People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge

Or in other words: There is no such thing as absolute (mathematical, provable) truth about reality, and if you ignore that there is such a thing as evidence for claims about reality, then all claims are equally justified, as long as you make assumptions that are consistent with your claims.

> If you were more intellectually humble this might be easier for you to accept, but as it stands, you are no different from anybody else who chooses to reject the limits of their knowledge.

Well, yeah, it is tragic how religion poisons minds to the point where everything about the world is upside down.

The funny thing is, you yourself don't actually believe that that supposed limit to our knowledge is there. You yourself do constantly make decisions prefering empirical evidence over other "belief systems". When the stove is hot, you don't put your hand on it "because it can't be proven that I will hurt myself (true!), and if I assume that heat doesn't hurt you, that is just as proven as the assumption that empirical evidence tells me something about reality (true!), so I am just as justified in my belief system that putting your hand on a hot stove won't hurt you as people with a scientific 'belief system'! Believing the science requires just as much faith as believing that a hot stove won't hurt you!" You are not actually stupid enough to believe that. In your daily life, for the most part, you constantly act consistent with the belief that empirical/scientific methodology gives you reliable information about reality, and inconsistent with the belief that any other assumptions instead of what possibly underlies scientific "belief systems" is just as justified/just as much "faith based". Nor would you accept so from anyone who disagree with you about something. If someone made the assumption that murdering people made their loved ones happy, and started murdering people on that basis, you would not say "oh, well, it's their assumption, and it can not be proven, but science can't either, so it proably makes people happy". You would immediately call that out as completely moronic reasoning that is way overstretching the implications of an iteresting conundrum of epistemology to be more real than the obvious immediate experience that killing people does not make their loved ones happy.

All of this is not actually a set of principles that you believe in. It's a set of excuses you give so as to avoid seriously examining the epistemic foundations of this one particular belief that you happen to have, and that you apply only very selectively to that one claim.

I don’t really get it. I can perhaps understand that some candidates might have gotten good feedback from blatantly guessing in the past, but that’s why I now explicitly tell them to disclaim guesses. If anything it looks more impressive when you honestly don’t know something but intuit the substantially correct answer (as long as it’s something that could be realistically intuited).

Yet even with my disclaimer, I’ve still conducted phone screens and onsite interviews where the candidate eventually started bullshitting. It’s one thing to say you don’t know and give a wildly incorrect answer - at least then I can try and steer the interview towards another of the candidate’s strengths. It’s even okay to preface your wild guess with an, “I think...”. But the cavalier way in which people will just spout nonsense is disturbing. Even if you’ve been performing well up to the point, engaging in bullshit is nearly immediate grounds for me to discount you as a candidate.

> people with greater humility have superior...

It's a contradiction in terms. It makes humility look like a tool. One could instead just say "try to be humble".

You are able to identify these over-confident people and prevent them from being a toxic influence on a team.