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Comment by bertr4nd | Hacker News Reader

I was struck by this bit in the passage about hubris: “The STEM student is taught that hubris is a useful vocational skill.” I recently asked a successful senior engineer how he was able to start an influential project, and the answer came down to a combination of hubris (he had to have confidence that his solution, starting from scratch against a well-funded team, would win out) and appetite for risk.

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I think he is wrong: STEM (especially programming) is excellent at proving the person to have failed.

You cannot create software without experience failure a hundred times a day.

Compare this to humanities like literature: how many times a day is a literature teacher proven to have made a mistake? How much real experience does this person have with failure? How many times have your literature teacher admitted "I made a mistake"?

So the STEM person is likely to be confident because s/he has a lot of experience with failure and know how to handle them, and how much they can delay progress.

>I think he is wrong: STEM (especially programming) is excellent at proving the person to have failed.

Yeah, i think the author has mixed STEM as a field with tech-startups business side where hustling attitude is advised and often necessary to be honest.

For what it’s worth, I’m not saying that confidence (even hubris!) is bad! Without his confidence, said senior engineer probably wouldn’t have built his successful project.

If I had any literary skill, I’d write a tragedy in which the hero’s flaw is his lack of hubris. (Perhaps it would be autobiographical - my grad school advisor said my weakness is that I’m not arrogant enough.)

This is literally true in terms of Larry Wall's comment about the three virtues of a great programmer. (Arguably he doesn't really mean it in the classical sense, but he does use the word.)

It makes it less surprising that the social impact of the internet has so curdled in the last decade, doesn’t it?

Qualities which are endearing in individuals or small teams pursuing open source projects are a lot less charming in corporations controlling aspects of one's daily lives. Larry Wall was never a corporate tycoon, nor did he (to my knowledge) aspire to be one. But even back in the day I found the hubris of e.g. Tim O'Reilly far less charming, even though it was hardly on a scale to threaten society.

Don't think this attitude is just limited to STEM though as Gioia implies. Humanities majors have plenty of hubris themselves, though it may have a different moral flavor than in the sciences. Similar career incentives though for sure.

The lack of self-awareness of the author is rather amusing. He seems to be striving to be a poster boy for the willful ignorance C.P. Snow bemoaned in The Two Cultures.

"I did not know it wouldn't work" is the core of this.

Beautiful sentence structure.

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