1. The Wise Critic
Honesty + Courage = telling difficult truths that it’s important for others to hear.

Honesty without courage is still good and valuable, but you’re limited to telling easy truths.

2. The Protector
Compassion + Courage = protecting other people even when it is dangerous and difficult, such as when saving someone from a bully means risking being bullied yourself.

Compassion without courage is great, but it’s limited to certain kinds of help.

3. The True Friend
Loyalty + Courage = being on the side of your loved ones and those you are grateful to, even when it comes at significant personal risk.

Loyalty without courage is still really nice to have, but it limits the extent of that loyalty.

4. The World Changer
Justice + Courage = fighting against the status quo to make the world better and fairer.

Justice without courage is great at small scales, but courage is often needed to create widespread change.

5. The Investigator
Truth-seeking + Courage = uncovering what is true regardless of what you wish were true or what you get rewarded or punished for finding.

Truth-seeking without courage leads to truer beliefs, but only in domains where truth isn’t too inconvenient.

6. The Hero
Goodness + Courage = standing up against immoral behavior, even when that behavior is socially condoned or carried out by the powerful.

Goodness without courage is a wonderful quality, but it doesn’t effectively combat evil.

Courage can make good behavior better and bad behavior worse.
That’s why it’s not a virtue by itself. But a lack of courage limits one’s ability to do good. Don’t seek courage for its own sake. Cultivate it because it enhances your other virtues.

Many people do bad things not because they are bad people but because they lack the courage NOT to. Seek courage because it allows you to do the right thing in difficult situations.

Here is how others have put related ideas about courage:
“…courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions.”

-C.S. Lewis

“Courage is the most important of the virtues because, without it, no other virtue can be practiced consistently.”

-Maya Angelou

“Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.”

-Samuel Johnson

“Who but a man of infinite courage could have dared to think those thoughts? That is the characteristic of great scientists; they have courage. They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.”

-Richard Hamming

(Hat tip to @CallHimMoorlock and @alexisgallagher on Twitter for pointing me to some of these quotes.)

On a personal note, I’ve become more courageous over the years. I still have plenty of room for improvement, though, and it’s something I’d like to continue to work on.

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This piece was first written on February 13, 2022, and first appeared on this site on February 3, 2023.

1. one is profound (but probably false or nonsense)

2. the other meaning is trivial or obvious (but true)

These paired meanings can trick our brains into thinking that the idea is both profound and true: we experience the profoundness of one meaning while experiencing the truth of the other meaning. These are phrases that exploit the odd nature of our minds.

Some examples are (arguably):

• “Love is just a word.”

• “Everything happens for a reason.”

• “There is no ‘I’ in team.”

• “Beauty is only skin deep.”

I’d like to propose a new term: “deepiful.”

A deepiful is a statement that seems trivial or dumb but which has genuinely profound consequences!

A deepiful is the opposite of a deepity (since a deepity is dumb but sounds profound, whereas a deepiful is profound but sounds dumb!).

Here are some examples.

Deepiful 1: if each of a system’s states is equally likely, and we group them into categories (e.g., “mixed up” states vs. “organized” states), then the things that actually happen will (obviously) tend to be from categories containing more states.

This is totally trivial in a sense, yet it’s the basis of entropy!

Deepiful 2: if some organisms are more successful at passing down their genetic material than others, then organisms similar to them will grow in relative numbers.

This is also trivial, yet it’s the basis of natural selection!

Deepiful 3: if you define new words for things and use the shortest words for the most commonly said things, you’ll be able to communicate using fewer letters. Keep going, and you’ll have the shortest way of saying things.

Another trivially true statement, yet it’s the core of information theory!

Deepiful 4: if you have a bunch of dots on a piece of paper, you can draw with a pencil from left to right to connect them together in an endless variety of ways!

This is obvious, and a young child can easily see that this is true, and yet it’s the basis of the concept of overfitting in machine learning!

This piece was first written on September 18, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 22, 2022.

Here are eight common and slick-sounding claims that I think are misleading, along with a very clunky alternative for each that I think is truer and more useful:

1. “You’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the things you did” -> don’t try to minimize the amount of regret you’ll have – try to maximize the total amount of the things that you value.
2. “Opposites attract” -> birds of a feather flock together (in fact, only a few types of opposites actually attract).
3. “Don’t let fear stop you” -> don’t let fear stop you when you’re afraid of doing valuable things that aren’t actually risky, and in those cases, try to ignore your fear and act in spite of it even though it may feel extremely shitty to do so.
4. “Trust your emotions” -> your emotions signal useful information about your needs and your beliefs about the world, so it’s really important to learn to notice them and understand what they are telling you…but don’t assume your emotions accurately reflect reality either, since they sometimes are much stronger than reality warrants (e.g., excessive fear of something that’s totally safe), or are the result of pattern recognition gone haywire (e.g., you get a bad feeling about someone because they have irrelevant similarities to another person who hurt you), or are impacted by random factors (e.g., feeling anger that’s caused more by hunger than by what the anger is fixated on).
5. “Believe your intuition” -> believe your intuition in situations you’ve experienced many times before, where there was enough feedback on how well your predictions performed to allow your intuition to have become honed (e.g., when interpreting the behavior of people you know well in common social situations, but not when evaluating if a complex philosophical claim is likely to be true), as well as in cases where there is no time to think things through carefully (e.g., if a yelling person leaps out in front of you and your intuition tells you that you’re in danger).
6. “Love happens when you’re not looking for it” -> desperation tends to be unattractive and can lead to bad, rash romantic decision making, so be cautious if you’re feeling that way and consider working on those feelings before seeking a partner, but on the other hand, the more people you meet, the more likely you are to meet someone you hit it off with, and that’s true even if you feel desperate
7. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” -> absence often makes the heart grow fonder…at first…and then, “out of sight, out of mind,” because eventually you get used to life without that person and it gets easier to be away from them and move on.
8. “Everything that happens happens for the best” -> bad things happen frequently that are truly not good, but you can often learn useful things from bad experiences, and it’s really worthwhile to actively look for what those learnings are. Plus, it is often possible to think differently about bad things in such a way as to reduce the suffering that they cause, and it’s often extremely worthwhile to do so when you can without deceiving yourself (e.g., remembering all the other things you are grateful for, or noticing the beneficial silver linings that resulted from the bad thing).