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by shunyaekam 904 days ago
Therapy helps in overcoming pretentiousness, no doubt. This is an emotional problem, feelings of worthlessness, attaching one's sense of identity to how smart one is etc.

It's a big problem, especially among people with no life (family, self-care habits), eg nerds with no purpose.

Making up a term just so you can continue jerking each other off intellectually wont help you with anything.

2 comments

From TFA:

> Sometimes talking with my friends is like intellectual combat, which is great. I am glad I have such strong cognitive warriors on my side. But not all ideas are ready for intellectual combat. If I don’t get my friend on board with this, some of them will crush an idea before it gets a chance to develop, which feels awful and can kill off promising avenues of investigation.

That doesn't describe anything like what you've described in your comment.

That's a pretty harsh take. I think it's worth fleshing out an idea a bit more to see how much value it has before you try to destroy it. If the cons outweigh the pros too heavily at the onset you might not bother trying to overcome them when there might actually have been something valuable there or something that could have been realized in a different way.