Is steve jobs not arrogant? It is a fine line between arrogance and confidence in one-self. I do not know where 37signals stands on that line, but their products are very much like Apple's - simple, elegant and not for everyone.
Then, a lot of people are selfish. If you are doing something they don't like, they'll say you're bad, and if you help them out, they'll say you're good.
My (probably inaccurate) conclusion is the people you piss off will say you're arrogant, and the people that you helped out will say you're self-confident.
Nota bene: this is all pretty tentative. My guesses don't represent my opinions, or those of any startups I start in the future.
From your link: The genetic fallacy is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context.
Notice how it says solely? There's no solely about this. To consider a root is not to ignore current meaning; one can do both. That's, uh, what dictionaries do.
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/afonedis.html
There's another point. The genetic fallacy refers to historical origin. The root of a word is certainly that, but it's also a piece (the main piece, in fact) of the word as it is now. If your point were correct, then a botanist examining the roots of a plant would also be committing the genetic fallacy. Happily for botanists and etymologists, the genetic fallacy applies to one sense of "root" but not the other.
What this means, of course, is that anyone who exhibits even a shred of self-confidence will probably be accused, by someone somewhere, of being arrogant. The symptoms are largely the same. The difference is one of degree, and of results.
Arrogance is hard to diagnose without the benefit of hindsight. It is now evident that Marc Andreesen was being arrogant when he proclaimed that Netscape would kill the Microsoft desktop. But Linus Torvalds was apparently not being arrogant when he claimed that he could build a better VC system than CVS in less than a month, because... he did.
I don't understand people who say success justifies arrogance (or worse, makes it not-arrogance altogether). Success just shields you from the consequences of your arrogance.
Yes, but whose attitude? That of the "arrogant" person, or that of the person who interprets a certain set of actions and statements as "arrogance"?
The problem is that there's only one (e.g.) Linus Torvalds, but he has thirty thousand critics, of all shapes and sizes and cultures, with a widely varying range of personalities. Some of his critics are bound to have no sense of humor. Some of them are bound to have a tin ear for dialogue. Some of them are bound to be jealous as hell. Some of them are enemies. Some of them are trolls.
Successful douchebags (by whoever's standards) are still douchebags.
Someone is labeled arrogant when they're successful enough that others have to pay attention to them, yet those same people are jealous it's not the other way around.
IMHO, the difference is in attitude. Self-confidence says "I'm OK, I'm pretty good." Arrogance says that, plus "oh, and other people suck."
Also, being pretty good implies being better than others. Whether you praise yourself or dis others, you're still saying you're at a high percentile. Being good or sucky is relative.
I do not think 37signals or Jobs is blinded by their confidence. Though one could easily claim Jobs confidence led to his downfall in 1987. He even explained this at the commencement speech at Stanford (I think).
Look at the evolution of the iPhone-- the SDK and Enterprise features. He essentially did a 180 degree turn on the SDK and embraced a lifelong enemy (MS) to help his customers.
Any examples of 37s ever doing anything like this?
Secondly, I see no evidence whatsoever that Apple "did a 180 degree turn" on the SDK. The plan of waiting over a year to release the SDK is working out great. There are good reasons to have done so -- it strings the hype cycle along (if Apple had released everything at once, what do they do for an encore?), it lets the UI designers get some real-world experience, it shakes out the hardware, etc. Embracing MS is also something Apple has done for years -- MS software is a cornerstone of the Mac's success (Excel was a Mac app first!)
Finally, it's a mistake to equate the actions of 37s, or the Rails community, or Apple with the actions of individuals. No one person runs these things. Even a tiny company like 37s has more than one person, and Apple is a huge company with lots and lots of smart people.
Not here though, it'll be fun to write but boring to read.
As for messaging, I mainly use gtalk or skype. For gtalk you have my contact info, and I think I used the same address for skype.
Also, like my personal mail, I'll only be able to use skype and such when I leave work. So, I won't be online until this coming weekend (hopefully).
Concerning child raising, I saw your conversation with that other guy. While your philosophy does seem like the best, it also seems to me that I can act unreasonably at times. Aristotle pointed this out, people can lack temperance. I think the keyword is akrasia.
Socrates, on the other hand, thought all moral failings were based on ignorance. From what I've noticed, the older people get, the more they lean to the former viewpoint. I'm not sure which view is correct; I like Socrates', but practically I follow Aristotle's.
But you seem to have brought up your own imperfection as a point of possible disagreement. I'm guessing that has more to do with this other issue:
The fundamental issue is that if you can't persuade someone of your ideas, that is a bad reason to force him.
