One of my high school teachers said something like: if someone doesn't understand your explanation, then you don't know it as well as you think you do.
Why?
First, because far more things can be explained to an intelligent lay person than most of us realize, and figuring out how to do so improves our own understanding. Therefore it is worthwhile to make the attempt.
Second, because it is far too easy to fool ourselves into thinking that we're making a succinct explanation that requires domain knowledge when actually we're spouting just enough jargon to remind those who agree with us of shared and possibly unexamined dogma. There is a real cost to mental habits that make such mental mistakes easier to make and sustain.
So yes. The other person may be too ignorant/stupid/whatever to understand you. But the alternative explanations should be disproven before you conclude that.
if someone doesn't understand your explanation, it might be that you don't understand the person well enough or you don't know the correct way to explain to that person in a plain language
My answer always changes since I haven't narrowed down a way to describe "cloud engineering" to people.
I've heard this saying before and every time I think, "maybe I don't know what I do".
In any case I think it makes me an unenjoyable person to be around. I more or less don't engage in opinionated discussion with people unless I'm intimately familiar with the topic at hand. Then it's no longer discussing opinions but trading facts. When I do engage, it's usually to ask questions of the other person's opinion without really challenging them. While I might agree with their opinions, I'm reluctant to refute them unless I can systematically prove them wrong. That's usually not possible, because they often know more than I do about any given topic. When I am asked questions directly I hedge my answers extensively.
When I was younger I used to take pride in this, but now I find it isolating. It's difficult to relate to people like this.
I like having _good_ conversations, and can still have them about controversial or opinionated subjects. If I don't know enough about a topic to offer my opinion I like to ask questions that will offer some insight as to why the person feels so strongly. Usually (not always) when someone feels very strongly about something, there is some kernel of truth somewhere that will at least be interesting. It's fun to at least figure out _why_ people think they way they do.
I used to have a bad habit of being a devil's advocate. I'm sure it was annoying when I was even younger, but I've found that faking (exploring) an opinion can help give the conversation some depth. Nowadays I do that less, but can get away with it if I preface it nicely enough.
More likely people find me difficult to take seriously because I’ll passionately argue for something I don’t necessarily have the best evidence for and then immediately give up and say I’m wrong when someone gives me the evidence I’m looking for.
There's a thing called.. hmm .. positive negotiation ? when you interact with someone by always aiming at finding a middleground/compromise, rather than arguing for the sake of it.
Your point reminds me of something that I'm seeing (IIUC). A lot of the time people will assert more than they know (I do that sometimes too[0]) and the discussion will stop. By insisting even at the risk at being wrong, you force everybody to show their hand and sometimes they'll realize that they may be wrong or off point and that they need to reevaluate the situation. .. We're tribal, even in scientific fields.
If this was more common, I think the world would start to become a much better place surprisingly quickly, at a cost of people suffering a little minor intellectual humiliation until they started to be more disciplined about their beliefs.
The "hedge my answers extensively" bit is spot-on, as is the isolating nature of this "trait", unfortunately.
Given the amount of cognitive bias each of us has, I'd say an important part of intellectual curiosity is making effort to learn to think better. I mean, a flat-Earther 9/11-truther astrologer could still claim to be primarily motivated by "intellectual curiosity".
The interesting question is whether that specific bit of rotten reasoning is still accessible to alteration after one has passed through that specific phase of neuroplasticity.
Answer yes or no AND write a short explanation of why.
Then the judge of the answer sheet should decide if points for or against are awarded for each question.
As an example, I just am really bad at complimenting others. Both because my own overall standards are so high and also because that was never a skill I learned; so I'm actually very shy at doing so. Maybe I should have been complimented more, and better trained as a child to compliment others.
I explained 6 in a different reply under this thread. However a different way of getting the data (which would be better and yield a clearer view) could be to ask: "If someone doesn't understand my idea what are the possible reasons?"
7) This one is just painful. It really depends on who you're exposed to on a daily basis and how you relate to them. I _have_ marveled at how smart, driven, or successful some others are... mostly the successful and driven parts though.
8/9) Emotional reactions are different from how you try to handle emotional reactions.
There are alot of discussions which basically come down to how humans interact and communicate with one another, and what works and what doesn’t.
I noticed I compliment others quite a bit more since listening.
