pages and Docs articles customers are reading before asking questions. By enabling Beacon on your Docs site you can track trends, identify gaps in your self-service content and improve your documentation, helping you support your customers better.
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Use the keywords feature in Docs to help your customers help themselves more often, which is a big win for both of you! You can add keywords to articles to rank them higher and nudge where articles will appear in the Docs search results, add keywords that don't actually appear in the article but are relevant to the material, and even account for misspellings or typos that might not produce any results otherwise. For example, imagine you have an article on how to add something to a calendar. Because you know that's commonly misspelled, you can add the wrong spellings - like calender, callender, and callendar - to the keywords for the article so that even when your customers use a common misspelling, they can still find the help they need. How to Fix Failed Searches offers a bit more information there!
If you're looking to share saved replies across mailboxes, a nifty way to accomplish that is by adding them to an internal collection in your Docs sites. As Docs content is accessible from the Docs search bar within any mailbox, you'll be able to search for those, and then use the insert content button to drop the saved reply into the reply editor just like you would a saved reply. And if you've added any variables to it, the editor will pick those up as well!
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. It doesn't actually talk much about EA, but I think starting people on this book will result in an EA that's thriving more and doing more good five years from now, compared to the future EA that would exist if the top go-to resource were more obvious choices like The Precipice, Doing Good Better, the EA Handbook, etc.
For typical rationalists, I think the best intro resource is still HPMoR or R:AZ, but I think Scout Mindset is a great supplement to those, and probably a better starting point for people who prefer Julia's writing style over Eliezer's.
I've made an outline of the book below, for my own reference and for others who have read it. If you don't mind spoilers, you can also use this to help decide whether the book's worth reading for you, though my summary skips a lot and doesn't do justice to Julia's arguments.
For the majority of people/instances, I think people would benefit themselves if not also society more broadly (when their goals are not anti-societal) if they would adopt more of a scout mindset in a variety of their decisions. That being said, after reading the book I did at times worry that Julia may have overstated the value or understated the costs/harms of adopting more of a scout mindset. Or at least, I think there are definitely a non-trivial number of people+decision combinations for which a hybrid or even soldier-heavy mindset is really important, and I felt like the book puts a lot of effort into making the general case for a scout mindset, whereas I had come in hoping for a greater degree of discussion/analysis on when the scout mindset is appropriate vs. when a more-soldiery mindset is appropriate.
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 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:
Here's some more evidence I got in favor of the fact that this is a particularly good book to give to new people. So far, the Rational Animations video about the "Rethinking Identity" section is the channel's most appreciated video in terms of comments, both on Reddit and YT. Also, I'm seeing comments suggesting that at least some people deeply understand and incorporate the message. On r/videos, which is a pretty generalist sub, I'm finding some uplifting (for me) interactions:
I've seen some criticism of this book in EA/Rationality spaces and in some Amazon reviews about the fact that it uses too much internet culture as examples and ties too much with current internet discourse. But I think this is potentially something good. It could achieve at least three things: 1. provide real examples (in a non-aggressive way) that are likely to be somewhat associated with people's identities, thus maybe making them break from this pattern. 2. Be a guide and act as example on how to achieve non-inflammatory non-mind-killing discourse on potentially sensitive topics, and 3. be read more because it ties deeply with how discourse is happening on the internet in recent years. Before obtaining real-world evidence I wouldn't necessarily bet on the fact that it achieves these positive effects, but after seeing reactions in the wild I'm more positive. The negative examples I've seen are fewer and generally downvoted.
4. It keeps your work in balance. People either focus so much on writing (which is a high intensity task, like running) that we forget that there is a lot you can do to make your PhD move forward in the walking phases. Or they spend too much time walking, and never step it up to write. You need both. 100 steps of going to the library and returning your overdue books; reading the style guide to resolve that nagging question about film titles; consulting your field notes. Then 100 steps of writing a draft of the introduction; or carrying out your experiment; or giving a conference paper.
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