Comment by programjames

I consider phrases like

> It's just good to be humble. End of story.

to be axiomatic declarations. My issue with these kind of axioms is they're not really necessary. You can get everything useful by only considering things that are good for somebody. Now, we don't live in a perfectly informed and rational society, so it can be good (for society) to indoctrinate everyone with this axiom. But, as with all axioms, not everyone will believe in them. So, if I'm told,

"You need to be more humble, it's a virtue,"

that's begging the question! I need some external reason to either adopt the axiom or humility. Society as a whole seems to have adopted this axiom, but why is that? There was probably an evolution of axioms, where ones that didn't work got rejected, while ones that mostly worked got inculcated. I think most people overestimate their abilities, which would lead to fighting over positional goods. I think the role of the humility axiom is to prevent such fighting, but it comes with drawbacks.

Since the Enlightenment, most wealth has been created by thinking really hard. This means you really want to rank people near the top accurately, so you can give them resources to go and create their ideas. The axiom of humility regresses everyone toward the mean—which is great when the GDP is measured in bushels, but not so great when it is measured in transistors.