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People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

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Re: People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

#121

Post by BeetleB »

Scanning the comments, I don't really see anyone discussing the value of "superior general knowledge".

I like knowledge, so I find value in attaining it. However, depending on your goals, intellectual humility will set you back a great deal. Most people use confidence and certainty as a signal, and suppressing these means they'll pick someone over you (for a promotion, for a relationship, for a contract, for your knowledge/expertise (even though you likely have more of it than the other guy)).

The people who are ahead are rarely the ones who are the most knowledgeable (with the possible exception of academia).

I've been told: "Be humble and tentative on the inside, but self-promoting and confident on the outside".

Re: People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

#122

Post by yters »

andbberger wrote: post #84
yters wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Yeats saying lack of conviction is a good thing? Or commenting on the fact that the wrong people have conviction?

Yes he is saying that lack of conviction is a good thing.

Even though the verse context is listing a bunch of bad things that are happening?

Bad thing;

Bad thing;

Bad thing,

Bad thing, and

Bad thing;

Good thing, and Good thing!

Re: People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

#124

Post by nemonemo »

toasterlovin wrote: post #115
bunderbunder wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be positive about that either. It could be that both are true, and create a virtuous cycle. Or it could be that neither is true, and it's really that both characteristics are engendered by having a curious temperament.

FWIW, I'm not sure that a curious temperament is materially different from intellectual humility.

I think curiosity implies intellectual humility but the converse is not necessarily true.

Re: People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

#125

Post by anoncake »

evandev wrote: post #111
Isamu wrote: post #28

A questionnaire from the article: 1) I am willing to admit if I don't know something. 2) I like to compliment others on their intellectual strengths. 3) I try to reflect on my weaknesses in order to develop my intelligence. 4) I actively seek feedback on my ideas, even if it is critical. 5) I acknowledge when someone knows more than me about a certain subject. 6) If someone doesn't understand my idea, it's probably b…

> Also (3) I don't get, because while I am extremely motivated by intellectual curiosity, I have maybe zero motivation to "develop my intelligence" like it was some kind of fitness thing. It would be more apt to, if you were writing code that has some level of networking involved. During this you think "I don't remember/know much of the OSI model, so I should go read up on the model to better understand the code I am…

That sounds as if trying to figure out on your own was antithetical to curiosity. That doesn't sound right to me.

Re: People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

#126

Post by hathawsh »

Isamu wrote: post #28

A questionnaire from the article: 1) I am willing to admit if I don't know something. 2) I like to compliment others on their intellectual strengths. 3) I try to reflect on my weaknesses in order to develop my intelligence. 4) I actively seek feedback on my ideas, even if it is critical. 5) I acknowledge when someone knows more than me about a certain subject. 6) If someone doesn't understand my idea, it's probably b…

I would add some important evaluations. These are some less obvious, deeper aspects of intellectual humility:

10) I accept that someone with less experience may have better ideas than I have, even in my own field of expertise.

11) Even if I am not certain of myself, I am willing to suggest and defend my ideas because they deserve equal treatment.

12) I am willing to forgo new ideas when they hurt momentum too much.

13) I am willing to forgo momentum when the benefits of new ideas outweigh the costs.

14) When I feel it is right to assert my position, I am able and willing to back down if I receive feedback that changes my assumptions.

15) I know when to humbly defer decisions to the team even though I believe the team's decision is less than ideal. People are more important than problems to be solved.

Re: People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

#127

Post by ohaideredevs »

oblib wrote: post #118

A good friend once told, after listening to me bitch about someone who loved to comment on my work, "You can learn something from everyone". I spent some time trying to dismiss that before considering that if he was right I'd already missed out on a lot, and that certainly humbled me because when I started looking for it I found he was right. The flip side to this is sharing what you know when it contradicts what oth…

I find myself in a similar situation - a friend's perspective is that you can learn from anything. Mine is that you should triage endlessly after a certain point, I guess that makes me dismissive.

Of course, if I told him "So, you can browse facebook all day and be better off?", he would probably say "You know what I mean."

Real "wisdom" is knowing when to be dismissive and when not to be, either extreme is bad, but being able to discern is tacit knowledge that no one can really say anything useful on without being super specific.

Re: People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

#128

Post by astrodust »

donkeyd wrote: post #10
rolltiide wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact is, people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. I've never heard of this happening can you give examples on this site?

I've worked with previous my boss's son. This guy felt like he was the best at everything and would get annoyed if people gave him critical feedback on anything he did and would insist he was right. Therefore, even when more experienced people told him things he disagreed with, he wouldn't accept their opinion and keep doing it his way. This caused a lot of people to not want to work with him and, in the end, was a m…

People like that are impossible to work with. It's a flavour of narcissism where the person in question is never wrong, cannot be wrong, so any mistakes are obviously someone else's fault.

Re: People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

#129

Post by Retra »

JakeStone wrote: post #94

Actually had an option to make something like this a teaching moment to my kids yesterday. I'd been reading articles about the bridge between Abell 0399 and Abell 0401. There was a Forbes article that said this provided supporting evidence for dark matter. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/06/06/scie... Dark matter bothers my sense of cosmic aesthetics. I'm not a physicist, I just like reading about h…

I believe this is largely the reason Galileo is often considered the first scientist. When Copernicus argued for a heliocentric world-view, he was largely doing so on the basis of aesthetic value: it simplified the mathematics. But it was always theoretically possible for another mathematical model to make the geocentric perspective more appealing, so anybody who was attached to it could simply cast his model off as a mathematical trick.

But Galileo built a telescope that anybody with a pair of eyes could use, no matter your aesthetic preferences, and he was compelled to transform his world-view on the basis of the facts he observed in it. He didn't really have to make any mathematical argument at all; he just had to explain what he observed, and it directly contradicted the Aristotelian model of reality.

Re: People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

#130

Post by whymsicalburito »

joe_the_user wrote: post #119
itsangaris wrote: post #106

It's likely the inverse: the more knowledge, the more intellectual humility, which is just rephrasing Aristotle, “The more you know, the more you know you don't know.”

Not necessarily. At one point, before the rise of Google, most of my answers to various general knowledge questions would be more or less just a somewhat selective average of things I'd heard and read from sources. I have an educated family and background so these answers were probably "about average" for the educated but still entirely wrong a significant part of the time. At a certain point in my development, I got…

Sounds like you're proving Aristotle correct
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