I’ve noticed in myself and anecdotally in others that a lot of stubbornness in conversation simply comes from the desire for validation. Having someone acknowledge what I’m saying is generally enough to get a conversation moving forward, where ignoring or not responding to my input can cause me to fixate until I recognize what I’m doing and break myself out of it.
But if I feel mild validation, even if it is concluded with a “no”, I’m far more likely to consider myself having reacted “humbly” and more openly during the introspection I am forced to have at 3:45am the following morning.
Maybe this was all a tangential comment, but that’s the thought that was sparked by this post.
Absolutely. And you can use that fact to steer conversations on a smoother course.
ME: We need to load the catalogue data into the app for this feature.
SOME IDIOT I WORK WITH: Well that's in the database of course, so that's easy.
ME (inside voice): It's not in the database. Why would you assume it was in the database? Because you are an idiot who makes assumptions.
ME (outside voice): Ah, well if the system was well-structured, of course you would be perfectly correct, but in this case, there is an unfortunate quirk, so, to my great surprise, that data is stored in XML files on this tape archive ...
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 fuck living in their own narrative and they literally don't even remember what you said six hours later. It's very liberating once you absorb that. (obviously, what you write on the internet is forever, but that's kind of why you should be so much less anxious about your conversations IRL).
'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 teenage years are intensely stressful partially because of this false notion other people remember things you did in perfect detail.
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.
Oh my introspection isn’t self flagellation. I don’t think about ways I could’ve improved my talking. It’s more in the same vein as how I will go back and look at projects I’ve completed a few times after I’ve finished. Or even like listening to a song that has been stuck in my head for a few hours.
It’s a way of closing the loop, mentally. It allows me to move on and not have this subconscious stress nagging at me for weeks after a significant interaction.
But yeah I’ll look into existential therapy. Thanks!
> they literally don't even remember what you said six hours later
This is believable right up until they relate to you what someone else said or did last week or even last month. Then you know that they remember things and are willing to share what they remember with others.
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.
Might be a little bit paradoxical from your perspective but this is very self-centered behavior. If someone tells you ”no”, it’s probably not because they don’t like you. People say no when they don’t want something themselves, and it probably has nothing to do with you or your validation.
Really bad advice. I have learned a lot from people way less experienced than me. Even if I usually know more than some individual I still find things that he may know and I do not.
Let's not talk about classifying an individual as "mediocre". It just seems the old "noble blood" fallacy as if some people is just "better" than others instead of everyone being being complex and with flaws.
Unfortunately this point of view do get to the extreme. "There's no such thing as a gifted child", for example, and schools for gifted children are downgraded or closed. Paths to early math education are closed, math curriculum downgraded.
This terrified my wife and I so much that we packed and moved almost 1k miles away. My son was taking 8th grade classes in 7th grade. That was a fight in itself with the school system we moved away from. He’s now in 8th grade taking all high school AP/Honors classes. He’s set to graduate high school with his associates and if he keeps it up he’ll have a bachelors by 20. The old school system there was nothing of the sort in place and we’re not talking about a small town. We’re talking about a million plus population area.
We should be doing everything we can to embrace and encourage children to excel. Not reduce every student’s education down to bullshit.
Edit:
We couldn’t afford to move but we HAD to. We sacrificed, we saved, we went without. It was rough and the living conditions weren’t the best to start but we were forced. We couldn’t sit idly by and watch our son become another statistic.
I know a handful of individuals who graduated from college at 20. All of them regret it. Starting their careers a few years early in no way made up for missed experiences or the social awkwardness of being significantly less mature than their ‘year’ peers.
If it’s about filling your sons need for intellectual stimulation there are many great online options (and books!).
This may be my own biases but pushing your offspring to skip a grade or take extra AP classes or graduate from college years early focuses too much on credentialism and external validation (particularly for you the parent) rather than helping the child build a rich, balanced life.
I've known a few well adjusted individuals who finished their education early.
You would tend not to notice except in conversation when you add things up and realise they are unusually accomplished.
Personally I think it's weird making people learn in lock step by age rather than allowing them to progress at their natural rate.
There are a few different underlying assumptions there when you think about it, eg that a) people of the same age have equal "maturity" b) socialising with people older than you is harmful (or less beneficial) compared to socialising with people the same age as you c) socialisation mainly happens in an institutional context d) the purpose of higher education is socialisation as much as learning.
Any or several of those ^ can be false for a particular student. Of course the institution and other students matter too in terms of outcome.