10) I accept that someone with less experience may have better ideas than I have, even in my own field of expertise.
11) Even if I am not certain of myself, I am willing to suggest and defend my ideas because they deserve equal treatment.
12) I am willing to forgo new ideas when they hurt momentum too much.
13) I am willing to forgo momentum when the benefits of new ideas outweigh the costs.
14) When I feel it is right to assert my position, I am able and willing to back down if I receive feedback that changes my assumptions.
15) I know when to humbly defer decisions to the team even though I believe the team's decision is less than ideal. People are more important than problems to be solved.
There are also people who assume their ideas in fields they don’t have experience in are good, precisely because of that lack of experience. They think their “outsider’s perspective” significantly increases their likelihood of being correct because they “think outside the box” or some such. It’s the opposite of humility, and supremely frustrating to deal with!
It would be more apt to, if you were writing code that has some level of networking involved. During this you think "I don't remember/know much of the OSI model, so I should go read up on the model to better understand the code I am writing". Instead of just trying different things and adapting examples not understanding what it is actually doing.
One of my friends called me a genius the other day, but I'm just really nerdy about something that makes money. He's really into comics and is a walking encyclopedia of characters, timelines, stories and arcs, but wouldn't consider that "smart stuff", even though it is to me.
I don't think of this in terms of intellectual fitness, but when I realise I made a wrong step in my modelling of the world I generally take a moment to reflect on where I went wrong and what I could do differently in the future to avoid similar pitfalls.
That is- dealing with stubborn, close minded people, is incredibly difficult to stay open for me- in the best case I just move on.
Questions to ask yourself if you feel that way regularly:
Have you considered that various shortcomings might hold different weights to people depending on their background, experience in other adjacent domains, etc? That what is factual for you might not be so to others?
How do you know that your analysis of the shortcomings are correct/pertinent? That the person you're talking to hasn't delved in it as deeply as you have and just reached a different conclusion? Are you the close minded one for having decided early in the conversation that because you've thought about it in a certain way in the past, any interlocutor who thinks of it differently is necessarily wrong and stubborn?
I do give the benefit of the doubt for as long as I can. I admit to understanding positions that are premised on different values. I have a hard time when once I understand the values, inaccurate steps are taken to reach a false conclusion.
What I’m talking about is more akin to talking with someone making a mistake in a proof, being pointed out the mistake, but still digging their feet in to not admit the mistake.
I’m fine if assumptions aren’t shared, but not when conclusions don’t follow logically from assumptions.
Being open minded isn’t akin to listening to everything and anything- there are limits.
So no, it is not that ‘I enter conversations with a pre-made idea of what [I] want the conclusion to be.’
Not all humans present that. They have reasons, some of which may just be their nature.
Well sure everyone does, to some degree. But I thought dyarosla's clarification was quite sound, particularly this part: I admit to understanding positions that are premised on different values.
In my experience, a lot of people are completely ignorant of this important idea, that values (or axioms) are a crucially important part of disagreements, that someone may be approaching the same general topic from a very different perspective than you. Not only do some people not know/appreciate this, I've encountered several people who completely reject this idea if you point it out to them.
That statement on "values", coupled with the other ones, all support strong self consistency.
How people evaluate things can, does, will vary from a highly rational POV.
I’ll concede that some people don’t value logical consistency - but that doesn’t make them more rational in their arguments.
If there is subjectivity in a ‘logical inference’, I’ll err on the side of being open to it.
However, people are often not entirely rational creatures.
Advocacy, for a very effective example, is a combination of reason, emotion and character.
How people feel matters. Who they are interacting with and or referencing matters.
Roll all that up, and we are likely to encounter people who are not self consistent.
That is OK, human. I just noted that being a predetermination, that's all.
Secondly, there is no requirement they be more rational in their arguments. They may not even see something as one, depending on what it is.
They may, for example, seek better mutual understanding.
It's not that someone can expect you to feel differently because they've presented a logical argument. That's not likely or expected.
The OP said they did not predetermine, and I just pointed out that they do. (And I do not care)
No worries, just information.
Understanding others helps considerably when having conversations IMHO. My comments here speak to that.
Just know others may, or may not make the value judgements presented in this thread, that's all.
