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by WalterBright 1398 days ago
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.

Very rarely are accomplishments made traveling a road strewn with flowers.

3 comments

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.

But there are always counterexamples too ... Stephen Wolframs and Nassim Talebs