"Pushing" and validation chasing are bad tho, with you on that one.
the gist of the quote is lost in translation i guess. it's trying to convey that you should assert your knowledge, otherwise, you will get lectured by people with no idea what they are talking about. idiocracy, populism, praise of stupidity etc.
Very true. I try to stay humble but at work I definitely have lists of people I always listen to and a (longer) list of people I generally never listen to. Maybe they have a good thought from time to time but I don’t have enough time to listen to all bad ideas to maybe find the one good idea.
I sometimes feel bad to have a prejudice against some pople but realistically i don't have the time and energy to sift through a lot of bad ideas when I can talk to other people who usually have good ideas.
this is classic exploration-exploitation tradeoff, like a multiarmed bandit. The general gist of most multi-armed bandit strategies would agree to listen more and more to people with good ideas, and spend less and less time (approaching but never reaching zero time) listening to people whose ideas you do not find rewarding.
It has nothing to do with being humble though. Being humble is about being honest with yourself or others. Learning who to listen to and take advice from is a different problem.
The "mediocre individual" (terminology from the quote above) might still have something valuable to share.
If you fight a drunk person throwing random punches, there might be still a probability to get knocked out because within that randomness there is a probability of a perfect punch.
Experts are often right but occasionally they can be wrong. Skilled competitors often win but occasionally they can lose, even to beginners.
Can you cite this quote in its original language? I'd be interested to read it.
Google translate gives me:
"نتيجة الكثير من التواضع هي أن ينتهي بك الأمر بالاستماع إلى مشورة شخص متوسط المستوى."
[Ibn Khaldun] widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages,[13] who made major contributions in the areas of historiography, sociology, economics, and demography.
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 think it comes with 2 trends that are rampant in social media, and runs especially deep in the US culture:
- adding virtue signaling to every interaction.
- using superlative for the most mondain things.
It's an instant credibility killer for me. But the problem is... for a lot of people, it seems to work.
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).
> 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.
That is a very good sign you are intelectually humble. I see the discussion here veering in many directions but in the end being humble is just being honest to yourself and others about what you know and what you don’t know. Perhaps with the capacity to empathise with people who know less and not making them feel bad for not knowing certain things.
I always think of the quote from the potter episode of Community, as the main character imagines what his mom's words of advice are:
"Jeff, you're a normal person. There's nothing very special about you at all. You're going to be great at a few things, but really crappy at more. And that takes a lot of the pressure off, so you can live a full, happy life. "
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.
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.
I like the quote in its use of sarcasm to emphasize a point.
I completely dislike that its apparent value also comes because it's a quote from a comedic character in a comedy film. I mean, that diminishes its value as sarcasm, and it becomes just a canned answer.
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.
Intellectually humble people is a rarity these days, In contrast you have an abundance of [1]Intellectual bullies which are very popular toxic crowd in places like twitter/reddit and sadly even on HN.
I've found that too much humility gets you bullied, or people try to take advantage of you, instead of playing nice.
I'm talking about in the workplace, but it's been consistent at every place I've worked. I have to act slightly like an asshole otherwise people come at me like wolves.
> I've found that too much humility gets you bullied
That depends a lot on your environment. There are many companies were this happens, upper management nurtures an unhealthy environment were abuse is common and people need to be defensive.
If you ever work in a healthy place, or if you have good friends, the possibility to just lower all barriers and be humble is liberating and it fosters creativity.
> I have to act slightly like an asshole otherwise people come at me like wolves.
I am sorry to hear that. I have worked in both kind of places and the mental health going home is vastly different. I hope you get a better working place that not only is healthier but will allow you to learn more, be more creative and productive instead of losing your time acting like an asshole because is required.
Some of the comments here discuss humbleness in general, which is different from what this post is about. The article talks about being intellectually humble, and defines it as the ability to self reflect and accept the possibility that you are wrong.
It is different from the standard context of being humble, which is usually to avoid bragging about own's success. Being able to accept own's mistakes, even when you're sure you're right, is another, big, step forward.
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.
