1. Soldier Altruists think it’s obvious how to improve the world and that we just need to execute those obvious steps. They see the barriers to a better world as:

(i) not enough people taking action (e.g., due to ignorance, selfishness, or propaganda), and

(ii) bad groups blocking things (e.g., corrupt politicians or greedy corporations).

2. Scout Altruists think it’s hard to figure out how to improve the world – and most attempts either don’t work, only slightly help, or make things worse. They see the barriers to a better world as:

(i) not enough understanding of causal mechanisms (e.g., due to a lack of high-quality evidence, not enough attention to the evidence we do have, not enough careful reasoning, etc.), and

(ii) too much investment in bad solutions (e.g., due to people jumping to conclusions, doing what feels good emotionally rather than what is effective, ideological blindspots, inertia, etc.)

Soldier Altruists say we need to DO and FIGHT more. Scout Altruists say we need to THINK and TEST more. Soldier Altruists are more likely to think that if we could just get people to be less selfish and more motivated to act, we would make a lot of progress towards a better world. Scout Altruists are more likely to think that if we could just get people to pay more attention to evidence and to have more good-faith debates with strong norms around the quality of argumentation, we would make a lot more progress.

Soldier Altruists may think Scout Altruists are far too reluctant to act and are wasting their time on research and debate. Scout Altruists may think Soldier Altruists are far too confident in their conclusions and are wasting their effort pushing for changes that aren’t going to help much (and which, in some cases, might even make things worse). Of course, in reality, there is a continuum between these two positions. So, on a scale from 0 (Soldier Altruist) to 10 (Scout Altruist) where do you fall? I’m probably a 7 or 8.

As some commenters have pointed out, there is a relationship between this distinction and “Conflict Theory” vs. “Mistake Theory.” I think it is related – but also distinct in important ways. Conflict theory says that there is a giant zero-sum struggle (groups fighting over fixed resources). Whereas in this case, we’re operating from a framework of altruism: “the world can be made a lot better – what’s the big barrier to that happening? Is it that we know what to do and we’re not doing it enough/with enough energy, or is it that we don’t really know what to do?”

Also, to clarify another important point brought up in the comments: I’m not asking, “do you think it’s obvious how we should improve the world if we had a magic wand that could change whatever we wanted?” – instead, the question is: “is it obvious what to do to improve the real world, given that we don’t have a magic wand?” Do we just need to put more money/time/effort/people into executing the current “obvious” strategies because they will work well if we just scale them up? Or is it pretty unclear what strategies we should even be putting more resources into (meaning that a lot of thinking, research, debate and/or evidence evaluation will typically be necessary to even figure out what is worth scaling up)?

Julia’s book (which I highly recommend): https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556/ref=nodl_

This piece was first written on April 23rd, 2021, and first appeared on this site on January 7th, 2022.

1. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
3. Gates’ Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
4. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
5. Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, don’t invoke conspiracy when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence).
6. Acton’s Dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
7. Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
8. Benford’s Law: In a diverse collection of unrelated statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.
9. Betteridge’s Law: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.
10. Brooks’ Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
11. Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
12. Claasen’s Law: Usefulness = log(technology).
13. Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right, but when they state something is impossible, they are probably wrong.
14. Cromwell’s Rule: Nothing but logical impossibilities have a prior probability of 0 or 1.
15. Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
16. Doctorow’s Law: When someone puts a lock on a thing you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.
17. Dunbar’s Number: Most people can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people.
18. Eroom’s Law: Drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
19. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: You’ll believe articles outside your area of expertise, even after acknowledging that neighboring articles in your area of expertise are completely wrong.
20. Gibson’s Law (or the Expert Witness Law): For each PhD (to use as an expert witness for one side) there’s an equal and opposite PhD.
21. Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
22. Morley-Souter’s Law (Rule 34): There is porn of it (no exceptions).
23. Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
24. Hebb’s Law: Neurons that fire together wire together.
25. Hubble’s Law: Galaxies recede from an observer at a rate proportional to their distance to that observer.
26. Hume’s Guillotine (Is-Ought Problem): Normative statements (about what’s moral/immoral/right/wrong) cannot be deduced exclusively from descriptive statements.
27. Humphrey’s Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
28. Kranzberg’s Law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
29. Lamarck’s Principle (or “Use it or Lose it”): Use it or lose it (evolutionarily speaking, but also in the brain).
30. Lewis’s Law: The comments you’ll inevitably find on any article about feminism justify feminism.
31. Littlewood’s Law: Individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.
32. Maes–Garreau Law: Favorable predictions about future technology will fall at the latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the predictor.
33. Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
34. Miller’s Law: To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
35. Moore’s Law: Computation per dollar grows exponentially (or: number of transistors per circuit doubles roughly every 24 months).
36. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
37. Alder’s Law: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
38. O’Sullivan’s Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
39. Pareto’s Principle (80/20 Rule): For many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
40. Peter’s Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
41. Poisson’s Law (or Law of Large Numbers): For independent random variables with a common distribution, the average tends to the mean as sample size increases.
42. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In bureaucracy, those devoted to the bureaucracy get control, those devoted to what it’s supposed to achieve lose influence.
43. Putt’s Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
44. Rosenthal Effect (Pygmalion Effect): High expectations lead to an increase in performance, low expectations to a decrease in performance.
45. Schneier’s Law: Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.
46. Shermer’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
47. Zipf’s Law: The frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n (few words are used often, most are used rarely).
48. Wirth’s Law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
49. Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
50. Stigler’s Law: No discovery is named after its original discoverer, including this one.

This piece was first written on July 6, 2020, and first appeared on my website on May 30, 2026.