Human Malfunctions #1: Arrogance

[Doktor Howl]

Stupidity is the state in which you refuse, for whatever reason, to think.  A person with a big brain that won't use it has no advantage over a person with limited cognitive abilities.  Look at the po'buckers out hollering praise for Trump or putting on angry town-hall face at a teabagger rally; when you refuse to question your own assumptions, then that freak is your equal.  The fact that he is your equal because you are slacking rather than him being smart is irrelevant, from a results point of view.

The thing that makes most smart people stupid is arrogance.  When you begin to think that the fact that you are smart implies that you are the smartest or even the only smart person around you, congratulations, you are now an extra in the movie deliverance.  Likewise, when you decide that your solution to a problem is superior to any other solution by virtue of the fact that you thought of it means that you are a DUMBASS.  Usually that isn't a conscious process...When an alternate idea is explained to you, you listen with the intent to sabotage it or pick it apart to defend your own cherished notion.

The people - in my own experience - that are most susceptible to this trap are people with professional standing.  Doctors, engineers, narrow-field tradesmen, and teachers at higher education levels are in fact the most obvious examples (though it is of course not universal in those fields).  You have to be careful with this, as a doctor that has become stupid can be worse than no medical care at all.  Less visibly, a stupid engineer or tradesman can also be a threat to life and limb.  Worst of all, an instructor that has allowed themselves to become stupid is contagious.

Oddly enough, lawyers seem to be less likely to fall into this trap, mostly because they are natural schemers and have no time for that sort of thing.  Their arrogance is instead reflected by their almost-universal poor taste.    Anyone who has ever seen how a lawyer dresses while on vacation will know precisely what I mean.

There is no universally-applicable solution to this.  Each person has to find their own way to not be stupid.  Personally, I always assume there is some data that I do not have, and I go into a solution assuming that it is fatally flawed.  Then I try to find the flaw.  When I am listening to someone else's solution, I trick my own ego by asking "what part of what they are describing can usefully modify my plan?  Asking that means I have to LISTEN to their idea for what it IS, at which point I often find that their idea was better as a whole...And if not, then there's one avenue that can be closed off.  But the plain fact is that I did in fact listen.  I accepted data contrary to my own personally-cherished idea.

Of course, this works far better in theory than in practice, at least at first.  Because it WAS my idea.  It was a bad idea, but it was MINE and now you bastards have killed it.  For which I will inflict an appropriate vengeance.



 

[altered]

I have thoughts on this. They’ll have to wait on caffeine and calories.

EDIT: Or just caffeine.

This sort of behavior is encouraged, you know. Among toadies and The Free Market alike, everyone loves a winner. And everyone loves someone that can cover their ass, make it some interchangeable wage-slave’s fault, come out smelling, well, more like Halls than roses, but you get the picture.

It’s my idea, I came up with it. Or if there are witnesses you forgot to shoot: it’s their idea but their idea was an unworkable monster and I’m the only reason it was successful.

Followed by, it’s my idea and these people fucked up the implementation. Or if you were cornered into the weaker form: it was their idea and I must have missed some of the failure modes because they’re idiots and I’m an overworked genius.

The sycophants will climb over the bodies of their brethren to coo and oh my over your successes if you’re loud enough about being behind them, and they will ignore the bloodstains if you can photoshop another person’s fingerprints onto the throat of the deceased.

This behavior is in demand. Human activity is a distant second.

I don’t have any suggestions for this, because actual deserved bragging is hard to distinguish from the false type without entirely too much digging to be worth it.

[Pergamos]

I think my favorite part of this is the way the po'buckers are held up as the naturally ignorant, those that we are as bad as, when we become arrogant.  There's an unexamined arrogance inside.  Naturally we are better than them the great unwashed, the uneducated.  We can be as bad as them, but only by failing, they can't possibly be as good as us. 

Not meant to be a backhanded compliment, I can see how it would come across that way, I don't know if that internal contradiction is intentional or not but I definitely think it improves the art of the piece.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

[Cramulus]

In a few places, Wilson writes about the Cosmic Shmuck principle - that you can avoid a lot of bullshit by thinking of yourself as this cosmic dumbass who is basically the straight-man in some divine comedy sketch. By recognizing the ways you are a cosmic shmuck, you can eventually stop jerking off to your own intelligence, and make a lot fewer head-in-the-clouds, not-receptive-to-what-you-should-probably-receive style errors.




Chao Te Ching, Chapter 51
If you want to be serious,
don't take yourself seriously.

Be open to change,
and bold enough to be the butt of the joke.

When you walk with total certainty,
your head high
like a cosmic schmuck,
you are vulnerable to the old banana peel shtick.

When a schmuck slips,
their face becomes red with embarrassment.

Eris showed them what they did not perceive.

And,
be honest,

it was funny.

[The Johnny]

What I'm hearing within what you wrote, seems to be a lot about people getting emotionally invested in ideas. It's when people also feel identified with an idea, so any attack or criticism or an idea is in turn a personal attack.

What I also see, kind of, is your engineering perspective come into play: whatever method furthers the ultimate goal in a better way, is the correct method... but there's one omission I think - the ultimate goal in itself can be extremely flawed, so I would say we need to be not only careful about our emotional investment in the ideas or the methods, but also of doing the same thing with the end goals.

