My answers to some philosophical prompts (try answering the prompts yourself in the comments below!):
Initiative means... It's important because...
Living life. Doing things instead of doing an impersonation of a rock.
Personal, individual responsibility is... It's good because...
Living life. Doing things for yourself instead of doing an impersonation of a rock.
Taking responsibility for your life means recognizing that other people won't solve your problems for you, and taking initiative to solve them yourself.
Taking responsibility also means choosing to control your own life. (You cannot be responsible for things you do not control.) That requires initiative rather than passively letting things happen – you have to actually do stuff to have any control.
Living irresponsibly-passively means letting external stuff control you, like memes, people ("authorities" or not), or even the weather (e.g. a passive person outside could live in the sun and die in the snow, the weather chooses).
One thing a responsible person does is never evade. He deals with things. Evading is irresponsible because it leaves you with no control over the evaded issue.
Criticism is... It has the following benefits...
A criticism is an explanation of a flaw an idea has. Identifying and understanding flaws makes it a lot easier to fix them (to figure out how to change your ideas to no longer have those flaws).
Persuasion is... It is good because...
Persuasion is about suggesting an idea that someone prefers over some idea(s) they already had. It's straightforwardly good if someone changes ideas to ones that they judge to be better.
Persuasion does not require multiple people. It can be self-persuasion. Persuasion, including self- and external, is how rational learning works.
Fallibility is... It is important to understand because...
People commonly make mistakes, so it's important to use methods of doing things which can identify and correct mistakes that occur along the way, rather than relying on everything going perfectly.
Learning and knowledge...
Want something? Prefer anything? What you need is knowledge. (Learning is getting knowledge.)
Learn how to get what you want. Learn how to meet your preference or goal. If you know how, you'll succeed.
The only exception is if you want something impossible or immoral. In those cases, learning is still the best approach. You can learn that it's impossible or immoral (and why), learn what a better preference/goal/want would be (and why), and learn how to change your mind to have that better preference/goal/want instead with zero hesitation or regrets.
Have any doubts about this? Any questions? The answers are all learnable knowledge. You can learn whether your doubts or correct or not and what's best to do about them. You can learn answers to questions (or learn that a question has no answer, perhaps because it's self-contradictory or nonsense, in which case you can learn how to make better questions, what related questions you'd want answers to instead, etc)
All of this is pure awesome with no drawbacks. It's the right way to live.
Reason has to do with correcting errors. What I mean is...
Rationality is commonly confused with being right. Actually, it's about how one takes into account the possibility of being wrong. Rationality is ability to find and correct errors. It's about being able to make changes going forward.
Without rationality, it doesn't matter how great one is today; long term one is screwed without change, because all people are only at the beginning of infinity. There's still unlimited progress, change and greatness ahead. However great you are today, if you don't change, you will be passed. (That you might die before this issue has maximum effect is not exactly comforting.)
Authority is... It is bad because...
Authority is the enemy of all of the above, especially life.
Following authority means not living on your own initiative. Following authority means not taking responsibility for your life and controlling it, but rather letting the authority be the primary responsible party making choices and controlling outcomes. (One would still be responsible for the choice to follow authority, thus allowing for plenty of moral guilt, but not much else.)
Authority isn't rational. It doesn't control things by having the best most persuasive ideas that have been exposed to lots of criticism in order to figure out the best ideas. It's not about learning, it's not designed for each person to control his life using his judgment and knowledge.
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