The wisest thinker in the room knows how to
​conduct their intellectual life extraordinarily well.

• ​Being expert at regulating one's thinking, judging, and believing activity.
• Knowing how to reason extremely well.
• Knowing how to think creatively.
• Knowing how to adjust one's confidence in a claim in accord with the strength of the evidence one knows about.
• Knowing when to suspend judgment when the evidence is inconclusive.
• Knowing how to take into account genuine expertise.
• Knowing how to track the quality of one's own evidential position.
• Knowing how to spot the signs of irrationality in oneself and others.
• Knowing how to handle disagreement and controversy.
• Knowing how to spot and respond to intellectual weaknesses, faults, and insecurities.
• Being vividly aware of the varieties of ways a belief can be good or bad.
• Being humble but only appropriately so.
• Being tolerant of contrary ideas, but only appropriately so.
• Knowing how to act with energy even when one knows that conviction is unwise but action must be taken anyway.

Here is an alternative but accurate characterization:​​

• Being expert at knowing if one has knowledge, and not mere opinion.​​
• Being expert at knowing how to tell if one has truth, and not merely reasonable ideas.
• Being expert at knowing when one has enough evidence to act.
• Being expert at knowing when one has enough evidence to believe.
• Being expert at knowing how to deal with intelligent, persistent disagreement.
• Being expert at knowing how to deal with controversy.
• Being expert at knowing how to think intelligently about religion, politics, love, and relationships.
• Being expert at knowing when one should suspend judgment.
• Being expert at knowing how to interpret the thoughts, remarks, and emotions of others.
• Being expert at knowing how to uncover subtle ambiguity, and deal with it well.
• Being expert at knowing how to spot expertise, and when to trust it.
• Being expert at knowing how to handle one’s own intellectual faults, weaknesses, and insecurities.
• Being expert at knowing how to handle the intellectual faults, weaknesses, and insecurities of those close to us.
• Being expert at knowing how to navigate subjective matters.
• Being expert at knowing when it’s wise to think for oneself.
• Being expert at knowing when one should be humble and when one should be confident.

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