What is arrogance/humility, what is bragging, is it bad, and why?

[FoJaR]

Originally Posted by stargroup100

I can't tell if you're serious but because this is Critical Thinking I'll assume so.


I have a personal objection to defining arrogance as simply the "high opinion of oneself". Not only is this not what the dictionary definition says, I have yet to ever come across in real life a situation where the word was used in this context. There is already a pretty universal negative connotation to this word, so what would be the point of defining arrogance in such a way?

from merriam webster:

: an insulting way of thinking or behaving that comes from believing that you are better, smarter, or more important than other people

it's more about how you interact with other people, and really has nothing to do with whether or not that behavior has any basis in fact. you can be the best in the world, but if you go around saying it, you're being a dick. an arrogant dick. by definition. really the only way to determine if you are being arrogant is to take a poll of the people around you, because arrogance is more about whether or not you are rubbing people around you the wrong way than whether or not you are justified in saying the things that you are saying.

The question is about what fundamentally accepted ideas for different groups of people or cultures could cause a different perspective on the quality of arrogance. The quote does use the word "place" but it is not referring to a literal place.

Even if it did, it really doesn't hold much significance. The only roots you can draw from are explanations from large-scale cultural values, which don't necessarily lead any opinion of arrogance, and you don't need a map for these either.

actually what is culturally acceptable is really all that matters, because you're only being arrogant if you're insulting the people around you. if it's normal to talk about how great you are in your culture, it's not going to insult the people around you, so it's not arrogance.

This. I'm willing to bet you didn't spend much time thinking through this one.

The point of your statement is to explain why someone can be good at something and still be truthfully humble. What you're saying here is that if something isn't easy, then most likely the reason for being skilled and humble is that they're not good enough to know how skilled they are. Does this mean that in order to be honest, someone that is only somewhat skilled can be humble, and someone that is extremely skilled and self-aware can't?

On top of that, this implies the extremely skilled person is now left in a position where they have no choice but to either be dishonest or arrogant. Again, how are these definitions practical?

i'm saying that first of all, most of the people who think they're the best arent, by a long shot, and those few that are the best are only the best so far, or even at the moment, and only at one thing. and they're probably pretty shitty at a ton of other things, and probably really shitty at a lot of other things.

the point is, overall you still dont have any reason to brag.

In the context of comparing skill levels of other people, of course this is not pointless. By comparing your own skill with others, you can assess what other people are doing that's better than you or worse than you, and as a result improve yourself by emulating the better. In most situations, you can even learn something from people worse than you, because you become aware of the possible choices and outcomes you didn't consider before, and you can utilize that.

Comparing who is generally better or worse is probably only useful in setting approximate benchmarks for yourself to track your goal progress, and this is still far from useless.

maybe if you have these people right in front of you and can ask them about that stuff, but you can track your own progress without comparing yourself to the people around you.