Toughness is a topic I spent some time thinking about today. The way I think about it is that toughness is one's ability to push through difficulty.

Imagine that Alice is able to sit in an ice bath for 6 minutes and Bob is only able to sit in the ice bath for 2 minutes. Is Alice tougher than Bob? Not necessarily. Maybe Alice takes lots of ice baths and the level of discomfort is only like a 4/10 for here whereas for Bob it's like an 8/10. I think when talking about toughness you want to avoid comparing apples to oranges.

I suspect that toughness depends on the context and isn't a completely general skill. Alice might be more physically tough than Bob, and Bob might be more socially tough, meaning that he's better at doing things like avoiding peer pressure. And maybe Alice is more morally tough, resisting the urge to lie and cheat. Maybe Bob is more cognitively tough; he's better able to able to deal with things like juggling lots of things competing for his attention. Maybe Alice is more emotionally tough and is better able to resist the urge to suppress difficult feelings instead of facing them.

All of this is pretty "back of the napkin". It's just kind of an initial attempt of me thinking about the topic. There's probably a better way to categorize things. And the categories I came up with probably have a fair amount of overlap.

I'm not sure how important toughness is. Physical toughness probably isn't very important in our modern world. I could see cognitive, emotional, social and moral toughness being pretty important. And rationality toughness! But then again, maybe not.

Consider social toughness. Suppose Alice has a hard time saying no to people. I see two broad ways of dealing with this:

1. Become more socially tough. This makes her more capable of pushing past the difficulty of saying no.
2. Make it less difficult to say no. Maybe explore why saying no is difficult and do whatever psychological work makes it less difficult to say no (cognitive reframing, exposure therapy, parts work -- whatever).

I feel like (2) is usually more appropriate than (1) -- in this particular situation, in other "social toughness" situations, and in other "toughness" situations. It usually makes sense to make the thing easier than to improve your ability to push past it.

This is just a hunch though. I'm not sure. And I think that this "ability to push past it" thing is at least somewhat important.

You don't want to become too tough though. I think it can be overdone. Well, sort of. What I have in mind is the following from How to Do What You Love:

A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way — including, unfortunately, not liking it.

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

I think some people might get so good at pushing past things that they forget to ask whether the thing is something they even should push past in the first place.

I am not familiar with these debates, but I have a feeling that you're arguing against a strawman here.

I've started to watch the YouTube channel Clean That Up. It started with me pragmatically searching for how to clean something up in my apartment that needed cleaning, but then I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and watched a bunch of his videos. Now they appear in my feed and I watch them periodically. To my surprise, I actually quite enjoy them.

It's made me realize how much skill it takes to clean. Nothing in the ballpark of requiring a PhD, but I dunno, it's not trivial. Different situations call for different tools, techniques and cleaning materials. But the thing that really caught my attention is simply knowing what to clean. In watching his videos I often am like "Oh, I wouldn't have thought to clean that but I'm glad that I know now."

One example that comes to my mind is trash cans. Previously I thought of trash cans as things you line with bags. You put the garbage in the bag and take the bag out when the garbage is full. The garbage never touches the can, so you don't need to clean the can. This makes sense in theory, but in practice things don't always work out that smoothly.

I just moved into a new (furnished) apartment and the garbage cans were all gross. I had to take the bags out and clean the cans. And today I was at a nice tea shop that is generally very clean, but I noticed that in the bathroom the trash can was gross.

The trash can in my apartment was actually noticeable but I don't know if the one in the tea shop was. If I hadn't been thinking about cleanliness recently I might not have noticed it. But even without having consciously noticed it, I think that subconsciously it might have bothered me.

Relatedly, I have a feeling that cleanliness -- both consciously being aware that things are clean and unconsciously being aware that things are clean -- helps most people achieve a stronger peace of mind. I watched a YouTube video a few weeks ago titled Zen Monk Reveals: Why Cleaning Matters More Than Meditation, so it must be true.

But seriously, it does seem plausible. I couldn't find any good actual research on the subject, but anecdotally I feel like people often breathe notably easier when things are clean.

And it's one of those things that is "important if true". Peace of mind, clarity of mind, emotional regulation -- whatever you want to call it, especially for people doing serious knowledge work, I think readers here will agree that it's important.

Some people will claim that they aren't bothered by a lack of cleanliness. Some of them will be correct, but I hypothesize that some of them will be wrong. Through a failure of introspection or something, I think people sometimes don't realize how much something like a lack of cleanliness is affecting them.

I suppose the actionable thing here would be to try cleaning more and seeing how it makes you feel. Maybe it makes you feel a lot better than you would have thought. And maybe it's worth spending an extra 30 minutes a week to achieve those benefits. Or maybe it's worth paying for outside help.

It's also possible that cleaning is worthwhile but the benefits aren't noticable enough to you. I'm not sure what to do about that. My instinct is that for most people it is worth biasing yourself in the direction of cleaning more than you otherwise would, but not too much more, and I'm not too confident.

I'm realizing now that I should have been more clear about what I meant by "feeling bad". I could see like a 1/10 or 2/10 level of "feeling bad" being worthwhile when you stumble across "basic thing gaps". But what I had in mind is moreso like a 5/10 or more type of "feeling bad". Something more substantial.

