Outsight Book Reader Diary

Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Review: The First Chief Justice: John Jay and the Struggle of a New Nation

The First Chief Justice: John Jay and the Struggle of a New Nation by Mark C. Dillon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Sunday, September 7, 2025

Review: The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes by David Robson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you consider classrooms in the UK and USA, for instance, our mental worth is often judged by who can put their hand up quickest – giving us the subtle signal that it’s better to go with an immediate intuitive response without reflecting on the finer details. And you are not going to be rewarded for admitting that you don’t know the answer; intellectual humility is actively discouraged.

Worse still, the lessons are often simplified so that we can digest the material as quickly as possible – leading us to prefer ‘fluent’ information over material that might require deeper consideration. Particularly in earlier education, this also involves glossing over potential nuances, such as the alternative interpretations of evidence in history or the evolution of ideas in science, for instance – with facts presented as absolute certainties to be learnt and memorised.12 The assumption had been that introducing these complexities would be too confusing for younger students – and although the teaching methods do allow more flexibility at high school and university, many students have already absorbed a more rigid style of thinking.

Even some well-meaning attempts at educational reform fall into these traps. Teachers have been encouraged to identify a child’s learning style – whether they are a visual, verbal, or kinaesthetic learner. The idea sounds progressive, but it only reinforces the idea that people have fixed preferences for the ways they learn, and that we should make learning as easy as possible, rather than encouraging them to wrestle with problems that aren’t immediately straightforward.
It’s little wonder that students in countries such as the USA and UK do not tend to score well on Igor Grossmann’s tests of evidence-based wisdom, or the measures of critical thinking that predict our susceptibility to misinformation.

Now compare those attitudes to the Japanese education system, where even students in elementary school are encouraged to wrestle with complexity every day; they are taught to discover new ways of solving problems for themselves and, when they have found one answer, to consider the other alternative solutions. If you don’t immediately understand something, the answer is not to ignore it and reinforce your own beliefs, but to look further and to explore its nuances. And the extra thinking that involves is not a sign of weakness or stupidity; it means that you are capable of ‘eating bitterness’ to come to a deeper understanding. If you initially fail, it’s fine to admit your mistakes, because you know you can improve later.

The students are simply better prepared for the more complex, nuanced, and ill-defined problems the real world will set against them during adulthood. And this seems to be reflected in their higher scores on measures of open-minded, flexible reasoning.13 Various studies, for instance, have found that when asked about controversial environmental or political issues, people in Japan (and other East Asian cultures) tend to take longer to consider the questions without offering knee-jerk reactions, and are more likely to explore contradictory attitudes and to think about the long-term consequences of any policies.

If we return to that idea of the mind as a car, the British and American education systems are designed to offer as smooth a track as possible, so that each person can drive as fast as their engine can possibly let them. The Japanese education system, in contrast, is more of an assault course than a race course; it requires you to consider alternative routes to steer your way around obstacles and persevere even when you face rough terrain. It trains you to navigate effectively rather than simply revving the engine.

Let’s be clear: we are talking about averages here, and there is a huge amount of variation within any culture. But these results all suggest that the intelligence trap is partly a cultural phenomenon born in our schools. And once you recognise these facts, it becomes clear that even small interventions can begin to encourage the thinking styles we have explored in the rest of this book, while also improving the factual, academic learning that schools already try to cultivate.

Even a simple strategic pause can be a powerful thing.

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Review: Viet Nam: History, Documents, And Opinions On A Major World Crisis

Viet Nam: History, Documents, And Opinions On A Major World Crisis by Marvin E. Gettleman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Communist Party of Indochina is founded. It is the party of the working class. It will help the proletarian class lead the revolution in order to struggle for all the oppressed and exploited people. From now on we must join the Party, help it and follow it in order to implement the following slogans:

1-To overthrow French imperialism, feudalism, and the reactionary Vietnamese capitalist class.
2-To make Indochina completely independent.
3-To establish a worker-peasant and soldier government.
4-To confiscate the banks and other enterprises belonging to the imperialists and put them under the control of the worker-peasant and soldier government.
5-To confiscate all of the plantations and property be longing to the imperialists and the Vietnamese reactionary capitalist class and distribute them to poor peasants.
6-To implement the eight hour working day.
7-To abolish public loans and poll tax. To waive unj taxes hitting the poor people.
8-To bring back all freedoms to the masses.
9-To carry out universal education.
10-To implement equality between man and woman.

NGUYEN AI QUOC

PART FIVE: THE FATE OF THE GENEVA AGREEMENTS: TESTIMONY OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION FOR SUPERVISION AND CONTROL IN VIETNAM

The First Six Months of the International Commission for Supervision and Control.
Vietminh Compliance with the Agreements.
Differences in Compliance (1955).
Differences in Compliance (1956).
The Agreements after the Deadline for Elections.
Airfields and U. S. Arms
Violations of the Agreements by South Vietnam.
Achievements and Setbacks of the Commission.
"Democratic Freedoms" in 1961..
Military Operations in Vietnam.
Aggression, Subversion: A Divided Commission.
The Commission in Escalating War

Cardinal Spellman
Thomas A. Dooley
DELIVER US FROM EVIL

B. MILITARY PERSONNEL

The following are individual case histories of North Viet-namese soldiers sent by the Hanoi regime into South Viet-nam. They are only an illustrative group. They show that the leadership and specialized personnel for the guerrilla war in South Vietnam consists in large part of members of the North Vietnam armed forces, trained in the North and subject to the command and discipline of Hanoi.

1. Tran Quoc Dan

Dan was a VC major, commander of the 60th Battalion (sometimes known as the 34th Group of the Thon-Kim Bat-talion). Disillusioned with fighting his own countrymen and with Communism and the lies of the Hanoi regime, he sur-rendered to the authorities in South Vietnam on February 11, 1963.

At the age of fifteen he joined the revolutionary army (Vietminh) and fought against the French forces until 1954 when the Geneva Accords ended the Indochina War. As a regular in the Vietminh forces, he was moved to North Viet-nam. He became an officer in the so-called People's Army.

In March 1962 Major Dan received orders to prepare to move to South Vietnam. He had been exposed to massive propaganda in the North which told of the destitution of the peasants in the South and said that the Americans had taken over the French role of colonialists. He said later that an important reason for his decision to surrender was that he discovered these propaganda themes were lies. He found

the peasants more prosperous than the people in the North. And he recognized quickly that he was not fighting the Americans but his own people.

With the 600 men of his unit, Major Dan left Hanoi on March 23, 1962. They traveled through the Laos corridor. His group joined up with the Vietcong First Regiment...

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