| I did. See the very next sentences there. Maybe you are just messing with people after all? I can definitely appreciate how something like that might come across as arrogant, when you just skip over or devalue the sentences that directly make it not so: > But then I'm also just inferring from the same text! How do I know it any better that he is, in fact, just an innocent "truth-seeker"? Nohow. Like this was not sarcasm. I was directly addressing the exact thing you're taking issue with, acknowledging the limitation. This is the way people communicate humility. They explicitly acknowledge that they're aware they're not the be all end all. The passages that followed were then justifications on why I hold this belief then despite this limitation. > Please consider that if you're having to scrape this much in the barrel I think I hammered this in pretty well, but all the points I raised in the way of "supporting OP'd humility" consist of features that are either very heavily repeated, structural, or I find otherwise extremely blatant. So what you characterize as "scraping the barrel" is at best more a scraping of my own skin, in frustration, for how hyper persistently are you trying to contradict the obvious and extensively evidenced. Suffice to say, please consider the exact opposite? I've been considering your view plenty. Even you suggest that the post's flow makes no good sense: so either the author is just some exceptional, miraculous buffoon like you claim they are, following in the footsteps of other wondrous specimens... or you're grossly misinterpreting the whole thing, have been repeatedly doing so with other people, and have been making some real tonedeaf remarks so far, confidently falling for the exact traps you're beating the drum to be so resistant against. I really don't think the former is likelier than the latter, and according to your logic, you shouldn't either. This would have been kind of the exercise from the get-go. To get you to try and spend like a grand total of 5 minutes re-reading the thing under the - to you, clearly - oh so unthinkable, blasphemous assumption, that maybe you're the one who's wrong? Just genuinely assuming, for the sake of the argument, that maybe OP isn't actually the evil incarnate you think they are, much like how similarly cartoonish ideas are rarely if ever true in general (or how assuming ill-faith is typically the wrong call). And just like how I keep desperately getting this point across, entertaining a similar off chance idea, that maybe you're not being like this just to troll. |
Let's define arrogance as someone "not being able to imagine an alternative due to hubris". I think that's a fair definition, at least in-context.
The core of my point then is that the exhibited part of that, "not being able to imagine an alternative", can actually happen in at least two different ways:
- one cannot imagine an alternative because they're so taken by their own capabilities and track record, or because that'd make them wrong and thus inferior (hubris) -- what you're supposing
- one genuinely, honest to god, just plain cannot imagine an alternative, and are simply candidly reporting that impression, encoding it directly, intensity-matched, in their language use
I think the author is actually a lot simpler soul than you take him as. And so what I'm positing then, is that I think you're conflating these two as a result of all this, especially because they present the ~same. And that further, this may not be a distinction you've ever considered, because if you did, the blogpost would have read blatantly different, and you wouldn't report running into this "strange" type of writing so often.
This is not to say the author would be immune to hubris either, or that it's one or the other, but rather that the signal you've been picking up on may not actually be as diagnostic in the way of that as you think it is.
They started out with some amount of hubris, let it grew dominant, realized it grew dominant, decided that's not what they want(ed) to be and that they've been deluding themselves. If they did not care about reasoning correctness, that recognition process and conclusion I'm not sure would have facilitated, certainly not this way. If this was about hubris like you framed it as, they wouldn't have stopped and made an exit. They'd have just dug their heel in further and kept enjoying the ride.