> The fact is, people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others. They close themselves off to new and important information.
> They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others.
It often feels like this, "everyone is dead inside but me", and when we make these sweeping generalizations we'll find plenty of instances to justify them. But we really can't peer in each others' heads, and over time I realized that when I acted on these kinds of assumptions, I behaved like a fucking tool.
It can be a bit uncomfortable to realize that what we think of as "us" these thoughts and feelings we internalize and think of as unique... aren't so I can understand some resistance to recognize the depths and thoughts of others... or being like everyone else.
Came across that in audiobook form not long after a really toxic abusive relationship with someone who suffers from a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder.
The chapter about the author's wannabe hustler friend described them like it was a biography.
I would argue that is a bit poorly phrased. One can base their self-worth on being right and simultaneously be humble enough to understand one can never truly know it all and thus be open to criticism and improvement.
Or is there something deeper from the book that better explains the point?
The book is full of gross generalizations and anecdotes. It's a self help/pop psychology book meant to make you feel good, not a proper scientific analysis. That said, it's still a good book that I enjoyed reading and I have a list of quotes saved in a text file that have helped me understand certain family members.
It's difficult to think of examples "from this site" because I rarely remember the posters' names.
I would point to cryptocurrencies as a rich source of extremely wrong takes: how bitcoin would replace paypal and credit cards, how government conspiracies would try to fight it, etc. None of those predictions came to pass, to put it mildly. What I can't offer is specific instances of people pivoting from "it's a currency! It even has 'coin' in its name!" to "it's not a currency! It's a store of value". But I'm sure there must be some.
I also remember when here (and, possibly, on slashdot before HN) one overdone "meme" was criticising CSI-style shows for "enhance!" making low-res images of license plates readable. "You cannot recover information that isn't there!" the comment would go, and it was the easiest upvote to get.
Today, there are plenty of AI demos that can, indeed, reconstruct license plates from low-res. Turns out the information wasn't actually lost. Unfortunately, I'm denied the gratification of all those people writing apologies, and I can't prove that they are the ones posting "It's not intelligence, it's just statistics!" today.
Nuclear power might be another example on a pretty good multi-decades run of varying other reactor technologies (pebble bed, fusion, etc) always on the cusp of breakthrough. This example is especially funny, because the actual scientists working on energy, and even the supposedly stupid politicians, have now created alternatives that are safe, clean, and close to competing with even coal in economic terms, let alone the far more expensive nuclear tech. Yet the wider tech community disregards this economic argument, and insists on fighting the public on safety. They just can't let go because they feel they were wronged on that issue in the 80s and 90s. Which is at least plausible, but it just doesn't really matter any more. There's a strong undercurrent of cultural grievances here, as if people were forever living in the science fiction of their youth.
well yes, I was being sarcastic but I'm glad it sparked this high value comment you wrote. It is easy to see how the 'consensus narrative' changes, as the accounts are censored and their comments are in fact promoted by the collective community. But it is impossible to see who was part of that collective community.
I've worked with previous my boss's son. This guy felt like he was the best at everything and would get annoyed if people gave him critical feedback on anything he did and would insist he was right. Therefore, even when more experienced people told him things he disagreed with, he wouldn't accept their opinion and keep doing it his way.
This caused a lot of people to not want to work with him and, in the end, was a major part of why I ended up quitting.
People like that are impossible to work with. It's a flavour of narcissism where the person in question is never wrong, cannot be wrong, so any mistakes are obviously someone else's fault.
I don't think this could ever be considered factual, but it makes sense to me.
In times where I'm invested in being right, it's harder to accept learning that I had been wrong, and I'm certainly not seeking out more information with which to challenge my understanding.
I saw many junior devs who thought they knew so much that they almost stopped to be curious and find the truth and knowledge out there, and I saw many devs who thought they were experts and just stopped to learn anything.
From The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.