Are You Intellectually Humble?

I think of the difference between:

Tim Cook: "We think you'll love this."

vs.

Steve Jobs: "It's insanely great!"

Given Apple's massive success I think they can afford to be more Cook-like, but a bit of Jobs-style fire, egomania, overconfidence and iconoclasm might help out when you're trying to transform an industry like PCs (Macintosh, iMac), audio players (iPod), or smartphones (iPhone). Though Jobs also had the seemingly (but not actually) humble "one more thing..."

I don't see a lot of humility - intellectual or otherwise - in Elon Musk, for example. But Musk's arrogance, like Jobs', is also backed up by ability to actually do things. And the ability to change one's mind, especially in the face of evidence, seems to be important.

I have also observed that effective self-promotion moves some people ahead of their humbler but more qualified peers.

I like to think so, but I sure detest the fake humble people, who deny that they know anything. This whole "I know nothing, like, not even that 1+1=2" kind of attitude or this borderline "the universe is holy and I must be in awe of it because it makes me sound deep and that I am humble, when really this is all a show to make others think that I'm intellectually humbler than they are."

I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else, but I just think there's a lot of overweening fake humbleness going on. "Oh, the universe is so big, how can we be so arrogant that we think we know everything, the universe is a wonderous place and we are so small and limited, and blah, blah, blah." Yeah, I get it already. Heard it the first million times how wonderous you think the universe is and how loudly and strenuously you proclaim to know nothing because you heard it is cool to say that you don't know nothing about nothing.

It's like humble bragging, but humble humbling.

I mean, we know that the entire universe's matter is made up of the periodic table through spectroscopy (not counting dark matter, just "regular" matter). It's not like there's going to be whisky atoms or pizza atoms so that there's just a lake of whisky somewhere. You are not going to be able to have animals made of Xenon or Argon or Neon or any of the other noble inert gases.

I think there is a lot of shit to learn and it is fun and interesting and I love it. But there's no reason to act with such fake reverence and like it is a holy universe. It's just flucking stuff that we need to learn about. It's not a god to pray to.

Do you all hate me now that I'm ruining all your universe reverence?

I don't know, man, it just bugs me to no end the whole "we know nothing" bow your head in fake humility thing so you can fit into the "I don't know crowd" and be a popular cool kid, too.

And then you hear via some third party what they related you saying to them, and knowing that wasn't what you said at all you can now take what they relate about others saying with a pinch of salt. Or a dumptruck.

Probably wan't one single guy, but a whole mass of them. Would be wrong to blame just the last one who finally broke the back of GP's camel.

> As a Christian I'm forbidden form holding any belief that isn't directly in the bible and not a provable fact.

Which is it -- "not in the bible", or "not a provable fact"? Because if it's both, that's a paradox.