The second virtue Marshall pairs with causal mode is **empiricism**: "diligently studying the world to find out what actually happens." He contrasts it with **idealism** — "starting from theories and ideals of how the world ought to be, and extrapolating reality from those theories." His exemplar is Machiavelli. *The Prince* reads tame today, but its method was radical: Machiavelli "actually sat down and explored many historical and contemporary cases of revolutions, civil wars, international wars" and reported what he found, however unflattering. "The key point is that Machiavelli actually studied the topic." Before him, dominant thinking ran the other way — being a good person was assumed to lead to power (Providence, fate). The discipline is to see things "exactly as they are — observe the world empirically — and deduce the causality of things from that," rather than deducing the world from how it should be. Marshall's closing prompt makes the demand personal: "Where have you neglected doing the deep and hard studies of what will actually lead to success in your domain?" The paths to success run through cause and effect, and they "can not be uncovered without studying the world and figuring out the cause-and-effect." --- *Source: [[Book Inventory/Progression|Progression]] (Sebastian Marshall, 2016) — Uncommon Virtues #4 — Causal / Empirical*