When I am great enough to be humble, you'll know. I like the sentiment of the article, though I have become personally suspicious of much self effacement. Most of being smart is being open to becoming smarter, which means actively seeking out having your mind changed. Being wrong in public is one of the fastest ways to get elusive answers as well, though admittedly the openness can deprive people of the satisfaction of correcting you, and they can quickly stop offering solutions and become resentful. Sticking your neck out on being stupid often yields commensurate rewards in the correction. Counter to the effacing humility prescribed by the article, I'd propose being bold in your questions and initiative at trying things yourself and being so terrible at them that someone sees what you are trying to do and corrects it. YMMV, but while humility gets reliable results in small groups (and I do value and respect it), I'd defy anyone to give an example of something that scales faster than being stupid. I would ask whether it's the confidence or obliviousness for acting and iterating in ignorance that yields experience.
Exodus 20:3 (KJV) "thou shalt have no other gods before me". As a Christian I'm forbidden form holding any belief that isn't directly in the bible and not a provable fact. It is amazing how many people claim to believe the bible, but then add a ton of beliefs on top of it that are not from the bible.
Not sure if troll or not but as you might know, there are different levels to Christianity. I'm not the kind of person to say all paths leads to Rome but I do believe that there are variables to a Christian life and every single person's journey will be different.
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.
But that's just culture/language. In the US, saying that you are good at something is expected, in other countries, you pass the same message just by just saying you do the thing. In these countries, if you say that you are good at something, it is the equivalent of saying "I am a fucking god and no one can approach me" in the US, it is just rude.
The biggest problem is you deny yourself the process of attaining true humility if you put up a “act as if” facade of being humble. It’s a falsehood, what you mean to say is you are being non-confrontational.
There is a process in attaining humility, you cannot just adorn yourself in it from the start.
I feel and certainly hope so, but I also feel there have been no positive consequences for it.
I think the only positive feedback along these lines (not that it had any positive consequences) was way back when I was a course assistant and instructor during graduate school in mathematics, and it came in the form of student reviews.
If you're being proved right, why change your mind? If it's too early to have data, then keep going. If data is starting to go against you, then intellectual humility will allow you to pivot to a better direction. Intellectual humility is not at the expense of intellectual rigor, it's what enables it. It's the difference between creating a high quality and fair experiment and creating one that's more likely to give you the result you want.
It's less about "I'm wrong i need to listen to everyone and rethink my opinions all the time", its "I could be wrong. If i see "data" that goes against my opinion, i should consider changing my opinion rather then assuming the data is wrong". Or just agree to disagree and implicitly don't assume the person disagreeing with you is an idiot/morally_bankrupt/etc...
The article touches on this from the perspective of threat but people have a tendency to lie to themselves; which is why so many mechanisms in experiments and medical studies exist to force intellectual humility into the process.
> But how can a humble person accomplish something extraordinary? At some point, you gotta have faith in what you're doing, despite all the opposition.
Humility means accurate self-assessment. People will argue this point, I suppose, conflating humility with meekness (and meekness with weakness), but I think a distinction is both correct and worthwhile.
Therefore, humble people can accomplish extraordinary things as well as (or better than) anyone, perhaps because of their accurate self assessments. This leads to interconnection (I'm good at X, not at Y) and complementarity: I strengthen what is weak in you and vice versa, and we develop in partnership in a way that could not be done separately.
Being in software development, I have no choice! Feel like every time I blink there is a new something to learn. After working in this field for 14 years I am still very much a newbie.
One of the most difficult things is to know when it's really good to be humble and when it's really good to assert yourself. None of them work the whole time.
Depends. Vigorous debate and experimenting does not come from humility. It comes from conviction. Humility is an end game, you can only reach for it when you accept that you are wrong (at the end of the argument) and likewise, when you win and don’t parade it and acknowledge the merits of the other side.
But during the process, no, there can be no humility. You have to fight.
> Depends. Vigorous debate and experimenting does not come from humility. It comes from conviction. Humility is an end game, you can only reach for it when you accept that you are wrong (at the end of the argument) and likewise, when you win and don’t parade it and acknowledge the merits of the other side.
This isn't true. Humility is accurate self-assessment, and from here can easily spring conviction, experimentation, and vigorous debate. (I know my opinions on subject X are well formed and tested by trial, error, and experience; that is why I hold such and such an opinion and can debate about it with conviction. It's also why I can take corrective measures and understand what others are saying, etc., etc.)
Indeed, humility is basically a prerequisite to adequate debate. One of the problems of society is that we don't get this.
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.
But if I feel mild validation, even if it is concluded with a “no”, I’m far more likely to consider myself having reacted “humbly” and more openly during the introspection I am forced to have at 3:45am the following morning.
Maybe this was all a tangential comment, but that’s the thought that was sparked by this post.