Discussing “humility” and “arrogance” is difficult without careful definitions. I was thinking about this recently; this is how I would like to define them.
Whenever I end up feeling like I have been arrogant, it is because I underestimated someone else’s abilities, and I ended up surprised by what they were capable of. If humility is the opposite of arrogance, then humility is the ability to accept, as your prior, that somebody you meet just might end up being more wise or more accomplished than you. To be arrogant is to fail to realize that you might have something to learn from other people.
(These definitions of arrogance and humility thus only relate to mental habits, not to social behaviors.)
Note how this makes humility valuable—if you expect everyone around you to be dumb and inferior and not worth learning from, if you don’t give others the chance to prove you otherwise, you’re going to miss out on everything that you could be learning from them. I wouldn’t expect your putative arrogant academic to have very many fruitful collaborations.
So yes, I would say that arrogance is bad intellectual hygiene—it’s having the wrong priors about the people around you.
Note also that it’s also possible to be unfair to oneself in this way. Impostor syndrome should not be confused for humility. High self-esteem should not be confused for arrogance.
… I realize only after writing all of this that there’s also intellectual arrogance and intellectual humility; it seems that they can be modeled the same way, but with ideas instead of people.
Discussing “humility” and “arrogance” is difficult without careful definitions. I was thinking about this recently; this is how I would like to define them.
Whenever I end up feeling like I have been arrogant, it is because I underestimated someone else’s abilities, and I ended up surprised by what they were capable of. If humility is the opposite of arrogance, then humility is the ability to accept, as your prior, that somebody you meet just might end up being more wise or more accomplished than you. To be arrogant is to fail to realize that you might have something to learn from other people.
(These definitions of arrogance and humility thus only relate to mental habits, not to social behaviors.)
Note how this makes humility valuable—if you expect everyone around you to be dumb and inferior and not worth learning from, if you don’t give others the chance to prove you otherwise, you’re going to miss out on everything that you could be learning from them. I wouldn’t expect your putative arrogant academic to have very many fruitful collaborations.
So yes, I would say that arrogance is bad intellectual hygiene—it’s having the wrong priors about the people around you.
Note also that it’s also possible to be unfair to oneself in this way. Impostor syndrome should not be confused for humility. High self-esteem should not be confused for arrogance.
… I realize only after writing all of this that there’s also intellectual arrogance and intellectual humility; it seems that they can be modeled the same way, but with ideas instead of people.
Maybe this says more about me than about the world, but if this was StackOverflow, this comment would get the star. Thanks.
Thanks!