The Mental Virtues - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Even if you are alone in your office, you are thinking. Thinking well under a barrage of information may be a different sort of moral challenge than fighting well under a hail of bullets, but it’s a character challenge nonetheless.
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love of learning. Some people are just more ardently curious than others, either by cultivation or by nature.
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courage. The obvious form of intellectual courage is the willingness to hold unpopular views. But the subtler form is knowing how much risk to take in jumping to conclusions.
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Intellectual courage is self-regulation, Roberts and Wood argue, knowing when to be daring and when to be cautious. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn pointed out that scientists often simply ignore facts that don’t fit with their existing paradigms, but an intellectually courageous person is willing to look at things that are surprisingly hard to look at.
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The median point between flaccidity and rigidity is the virtue of firmness. The firm believer can build a steady worldview on solid timbers but still delight in new information. She can gracefully adjust the strength of her conviction to the strength of the evidence. Firmness is a quality of mental agility.
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humility, which is not letting your own desire for status get in the way of accuracy. The humble person fights against vanity and self-importance.
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The humble researcher doesn’t become arrogant toward his subject, assuming he has mastered it. Such a person is open to learning from anyone at any stage in life.
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Autonomy is the median of knowing when to bow to authority and when not to, when to follow a role model and when not to, when to adhere to tradition and when not to.
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generosity. This virtue starts with the willingness to share knowledge and give others credit. But it also means hearing others as they would like to be heard, looking for what each person has to teach and not looking to triumphantly pounce upon their errors.
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thinking well means pushing against the grain of our nature — against vanity, against laziness, against the desire for certainty, against the desire to avoid painful truths. Good thinking isn’t just adopting the right technique. It’s a moral enterprise and requires good character, the ability to go against our lesser impulses for the sake of our higher ones.
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wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing how to handle your own limitations.
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Warren Buffett made a similar point in his own sphere, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 I.Q. beats the guy with the 130 I.Q. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble.”
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Good piece. I only wish David had written more about all the forces that work _against_ the virtues he describes. The innumerable examples of corporate suppression/spin of "inconvenient" truths (i.e, GM, Toyota, et al); the virtual acceptance that lying is a legitimate tactic in political campaigns; our preoccupation with celebrity, appearances, and "looking good" in every imaginable transaction; make the quiet virtues that DB describes even more heroic than he suggests.