People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

I think that is a good point. However, when I skimmed the article my thoughts were of the opposite people: the people who brag about their skills but then end up having very few skills in that area.

> People might start off arrogant but once they acquire enough superior general knowledge they figure they know jack and forces them to be humble ?

There are too many other variables at play - i.e. inherent psychological disposition, environmental and social factors, institutional incentives - to know how cause and effect work in the development of intellectual humility.

But sometimes arrogance in general (and perhaps intellectual arrogance too) is itself just a thin defense against a dominating unexamined insecurity about oneself.

If acquiring more general knowledge helps make you more comfortable with yourself, it might make you more intellectually humble, but it could also do nothing, or even the opposite.

I think this article overlooks a crucial factor, which is ego insecurity. People with an exaggerated sense of overconfidence often learn and achieve more, because their overconfidence serves as a buffer against insecurity, and their inflated self-importance gives them motivation to work hard.

A certain amount of overconfidence is an integral part of being a healthy, thriving human being. People who are depressed have more accurate self-assessments than healthy people. Humility exposes a person to a lot of unpleasant, aversive feelings that can convince them that their energy is not being well spent, making it hard to continue investing at a high enough level to achieve much.

I think it's good to learn the ideas and skills of humility. I think it's important to recognize that it's unpleasant to find out that we're wrong, and we have a natural tendency to avoid unpleasant things, so we have to consciously and actively compensate for our tendency to preserve our own mistaken assumptions. However, I wonder if it's really healthy to internalize humility, to give up a subconscious way of thinking associated with high functioning and adopt a subconscious way of thinking that is associated with depression.

Ideally we'd all have such unassailable emotional security that we wouldn't be bothered by an accurate degree of humility. In reality, I think we have to fake it, and I think a lot of the people preaching this gospel of "you shouldn't feel bad when you find out you're wrong" are faking it too. But that's okay. Our full being is a combination of our messy human psyche that isn't designed for the things we try to use it for and the conscious ideas by which we interact with it. Sometimes these parts are compare to an elephant and a rider — the tiny rider on top is the part of our mind that we consciously control. I think it's okay if that's the only part that really practices humility.

One of the ways I think about humility is that it is the ability of a person to successfully integrate information that requires some non-trivial refactoring of one's internal model of the world.

Refactoring can be a costly operation, so it makes sense that the mind shouldn't take on that task too often, especially if one's mind is more likely to suffer net harm from an unsuccessful or partial refactoring.

However, if a person is gifted at learning in the broadest sense, then it would make a lot of sense that their mind would undertake this process much more gladly, and as a result, form a very strong model of the world.

I think you are right that they are getting to valid points, but I am saying they don't necessarily relate to a theory of intellectual humility.