Here your comments about different ways people can be unreasonable are important. If a problem is due to someone's ignorance then it makes sense that good ideas can solve the problem. Ideas clearly are capable of reducing ignorance.
If it's a problem of akrasia, lack of self control, emotions run wild, or solidly entrenched bad ideas, then what to do is less clear. What if the person, adult or child, won't listen to reason? If what he wants isn't based a reasoned decision then why would reason change his mind?
I have some answers to those questions. But first I want to check in to see if you agree so far, and if this is the sort of question you are interested in.
PS FYI I might potentially be able to give a more helpful reply in private; I try to avoid personal comments in public about both myself and others.
Please consider yourself to have no obligations to me, and continue things only if you want to.
In fact, a lot of beliefs on parenting amount to trying to say both, "Children are so ignorant and gullible that they'll believe almost anything. They pick up bad ideas very easily." And, "Children are so stubborn that they never listen to my good ideas." But you can't have it both ways. If a child can pick up ideas causing him to disagree with his parent, there have also been opportunities for him to be persuaded of ideas in agreement with his parent. The parent is blaming his ideas' lack of appeal on the child's stubbornness, while denying the appeal of rival ideas based on the child's gullibility.
Here we have a different issue. We accept (or I do, and I'm clarifying, and if you don't we should probably discuss that) that ignorance is nothing to fear (indeed people face it all the time when exploring a new field.) And we further accept that ideas that are part of a truth seeking process are nothing to fear. Those will be amenable to criticism, improvement, persuasion. But what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process? I will answer each of these cases separately.
'Very unreasonable' ideas are nothing more than ideas that the speaker strongly disagrees with. This isn't actually a comment on whether the process behind them is truth seeking, or whether they are held open to change.
Ideas that aren't intended to be reasonable are harder to address. But people aren't perfectly consistent, so sometimes it doesn't turn out to be much of a problem. Just because someone's philosophy isn't compatible with taking advice for good reasons (they deny their being such thing as truer reasons, say) doesn't mean they won't sometimes take your advice.
But if it is a problem, then we can focus on something else: why doesn't this person intend to be reasonable? He has a bad idea about how to approach life. He has little or mistaken understanding of what approaches will solve his problems, or will be enjoyable. Many people have an idea something like, "arguments are unpleasant" and avoid them. They can be! But there are ways of thinking and arguing which make them pleasant and helpful. One could begin by teaching/explaining those, and then the person could try using reason, find it's a good thing, and then intend to have reasonable ideas and make some effort to hold his ideas open to rational improvement. There is a rational path forward.
(Note for upcoming paragraph: By 'knowledge' I do not mean justified, true belief. What I mean is closer to 'understanding' or 'good ideas'.)
What about ideas that aren't created via a rational process? Well, like what? All knowledge is created via conjectures and criticism, aka evolution. If you actually left out criticism entirely it wouldn't be possible to get anywhere: very bad guesses would run amuck. You might think that some people are a bit like that. But that would underestimate how difficult daily life is. For example, having a conversation about the weather in English requires rational processes. You have to make guesses about whether the other person is talking to you, and what he means to say, and you have to criticize those guesses. If you don't, you won't create knowledge. In particular, you won't create knowledge of what he's trying to communicate. You won't understand and won't be able to reply coherently. Forming your own sentences is also a matter of knowledge creation. You must create knowledge of which words would express your intended meaning (not to mention what intended meanings should be said or not).
These conjectures and refutations that create knowledge mostly take place at a sub-conscious level. But we know they must be taking place or people would not be able to function at all for practical tasks or simple conversations. Whether there is a different way of creating knowledge is another can of worms, which we can discuss if you'd like, but I'll omit it for now.
The reason I went through each case of, "what if a person has thoughts or preferences that are very unreasonable, or not even intended to be reasonable, or not created via a rational process?" separately is that they are actually distinct claims. They are intended to be roughly synonymous descriptions of something, but they aren't. The question contains misconceptions about the types of situations it is intending to describe. When what's going wrong in each situation is understood more precisely, then it's easier to address.
We may still be wondering about those times people seem very unreasonable, agree they were unreasonable afterwards, and do intend to be truth seeking and rational. What could be going on there if they are, at least subconsciously, thinking with rational, knowledge-creating processes?
Part of the answer is that people make mistakes.
Part is that people generally have mistakes in their ideas about what their personality and ideas are. One consequences is that many mistaken ideas they "used to have" are actually still in their personality, but they don't realize it.
Part is memes, which really needs a separate post as well as a note that I think most published ideas about memes are terrible, so this may not be what you expect.
I'll stop here for now. Let me know what you think. No hurry.
PS I've bookmarked this thread and will check periodically unless you want to suggest another approach.
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080223.h...