I think I understand sentence 2, but the meaning of 1 and 3 elude me!
But I disagree with your last sentence, at least as a generalization. There are legitimately talented, accomplished, capable, and arrogant people all over the place! In fact I'd say a slight majority of talented people are arrogant (say, 60%). That said, there are pretenders who are arrogant without talent, and they "poison the well" for the 60%.
I think this is especially a problem in software, because the field is still "pre-paradigmatic science" (in the Kuhn sense) which means, in part, that there is no great way to measure relative developer capability. The best you can do is examine their history of "finishing hard things" or "solving synthetically hard problems." How fast and well do you learn? What is your intuition about design, about code? Do you actually care about the structure of software enough to have opinions about it?
The biggest problem we face is that the really good developers answer yes to the last question, but then are faced with the dilemma of being forced to dwell in an inferior technology space in order to make a living. Presumably a strong paradigm would reduce this error mode!
If you had ideas around defining that paradigm for software applications, somewhere between the too-abstract Turing machine/Lambda Calculus and the too-concrete "everything is just a string of bits" mental models, would that make you narcissistic? Or just too ignorant to realize that "the best paradigm" is too subjective to define, or illusory, or already discovered (and ignored)?
Was Lavoisier, and the other scientists that converted the practice of alchemy into the practice of chemistry narcissists because they competed with each other for recognition and fame?
Was talking about narcissism not arrogance which by itself doesn’t imply narcissism. Some of the mentioned scientists may have been narcissists but it’s hard to impossible to diagnose people like that, especially ones who are no longer around. And there’s also a distinction between narcissism (the persobality disorder) and narcissitic traits which we all have to some degree. If you’re curious about the subject I recommend watching Sam Vaknin youtube. He is a narcissist but also extremely an intelligent intellect. He is not hiding the fact that he is a narcissist and has a very interesting insight
But I disagree with your last sentence, at least as a generalization. There are legitimately talented, accomplished, capable, and arrogant people all over the place! In fact I'd say a slight majority of talented people are arrogant (say, 60%). That said, there are pretenders who are arrogant without talent, and they "poison the well" for the 60%.
I think this is especially a problem in software, because the field is still "pre-paradigmatic science" (in the Kuhn sense) which means, in part, that there is no great way to measure relative developer capability. The best you can do is examine their history of "finishing hard things" or "solving synthetically hard problems." How fast and well do you learn? What is your intuition about design, about code? Do you actually care about the structure of software enough to have opinions about it?
The biggest problem we face is that the really good developers answer yes to the last question, but then are faced with the dilemma of being forced to dwell in an inferior technology space in order to make a living. Presumably a strong paradigm would reduce this error mode!
If you had ideas around defining that paradigm for software applications, somewhere between the too-abstract Turing machine/Lambda Calculus and the too-concrete "everything is just a string of bits" mental models, would that make you narcissistic? Or just too ignorant to realize that "the best paradigm" is too subjective to define, or illusory, or already discovered (and ignored)?
Was Lavoisier, and the other scientists that converted the practice of alchemy into the practice of chemistry narcissists because they competed with each other for recognition and fame?