Is arrogance a symptom of bad intellectual hygeine?

I think some behaviors which may be considered arrogant can be justified. For example, dismissing other people's opinions out of hand can be a good choice when actually surrounded by people with very low-quality opinions.

As for appearing arrogant to others - it may be a difficult-to-avoid side effect, or it may have value of its own - there are social contexts where acting arrogant is useful.

Is it arrogant for HPJEV to consider himself to know better than the adults around him? Maybe so, but he's right about a lot of these things. (I believe there's a significant subset of HPMOR would-be readers who found Harry insufferably arrogant. Does that mean he should change his behavior?)

Having tabooed "arrogance", one of the interpretations is "emotional attachment to the idea of one being right". That, I think is a real problem for an aspiring rationalist - you need to be able to consider the possibility of being wrong.

As DanielLC says, you should calibrate yourself and neither strive to underestimate nor overestimate your abilities.

I want to be able to assure myself that this or that intolerable academic will be magically punished with a decreased capacity to do good work

(If they aren't well-calibrated, that seems like a likely outcome.) Edit: not sure about this part.

I think a lot of what folks call "arrogance" is just a basic failure to be instrumentally rational in interpersonal communication.

Probably for most people, the unwillingness to assent to the opinions of the higher status, the authorities, or the majority is intellectual "arrogance".

How dare you think that you can know better than The Bosses, The Authorities, The Masses?

I'm increasingly of the opinion that truth as correspondence to reality is a minority orientation.

You might say that they are both traps, at least from a truth seeker's perspective. The arrogant will not question their belief sufficiently; the humble will not sufficiently believe.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gq/the_proper_use_of_humility/

Somebody might come across as arrogant because he can anticipate arguments other people come up with and understands their position better than they do, and disinclination to engage them from what is in the other guy's perspective an honest and satisfactory fashion could easily be interpreted as arrogance. I'm imagining someone like House MD (fictional evidence, I know). In such a case the "arrogant" academic might not perceive himself that way.

There is also the real life case of John Nash who IIRC others described as highly arrogant, but was nevertheless brilliant. He still had his capacity to produce useful work damaged by schizophrenia but that was probably due to genetic causes seeing as his son suffered similar problems.

Perhaps arrogance impacts different people differently? If you're brilliant to begin with, you may be able to do great work regardless of your arrogance, whereas arrogance in someone who is merely bright might cause a severe reduction in effective intelligence.

By "arrogance" do you mean overestimating your abilities, or just being annoying about it? The first one is problematic, but so is underestimating. You should calibrate yourself and get an accurate view of your abilities. The second one seems to be more about some kind of signalling. It has an obvious disadvantage of alienating people, but it must have some kind of advantage or people wouldn't do it.

I forget who said this originally, but much of rationalism is internalizing the fact that you, yes you, are prone to all manner of biases and mental tics that lead to error. If 'arrogance' as it's being used here is something that interferes with recognizing the errors that you're making in any given moment, then arrogance is certainly antithetical to rationalism.

On the other hand, I'm fairly used to people thinking of me as arrogant in person-to-person communication, and when they give me that label it never has much to do with my willingness to admit error. Usually it has to do with my vocabulary, or other patterns of behavior that they interpret as a desire to be seen as intellectually superior. If that's what 'arrogance' means, then it's more orthogonal to rationalism. Heck, arrogance as an affect might even be rational in certain circumstances, depending on how you want to be seen during particular social situations.

If you are actually concerned quite a lot with being better than other people, and your challenges are not directly competitive or collaborative in nature (if you're trying to invent something in your garage, or write well, or do well in classes that aren't graded on a curve), then that form of arrogance is probably a failure mode. It implies that you're performing a social role, not trying to succeed, and so you'll tend to optimize for best appearances and not best results.

Discussing "humility" and "arrogance" is difficult without careful definitions. I was thinking about this recently; this is how I would like to define them.

Whenever I end up feeling like I have been arrogant, it is because I underestimated someone else's abilities, and I ended up surprised by what they were capable of. If humility is the opposite of arrogance, then humility is the ability to accept, as your prior, that somebody you meet just might end up being more wise or more accomplished than you. To be arrogant is to fail to realize that you might have something to learn from other people.