That magnitude doesn't seem worthwhile. If you react that way every time you don't know a "basic thing", you'll probably end up feeling a ton of bad feelings. An amount that outweighs the benefits of added motivation.

Ah yeah, the phenomena you mention resonate with me and seem like evidence in favor of this idea that there is a distinction between soldier-oriented mindsets that fight against new ideas and ones that fight against something more social.

I'm really glad to hear that! Thanks for letting me know that it is something you've appreciated, knowing that makes me happy :)

Ok yeah, I think this is making sense to me now. Thanks!

As has been said, "Hesitation is always easy, rarely useful."

I think there were a couple extra "s"s ;)

That makes sense, although succeeding in that way at extinguishing mosquitoes requires a lot more than agency! Although it does help. So I guess I see why it would help. The OP sounds to me like it's implying that agency is enough, not just that it can help, but I guess there are a lot of situations where it is enough. Like donating to a charity or something. Am I thinking about this correctly?

I'm confused - how does being agenty help one get utility from compassion? I think part of my confusion is because these ideas are all pretty abstract; a concrete example would help.

There is a concept related to scout mindset and soldier mindset (helpful outline) that I'd like to explore. Let's call it an "adversarial mindset".

From what I gather, both scout mindset and soldier mindset are about beliefs. They apply to people who are looking at the world through some belief-oriented frame. Someone who takes a soldier mindset engages in directionally motivated reasoning and asks "Can/must I believe?" whereas a scout asks "Is it true?".

On the other hand, someone who is in an adversarial mindset is looking through some sort of "combat-oriented frame". If you say "I think your belief that X is true is wrong" to someone in an adversarial mindset, they might infer subtext of something like "You're dumb".

But despite being in this frame, they likely won't respond by saying "Hey, that was mean of you to say I'm dumb. I'm not dumb, I'm smart!" Instead, they'll likely respond by saying something closer to the object level like "Well I'm pretty sure it's right", but the subtext will be something more combative like "I won't let you push me around like that!".

Adversarial mindset isn't about beliefs, it's about self-esteem. Maybe?

There are various phenomena that make me think that a person is in an adversarial mindset. One such phenomenon is when someone is more likely to update their belief when you phrase your critique softly.

For example, imagine that instead of saying "I think your belief that X is true is wrong" you said "Hey, I could totally be off here, but do you think there's a chance that your belief about X might not be completely accurate?". And imagine that the person updated their belief in response to the soft phrasing but not the "hard" phrasing. If so, it seems to me that it isn't the belief in X that they are defending against. It's their identity of someone who isn't dumb (or something).

A related possibility is that instead of inferring subtext that is aimed at attacking them ("You're dumb"), they might adopt a dominance-oriented frame and infer subtext of "I'm dominant over you. Submit to me by conceding.", or something. I ran into a situation once where I got into an argument with a therapist of mine that wasn't productive, and I suspect that the reason why it wasn't productive is because she adopted a dominance-oriented frame.

It began by me mentioning that I think beliefs influence feelings. She said something along the lines of "if that were true my job would be a whole lot easier". I clarified that I don't think beliefs are the only thing that influences feelings -- at least not conscious, verbal beliefs as opposed to "emotional learnings" -- but, in some sort of pragmatic sense that I can't fully articulate, they play a role.

I came up with an example where Alice thinks it's a sunny day, is excited to go for a walk, opens the blinds, sees that it's raining, and then feels disappointed. And I explained that in this example I think moving from "belief that it is sunny" to "belief that it is raining" heavily influenced Alice's emotions to shift from excited to disappointed. I expected that the therapist would nod and agree, and then proceed to add nuance to her position that beliefs don't influence feelings. Instead, she dug her heels in and doubled down. I think there are many potential explanations for this other than a dominance-oriented mindset, but a dominance-oriented mindset feels pretty plausible to me here.

Coming back to Julia Galef's book The Scout Mindset and even to the art of rationality more broadly, I suspect that the adversarial mindset and other soldier-adjacent mindsets lead to a lot of "stuckness" and just generally get in our way. And I'm not just referring to "normies" here, I'm including the "rats", including myself!

This claim I'm trying to gesture at seems pretty "important if true". One of my favorite quotes:

My path to this book began in 2009, after I quit graduate school and threw myself into a passion project that became a new career: helping people reason out tough questions in their personal and professional lives. At first I imagined that this would involve teaching people about things like probability, logic, and cognitive biases, and showing them how those subjects applied to everyday life. But after several years of running workshops, reading studies, doing consulting, and interviewing people, I finally came to accept that knowing how to reason wasn't the cure-all I thought it was.

Knowing that you should test your assumptions doesn't automatically improve your judgement, any more than knowing you should exercise automatically improves your health. Being able to rattle off a list of biases and fallacies doesn't help you unless you're willing to acknowledge those biases and fallacies in your own thinking. The biggest lesson I learned is something that's since been corroborated by researchers, as we'll see in this book: our judgment isn't limited by knowledge nearly as much as it's limited by attitude.

- The Scout Mindset

I don't get the sense that we have a great understanding of why people adopt adversarial mindsets though, or how one can resist adversarial mindsets from slipping in. Seems like a topic worthy of more attention.