It is far more likely than you think. Consider a politically charged issue, some matter where religion is involved...
This all just is not the set piece implied.
That's when you should play the part of being stubborn and close-minded yourself, if this is what it takes to ensure that your points are heard. Intellectual humility is the best case, but sometimes it is best to cut one's losses.
> That's when you should play the part of being stubborn and close-minded yourself, if this is what it takes to ensure that your points are heard.
Do you honestly believe that this is an effective technique in spreading your ideas?
What's the difference between curiosity and a drive to develop your (crystallized) intelligence?
Like I don't read to be well read. I don't listen to news to be informed. I read and listen out of my interests.
I don't think anyone literally thinks, I need to know this to improve my intelligence as it is a weakness. It's usually more abstract.
The only people who would deny those things are phonies who aren't in touch with themselves. Accept it, acknowledge it, account for the bias it brings. Then maybe one could work on it.
Some people like being uncomfortable because it motivates them.
Being comfortable for some people can lead to complacency.
Weirdo in a good way. Thanks for this one - sometimes I forget that thoughts/actions are smart, not people.
To fix such a things in a questionnaire there are 9 questions. Maximum score you could possible get is 9 times 7 = 63, but probably not many people would get so much. Even those who are super humble.
> Also (3) I don't get, because while I am extremely motivated by intellectual curiosity, I have maybe zero motivation to "develop my intelligence" like it was some kind of fitness thing.
So you do not reflect on your weaknesses in order to develop intelligence? Or you are doing it sometimes, when it is obvious for you that your task needs more intelligence from you? Maybe 3 as an answer would fit?
> I don't think that is really related to humility.
Good questionnaires are not like a random internet ones. There are special methods allowing to ensure that questionnaire is measuring what we want to measure, not something else. For example, you can measure intellectual humility based on the interviewing a participant, and then ask participant to fill a questionnaire with a 50 questions (or maybe 150, as much as your creativity could devise), that you think might be good. Get 50 participants, or maybe 100. The more is better, but it is a long and difficult task, to interview 100 people, and if you used a several PhD students as interviewers, than you need to control for interviewer also, because different people could get different results even when asking the same questions. So you would need even more participants to get a statistical significance. Number of questions itself also increases the number of data points needed.
After you gathered data, you would run it through R to find questions that are the best fit, to reduce questionnaire to bearable size. Probably after it you should test your new questionnaire by the same tactic you invented it. You even might need to do this, if at the first stage you got insufficient number of participants. But now you would need no factor analysis or something like, just a correlation would be enough. Or maybe chi-square.
I didn't read an article itself, but it is a published paper in a reviewed journal, so I bet it is done good, not just authors picked 9 questions on a random. Therefore I bet, that if you don't think that it is really related to humility, than you probably should change your mind and think the other way around. If it somehow important for you, I'd suggest to find a full text of paper describing methods used to devise a questionnaire and read them through. Maybe you are right after all. There might be a statistical mistakes, mistakenly used statistical methods for example, or some issues with the data gathering.
1) I am willing to admit if I don't know something.
2) I like to compliment others on their intellectual strengths.
3) I try to reflect on my weaknesses in order to develop my intelligence.
4) I actively seek feedback on my ideas, even if it is critical.
5) I acknowledge when someone knows more than me about a certain subject.
6) If someone doesn't understand my idea, it's probably because they aren't smart enough to get it. (reverse)
7) I sometimes marvel at the intellectual abilities of other people.
8) I feel uncomfortable when someone points out one of my intellectual shortcomings. (reverse)
9) I don't like it when someone points out an intellectual mistake that I made. (reverse)
Critique: I can see some confounding problems right away. When I was younger I was pretty painfully shy, so (4) I would not seek feedback, but not out of a lack of humility. Also (3) I don't get, because while I am extremely motivated by intellectual curiosity, I have maybe zero motivation to "develop my intelligence" like it was some kind of fitness thing. Also maybe I'm a wierdo but I don't think so much in terms of people being "smart", I think it is something you do. That is, it's hard work.
And with (8) and (9), it takes training to not feel uncomfortable or to not dislike it when someone points out your mistakes or shortcomings. I don't think that is really related to humility. In fact if you are super critical of yourself and judge yourself poorly compared to other people, you still hate it if anybody else points it out.