[luketheobscure]

The problem with this approach is that it pushes out a lot of people, especially women and minorities. When you are conditioned from birth to believe that you belong somewhere, a bit of criticism like this is easily brushed off. White men especially are used to seeing board rooms full of similar looking people, or equally homogenous computer engineering teams. We don't often stop to question if we belong in a STEM field. We assume it.

When you've had to fight for your seat at the table, having your idea called stupid by a high ranking faculty member might rattle you enough to leave. Not because you don't deserve to be there, or are somehow intrinsically less capable of receiving criticism, but because you don't have the misplaced confidence of some of your peers.

[danielmarkbruce]

I'm not a scientist so I'm speculating, however: if one doesn't have that... weird level of self confidence to detach their ideas from themselves, can they actually make it in science? I'd guess no. Does society want people who don't have a lot of self confidence in science? Won't they end up fudging data to conceal the fact that their hypothesis is wrong, rather than just acknowledging the fact and moving along, feeling just as smart as yesterday?

[luketheobscure]

While we celebrate individuals, in my experience real work is done by teams of people, and there’s lots of research that shows heterogenous teams perform better than homogenous ones.

I’ve seen teams where a single toxic “rock star” destroys productivity, and I’ve been on teams of quiet, thoughtful individuals where we somehow become much more than the sum of our parts. And often excess self-confidence can become a barrier to accepting constructive criticism.

[danielmarkbruce]

Are you a scientist?

[ciphol]

Anyone can fudge data to get a result that objective evidence doesn't support.

The more self-confident scientists might actually be more likely to fudge data - they can self-justify by thinking "this idea must be true, so even if I put fake data in now, it doesn't matter because eventually real data will emerge to support it"

[danielmarkbruce]

"this idea must be true" - this is the opposite of the type of person I'm talking about. There are some people who are able to completely detach their ideas from themselves, never losing confidence in themselves even if they lose confidence in one of their ideas.