[Faust]

I think it's a pattern that becomes ingrained over time under specific conditions:
The person is kept under continuous pressure
Their attention span is divided thin (see doctors with 60 seconds or less per patient)
Being forced to make decisions without all the information in stupidly short often arbitrary timeframes
Having to seriously undercut a system for time money or effort and then suffering the legacy debt that would have been better "If only they had listened to me" creates a kind of Cassandra Complex.

I'm sure I do this a lot but only with the management above me, I rely on the knowledge and expertise of my team, because they are the ones who know where the cracks are when all I can see is the overall design.

I think I know why lawyers escape it too: their whole job is based on convincing someone why they are right, and what they need to do to support that.

Of course, this works far better in theory than in practice, at least at first.  Because it WAS my idea.  It was a bad idea, but it was MINE and now you bastards have killed it.  For which I will inflict an appropriate vengeance.

This is appropriate in some situations being presented with nothing but terrible solutions, if we have to go with a terrible option, its going to at least be one my gut says to go with.

[chaotic neutral observer]

You're allowed to be arrogant only if you're competent, and one of the most important markers of competence is ability to recognize your mistakes, admit them, and correct them.  Unsurprisingly, this makes arrogance and competence a rare combination.

When was the last time you saw someone screw up spectacularly, own their mistake with grace and confidence, and keep on going?  It probably wasn't in politics.

My thinking is that "being right now" is far more important than "never being wrong".  So, if your idea is better than mine, I will demonstrate my superiority by stealing it, and then loudly giving you credit for it.

[altered]

You're allowed to be arrogant only if you're competent, and one of the most important markers of competence is ability to recognize your mistakes, admit them, and correct them.  Unsurprisingly, this makes arrogance and competence a rare combination.

When was the last time you saw someone screw up spectacularly, own their mistake with grace and confidence, and keep on going?  It probably wasn't in politics.

My thinking is that "being right now" is far more important than "never being wrong".  So, if your idea is better than mine, I will demonstrate my superiority by stealing it, and then loudly giving you credit for it.

The best way to be

[Fujikoma]

Just popped in to say I like all of this.

[Cramulus]

You're allowed to be arrogant only if you're competent, and one of the most important markers of competence is ability to recognize your mistakes, admit them, and correct them.  Unsurprisingly, this makes arrogance and competence a rare combination.

When was the last time you saw someone screw up spectacularly, own their mistake with grace and confidence, and keep on going?  It probably wasn't in politics.

My thinking is that "being right now" is far more important than "never being wrong".  So, if your idea is better than mine, I will demonstrate my superiority by stealing it, and then loudly giving you credit for it.

Paul Crik once said:

Arrogance + Charisma = Charm
Arrogance Without Charisma = Vulgar



(though he's talking more about vanity than the "stupified by their own intelligence" brand of arrogance Roger describes above)

[Doktor Howl]

You're allowed to be arrogant only if you're competent, and one of the most important markers of competence is ability to recognize your mistakes, admit them, and correct them.  Unsurprisingly, this makes arrogance and competence a rare combination.

When was the last time you saw someone screw up spectacularly, own their mistake with grace and confidence, and keep on going?  It probably wasn't in politics.

My thinking is that "being right now" is far more important than "never being wrong".  So, if your idea is better than mine, I will demonstrate my superiority by stealing it, and then loudly giving you credit for it.

Arrogance precludes competence, although it may not be noticeable at first.

[Doktor Howl]

What I'm hearing within what you wrote, seems to be a lot about people getting emotionally invested in ideas. It's when people also feel identified with an idea, so any attack or criticism or an idea is in turn a personal attack.

What I also see, kind of, is your engineering perspective come into play: whatever method furthers the ultimate goal in a better way, is the correct method... but there's one omission I think - the ultimate goal in itself can be extremely flawed, so I would say we need to be not only careful about our emotional investment in the ideas or the methods, but also of doing the same thing with the end goals.

Flawed goals are the only ones that have any opera in them, though.

Seriously, was there any actual reason to go to the moon?  No, of course not.  It is basically just more Arizona, which nobody wants or needs.

But the goal WAS there, and we did 100 years of science in 10 years, immeasurably improving human existence, in the furtherance of a few buzz-cut white dudes driving golf balls across a dead rock.

On the downside, it also gave us Tang.  Most of you are blissfully too young to remember Tang, but it was to my generation what dying of starvation was to Germans in 1634.  An immediate, existential horror.

[Doktor Howl]

I'm sure I do this a lot but only with the management above me, I rely on the knowledge and expertise of my team, because they are the ones who know where the cracks are when all I can see is the overall design.

If you have a trained crew and you don't use "mission tactics," you aren't really managing.  Also, any metric that is more than one step away from "getting the job done" is automatically garbage.

[Doktor Howl]

I'm sure I do this a lot but only with the management above me, I rely on the knowledge and expertise of my team, because they are the ones who know where the cracks are when all I can see is the overall design.

If you have a trained crew and you don't use "mission tactics," you aren't really managing.  Also, any metric that is more than one step away from "getting the job done" is automatically garbage.

Going to expand on this: 

I have seen companies where inside personnel who will NEVER meet a customer face-to-face must wear a tie and jacket (Nalco used to be infamous for this), or face disciplinary action.  This was supposed to aid professionalism.  What it actually aided were "the resumes of all the competent people going into the fax machine".

That dress code was a metric that did not aid "getting the job done," which almost always means "actually inhibited the job getting done."

This was a direct result of authoritarian management tactics.  All their skilled folks moved to other offices, and Nalco went into a decline that they are still addressing badly.