(These definitions of arrogance and humility thus only relate to mental habits, not to social behaviors.)

Note how this makes humility valuable -- if you expect everyone around you to be dumb and inferior and not worth learning from, if you don't give others the chance to prove you otherwise, you're going to miss out on everything that you could be learning from them. I wouldn't expect your putative arrogant academic to have very many fruitful collaborations.

So yes, I would say that arrogance is bad intellectual hygiene -- it's having the wrong priors about the people around you.

Note also that it's also possible to be unfair to oneself in this way. Impostor syndrome should not be confused for humility. High self-esteem should not be confused for arrogance.

... I realize only after writing all of this that there's also intellectual arrogance and intellectual humility; it seems that they can be modeled the same way, but with ideas instead of people.

I believe you're confusing arrogance and closedmindedness. There is a correlation between openmindedness and intelligence. I do believe openmindedness is a form of rationality. I'm not sure how good rationality training is at increasing it. Personality Psychology indicates Openness to Experience is a fairly stable trait; not one that can be taught.

There are times where being skeptical pays of. There are other times where it's useful to have a low bar of accepting new information. When a startup CEO goes pitching to investors he has to project confidence. On the other hand there are times in his business when it's very useful to think critically about the assumptions the business makes.

The important thing is to have behavior that makes sense in a particular context.

Well, if I take my English's dictionary :

Arrogance :

1. offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride.

Humble :
1. not proud or arrogant; modest: to be humble although successful. 2. having a feeling of insignificance, inferiority, subservience, etc.: In the presence of so many world-famous writers I felt very humble. 3. low in rank, importance, status, quality, etc.; lowly: of humble origin; a humble home. 4. courteously respectful: In my humble opinion you are wrong. 5. low in height, level, etc.; small in size: a humble member of the galaxy.

Considering humility is the supposed opposite of arrogance, I am assuming that humility mainly imply inferiority which means that it isn't really a good behavior either.

Rationally speaking if arrogance is 10 and humility is -10 wouldn't 0 be the rational answer as of how to act considering the society seems to value humility due to the desire or rather good feeling humans feel when someone act as inferior toward them ?

If the above is true it means that both humility and arrogance are "bad" and should be seen from a different perspective.

"Arrogance" could mean different things.

One is closing your mind -- "I know this to be so and no empirical facts will make me change my mind!" That seems to be unambiguously bad.

Another is showing disdain for others -- "What such a stupid creature like you could possibly know about this?" That can certainly by justified (I recommend reading comments on popular sites such as YouTube if you doubt this), but also has obvious failure modes. There are additional complications here as arrogance in this sense is often seen and/or used as a form of status signaling.

Yet another is thinking you know better -- "Hold mah beer and watch this!" In this sense Jackass is all about arrogant people. This meaning boils down to the willingness to take large risks in highly uncertain situations and the value of this characteristic is debatable. I think I can make an argument that this is a personally dangerous but socially priceless trait -- you do want to have mad experimenters around, though you would not necessarily want to be one yourself.

The failure mode for the arrogant is different from the failure mode of the humble. These are deep personality traits, that are hard to change; I think the better idea is to manage the drawbacks of whatever you have (and to be aware of it - since most people are arrogant and humble in different situations, we might not be self aware as to what is the dominant trait).

It's certainly useful to be arrogant with respect to action, for many reasons. It's often useful to be humble with respect to knowledge.

But don't confuse epistemic humility with social humility. I think I am much better at predicting most technological innovations than almost everyone. Why? Because I know that the uncertainties in any prediction are much higher than any predictors seem to admit, and they positively reek of overconfidence, even when they disagree with almost all other predictors. So my attitude seems to be an epistemic humility that causes a social arrogance.

You're looking at this the wrong way, I think. Arrogance and humility can be useful instruments in certain situations. As Aquifax is saying, there are social contexts where acting arrogant is useful, but there are also contexts where acting humble is useful as well.

A truly humble person will be more open to hypotheses that seems unlikely. If evidence later is updated I think that a humble person will have an easier time cooping with it and maintain his critical thinking. While an arrogant person will try to find evidence supporting his own claims?