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Are You Intellectually Humble?

oa.mg

41–50 of 112 posts

Re: Are You Intellectually Humble?

#41
post #19

The only advantage I see at beeing humble is that it does not offend people with low self-esteem. One only needs to say to be good at something or to be proud of something to trigger some people. More so in Europe than in the States I think.

It also helps you brainhack yourself into learning more thing, and being more open to other people's perspectives. Not all of these will be valuable, but some of them will be, immensely so. If you have success based solely on your own perspective, it's easy to think you have it all figured out already and overlook where there's room for improvement and outside input.

A critical component to learning is letting other people see your thoughts and ideas and get them to criticise them. This part is much much easier to do if you aren't humble about it, you only need a tiny bit of humility to read and understand others ideas, anything above that will just hurt your ability to learn.

The most common thing people do is the opposite of the above. They are humble with their own ideas and are scared to show them to people, while they are confident in shooting down others ideas so they don't learn that well from listening. Even people who see themselves as humble are usually following this worst of the worst strategy.

Re: Are You Intellectually Humble?

#44
post #38

As a principle I agree with this but some environments make it possible. If your intellectual humility is almost guaranteed to be used against you as weakness and liability then such hostile environments mean you must at least fake arrogance. But in my experience, the rare time it was encouraged to say "i don't know" and "I was wrong" were also the times when I was around the most competent and talented people.

Yes, and leave that hostile environment at the earlies possibility for good!

Re: Are You Intellectually Humble?

#46

A bit unrelated, but one pet peeve of mine these days is the explosion of humble brag. It used to be a little annoying, but it's now everywhere. Name dropping, inserting casually possessions, social status or achievements, using "I'm humbled by" all the time... Doing your best to not sound pretentious is great. I wish I worked on that way sooner. But faking humility, often badly, is such a mood killer for me. I also…

I have worked with a number of people who are like that and nobody seems to notice which drives me nuts so it can't be addressed. I have one of those now and I just have to make sure we stay on different teams. The combination of a massive ego and the skill to mask it create a truly terrible person.

Re: Are You Intellectually Humble?

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be contrary, it's possible that you're reading too much into other people's responses if you're actually beating yourself up in the middle of the night about what someone meant or didn't. Check out existential therapy. I'm not saying this to pathologize or minimize what you're saying, just that it's something I used to suffer from before I realized via (said therapy) that everyone else is just a narcissistic…

'People think about you enormously less than you think they think about you' was a really important realisation for my mental wellbeing! It's quite easy to demonstrate too, pick a random person in your life who you don't have a close relationship with and try and remember some random anecdote they mentioned a month ago. This should be drilled into schoolchildren along with reading and writing I think, many people's t…

People have trigger words and phrases though, if you utter them the person will flip a switch in their head and now treats you differently. There isn't any nuance here, people don't think a lot about you so there isn't room for nuance.

And since they don't think a lot about you it means that you wont be able to make them flip that switch back unless you find some rare trigger phrase for it, or a very long time passes, or you can somehow make them think a lot about you.

Re: Are You Intellectually Humble?

#48
Good teachers equip you with tools used to dispute their own conclusions. Worldviews should be malleable and subject to change. The ability to see things from different perspectives goes a long way in being able to question rigid thoughts.

Re: Are You Intellectually Humble?

#50

A bit unrelated, but one pet peeve of mine these days is the explosion of humble brag. It used to be a little annoying, but it's now everywhere. Name dropping, inserting casually possessions, social status or achievements, using "I'm humbled by" all the time... Doing your best to not sound pretentious is great. I wish I worked on that way sooner. But faking humility, often badly, is such a mood killer for me. I also…

Stay off of LinkedIn, then. That seems to be the place people practice it[0].

I don't humblebrag, and it doesn't win me friends. There's some things that I'm really, really good at, and lots of things that I'm mediocre, to really bad, at. I don't hide any of it.

Most folks on venues like this, assume I'm arrogant (I'm not). I just don't pretend to be bad at stuff I'm good at, and don't pretend to be good at stuff I'm bad at.

That seems to be an aberration, in today's world.

I'm not looking for work or friends. I don't participate in any social media, outside of this place (an occasional update on Facebook or LinkedIn. Almost never Twitter, Instagram, etc.). I just hang out here, because there aren't many tech people around my neck of the woods, and I'm quite impressed by many of you. I participate, because I feel a sense of duty to do so (If I want to be a member, I should act like a member).

[0] https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn

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