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

[FoJaR]

Originally Posted by stargroup100

I am living counterexample of your point. If someone is truly the best at something and expresses it when it is relevant, I will absolutely not see it as arrogance.

how about someone who is better than you, maybe better than everyone in the room, objectively, at something delcaring that they are better? is that okay? if i beat you at counter strike repeatedly, and i say to your face that i am better than you, how is that not a dickish thing to do? it may be true, it may be relevant to the topic at hand, but it's still an arrogant thing to do.

Why does it have to be a poll? Who gets to cast a vote? How are votes cast? What is the criteria that needs to be met? How are you going to go poll everyone involved anytime you need to need to determine the arrogance of an individual? Are you so certain there's no other way to determine this?

jesus christ.

You are assuming that
1. All cultures have an accepted perspective to what counts as arrogance.
2. For any given context, all persons of a given culture have the same feelings about what is considered arrogance.

i am assuming that all cultures have a baseline perspective on what counts as arrogance, and that a solid majority of persons in a culture have the same feelings about what is considered arrogance, yes. there's gonna be a distribution, but it's going to be a well defined one.

What I consider arrogance may be totally different from what my brother considers arrogance, and we share a near identical culture.

yeah, but if you were to take a survey of your entire family and neighbors etc, you would have a pretty solid idea of what your culture as a whole thinks, and generally it would agree.

You even said that to be considered arrogant, we should take a poll. What happens if you mix populations from two or more cultures (who, let's just hypothetically say, all share the same opinion on arrogance within their culture)? Does what culture they belong to automatically dictate their position of arrogance? I find this notion absolutely absurd.

too bad?

i mean this isnt totally uncommon. when you mix two groups, a lot of the time actions that go without notice in one group are a big deal for the other group. one group of people might not consider something arrogant while the other does, and guess what? that's okay. i mean, sometimes it causes problems, but there's nothing to stop two groups of people from seeing things differently.

So what you're saying is, only under a particular context is this person considered the best. What if his statement of his own skill explains and demonstrates understanding of this context? Then he is still being honest, regardless of how good or bad the person is at anything else. Are you still going to make a strict dichotomy between honesty and arrogance? How are you so certain this is still going to rub everyone the wrong way?

well first of all, the honesty comment is directed toward archowl who has in the past used his need to be honest as rationalization for arrogance etc.

Suppose I'm going into an interview for a job. Everyone else has been shown to be qualified, but I know I'm better than everyone else at the job and deserve it. Should I undercut myself or express my honest opinion of myself? Is this not considered bragging? Either way, it's a high opinion of myself so it's arrogant according to your definition. How would this be insulting?

well, this is a tough situation. in job interviews, it's expected that you will try to sell yourself. you could say that the culture of job interviews is more lenient when it comes to high self opinion. how you say what you say may very well come off as arrogant even in a job interview though, so it's something to be careful of.

again, arrogance is all about how people perceive the way you talk about yourself. because of cultural norms, most people generally have a good idea of where the line is in a given situation. some people cross the line because they are oblivious or lack social grace, some cross it because they have disorders, and some cross it because they're assholes or because they like feeling better than the people around them.

Except this statement is not true for most all skills. You may be able to name a handful of things that don't necessitate comparison with others, but there are activities in which comparison to other people is absolutely unavoidable. Any competitive game with interacting strategies between two or more players is an example of this.

and good taste dictates that when the game is over you are polite to the person that you beat. going over to the person you just beat and saying "i beat you because i'm better than you" may be true, but it's also pretty arrogant and rude.

Okay, so now we're also going to equate omission and dishonesty? If I don't tell you I had steak for dinner last night but I told you I had potatoes, am I being dishonest? How are you even going to realistically make someone assess everything else that exists? Do I need to pull up a comprehensive list of every sport, game, academic field and sub-field, skill, etc. and give you my personal opinion of my proficiency in everything there? This is absolutely not realistic and is irrelevant in the first place.

again, this is to archowl, not you. this is in reference to his need to talk about how he's better than people and how he feels that not doing so is dishonest. you arent part of this conversation.

Summary
You have tons of fallacies in your arguments, all under the general presumption that any kind of expression of self in high regard is most definitely unnecessary and insulting to most everyone else. This basic presumption is unsupported, and leads to a bunch of poor arguments with holes in them.

All of these fallacies can be patched if you go back to the drawing board and realize that under certain circumstances, high opinion of self is not only not insulting but the right thing to do, and comparison of self and others is a critically fundamental method in which all people use to improve their own lives and interpret the reality around them.

like it or not, in western culture most of the time when someone tells the people around them that they are better than them, that person is being arrogant, according to the definition. it is generally perceived as being in bad taste.