A plausible way to cash out “X is being arrogant” is “X is claiming more status than I think they have.” That means it’s a function of my beliefs about how much status I think X has (implicitly, relative to some community), not just a function of X’s behavior in isolation.
Isn’t arrogance sometimes more about having confidence than anything about social status? E.g. “He is arrogant enough to think he has discovered a grand unified theory of everything.” This type of arrogance is virtuous I think.
Believing that you can bluntly tell things you are confident about implies believing that your social status is not too low. (Or a lack of social awareness.) People with very low status know they would get kicked even for saying “2+2=4” too confidently.
Regardless of what the allegedly-arrogant person believes, I think what’s happening when someone is accused of arrogance for being “too” confident about a belief is generally that the accuser sees what they say about that belief as claiming higher status than they deserve.
In a (laughably unreal) ideal world, in these cases “status” would mean “reputation for accurate beliefs” and “deserve” would mean “deserve on the basis of known ability to form accurate beliefs in this area”. In practice, it often comes down to the same sort of ape-hierarchy status that applies everywhere else.
As you will have guessed, I share Qiaochu’s opinion that “arrogant” usually means approximately “trying to claim higher status than they have/deserve”. This probably means that those of us who don’t think highly of status as a guide to accuracy, trustworthiness, etc. should often prefer terms other than “arrogant” when describing others. casebash’s example suggests that “overconfident” and “rudely dismissive” would be good candidates.
I claim that when you describe this situation as arrogance as opposed to something else, you are still parsing it in terms of status. There’s a status ladder for physicists, and if someone insufficiently high up on the ladder claims to have a grand unified theory of everything, that gets parsed as them claiming to have more physics status than you think they have. You might also separately object that in fact there’s a good argument for assuming on priors that they don’t have such a theory, and that they ought to also assume that they don’t have such a theory, but describing this state of affairs as arrogance as opposed to, say, a lack of understanding of priors is tapping into mental machinery that I claim is about evaluating status.
People are often confident in a way that other people think they have a right to—confident in a way that doesn’t claim more status than they’re perceived as having—and then people just call that confidence, not arrogance.
No, I’m making a different point that has nothing to do with status. The prior probability that you actually did come up with a grand unified theory that describes reality is pretty low, even for an actual trained physicist that is the top in her field. Given any one person has limited time and resources, the highest expected payoff thing to do is to NOT look for needles in haystacks but rather assume your new theory is wrong and go do something else. However if everyone takes this approach we will never have progress. So progress is dependant on some people at least acting arrogantly and with audacity to assume, contrary to reasonable priors, that they might actually be on to something and proceed as if they have a fighting chance of being right (despite decades of stagnation and thousands of failed attempts before them).
That is a fine point to make, but I think arrogance is not the right word for the virtue you’re describing. Arrogance is how other people might describe a person trying to uphold this virtue, and it’s also how a part of you might describe another part of you trying to uphold this virtue, and that’s the thing I’m claiming is about status.
A plausible way to cash out “X is being arrogant” is “X is claiming more status than I think they have.” That means it’s a function of my beliefs about how much status I think X has (implicitly, relative to some community), not just a function of X’s behavior in isolation.
Isn’t arrogance sometimes more about having confidence than anything about social status? E.g. “He is arrogant enough to think he has discovered a grand unified theory of everything.” This type of arrogance is virtuous I think.
Believing that you can bluntly tell things you are confident about implies believing that your social status is not too low. (Or a lack of social awareness.) People with very low status know they would get kicked even for saying “2+2=4” too confidently.
Regardless of what the allegedly-arrogant person believes, I think what’s happening when someone is accused of arrogance for being “too” confident about a belief is generally that the accuser sees what they say about that belief as claiming higher status than they deserve.
In a (laughably unreal) ideal world, in these cases “status” would mean “reputation for accurate beliefs” and “deserve” would mean “deserve on the basis of known ability to form accurate beliefs in this area”. In practice, it often comes down to the same sort of ape-hierarchy status that applies everywhere else.
As you will have guessed, I share Qiaochu’s opinion that “arrogant” usually means approximately “trying to claim higher status than they have/deserve”. This probably means that those of us who don’t think highly of status as a guide to accuracy, trustworthiness, etc. should often prefer terms other than “arrogant” when describing others. casebash’s example suggests that “overconfident” and “rudely dismissive” would be good candidates.
I claim that when you describe this situation as arrogance as opposed to something else, you are still parsing it in terms of status. There’s a status ladder for physicists, and if someone insufficiently high up on the ladder claims to have a grand unified theory of everything, that gets parsed as them claiming to have more physics status than you think they have. You might also separately object that in fact there’s a good argument for assuming on priors that they don’t have such a theory, and that they ought to also assume that they don’t have such a theory, but describing this state of affairs as arrogance as opposed to, say, a lack of understanding of priors is tapping into mental machinery that I claim is about evaluating status.
People are often confident in a way that other people think they have a right to—confident in a way that doesn’t claim more status than they’re perceived as having—and then people just call that confidence, not arrogance.
No, I’m making a different point that has nothing to do with status. The prior probability that you actually did come up with a grand unified theory that describes reality is pretty low, even for an actual trained physicist that is the top in her field. Given any one person has limited time and resources, the highest expected payoff thing to do is to NOT look for needles in haystacks but rather assume your new theory is wrong and go do something else. However if everyone takes this approach we will never have progress. So progress is dependant on some people at least acting arrogantly and with audacity to assume, contrary to reasonable priors, that they might actually be on to something and proceed as if they have a fighting chance of being right (despite decades of stagnation and thousands of failed attempts before them).
That is a fine point to make, but I think arrogance is not the right word for the virtue you’re describing. Arrogance is how other people might describe a person trying to uphold this virtue, and it’s also how a part of you might describe another part of you trying to uphold this virtue, and that’s the thing I’m claiming is about status.
It is common for a word to have more than one meaning.