Virtues

Applied Virtues

• Curiosity: The drive to find new problems and generate conjectures.

• Self-Criticism: The primary tool of intellectual honesty.

• Clarity: The virtue of refining thoughts to be less ambiguous and easier to criticise.

• Epistemic Humility: The consistent recognition of one's own fallibility.

• Thoroughness: The commitment to accounting for all known uncontroverted ideas and pending criticisms that may pertain to the problem at hand. {This seems weak}

• Good Faith: The commitment to "steel-manning" ideas and criticisms.

• Resilience / Fortitude: The ability to recover from failure and re-apply the process.

• Decisiveness: The will to act once a conjecture is provisionally accepted and criticism is exhausted.

• Self-Discipline: {This one needs work. I don't understand it well enough to write a good summary.}

• Courage: The will to face the potential pains of the epistemic process (facing uncomfortable truths, acting on counter-intuitive conclusions, thinking alone).

• Accountability: A social manifestation of integrity; the willingness to "own" the consequences of one's actions.

• Reliability: The practice of meeting one's voluntary commitments.

• Proportionality: The skill of acting proportionately to a given situation, criticism or event.

• Intellectual Impartiality: The skill of separating the content of an idea from its source, allowing criticism to be applied fairly.

• Fairness: The consistent application of the same critical standards to all ideas.

• Intellectual Patience: The willingness to give a problem the time it needs, rather than using a problematic solution (a solution with pending criticisms). {Okay but what if it is an emergency?}

• Foresight & Planning: The application of conjecture and criticism to problems pertaining to future circumstances.

• Diligence / Industriousness: The sustained application of effort to the problem-solving process, usually to a particular problem.

• Creativity / Ingenuity: The skill of generating novel conjectures and criticisms.

• Efficiency: The drive to reduce the work, resources or steps it takes to solve problems.

• Resourcefulness: The skill of solving problems within constraints.

• Purposefulness: The skill of defining a hierarchy of problems to solve, ensuring one's productive effort is directed at goals worth pursuing.

• Focus: The ability to sustain mental effort.

• Sharpness: Raw mental processing power.

• Energy / Vitality: The capacity to be highly productive, especially over long durations.

• Athleticism / Physicality: The capacity of the body to execute actions.

• Memory: The ability to store and retrieve important conjectures and criticisms.