Quote: 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.
This is to appear arrogant yes. This is stupid because you can dismiss ideas without being a dick.
To BE arrogant, to believe yourself superior, is bad for a rationalist, because it will hurt more if you are wrong and hence you will have a harder time cooping with new evidence.
Which is basically what you said in the end, you need to be open for the possibillity that you are wrong. But then we must conlcude that it is always bad to be arrogant while trying to be rational. Iit is likewise bad to SEEM to be arrogant if you can avoid it. And if you can´t avoid it then A) you have other problems or B) someone else is simply jealous and you are NOT arrogant.
Quote: 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.
Note: to quote someone, you should place a "greater than" character before the quoted portion. (You can only quote solid paragraphs; if you want to quote across a line break, you'll have to use the "greater than" character a second time.)
Ex. 1:
"> Hello." (without the quotation marks)
becomes
...Hello
I have this belief that humility is a part of good critical thinking, and that egoism undermines it. I imagine arrogance as a kind of mind-death. But I have no evidence, and no good mechanism by which it might be true. In fact, I know the belief is suspect because I know that I want it to be true — 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. The truth could be the opposite: maybe hubris breeds confidence, and confidence results? After all, some of the most important thinkers in history were insufferable.
Is any link, positive or negative, between arrogance and reasoning too tenuous to be worth entertaining? Is humility a pretty word or a valuable habit? I don't know what I think yet. Do you?