Truth-seeking; willing and able to change one's mind based on evidence; epistemically reasonable.
Refers to "scientists" and "sports fans" on Tim Urban's Thinking Ladder. Contrasts with low-rung "lawyers" and "zealots".
Refers to "scientists" and "sports fans" on Tim Urban's Thinking Ladder. Contrasts with low-rung "lawyers" and "zealots".
The main divide in society today isn't "left" vs "right", it's "high-rung" vs "low-rung"―and nothing can change my mind on that.
by TheNakedBum January 24, 2024
The quality of a person's skills in epistemology ― cognitive bias compensation, scientific skepticism toward oneself and others, bullshit like that. Associated with reasonableness, curiosity, empiricism, a burning for learning, obsessive devotion to evidence as the arbiter of truth, mental modeling skills, high-rung thinking, evenhandedness, honesty, humility, a love of simplicity, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, game-theoretic analysis, statistical literacy, and other junk the human race hasn't figured out yet.
"Oh, I do ClearerThinking quizzes most days to boost my epistemics. Plus I read Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality and LessWrong, to help me be cool like Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander and those other navel-gazing windbags I never read like... Immanuel Kant? Whatever, point is, all humans are morons until they learn how to think. So I'm trying to learn how to be a bit less mind-bogglingly stupid than average."
by TheNakedBum January 24, 2024