This is a broad problem in our heuristics.

“Principles and values” have been reduced for the sake of simplicity, and it’s become rather detrimental.

All “arrogance” —in this case triumphant self recognition— is not necessarily a disdainful expression. We used to despise unearned or unwarranted arrogance. That’s a massive distinction that shouldn’t have crept into “anyone who doesn’t hate themselves and pretend their achievements aren’t achievements”.

We see this with other things like hypocrisy. Especially in parenting: “well you tried [bad thing] when you were young, who are you to tell your kids they shouldn’t do [bad things]???

Umm, a loving parent? The best parents are “hypocrites” —if we’re to use the bastardised version of the term.

How about a smoker telling you that you shouldn’t smoke?? Seems hypocritical? Or… excellent first hand advice!

We see it with“correlation isn’t causation”… mmhmm, but sometimes it’s indicative of a relationship, still worth investigating.

We’ve gotten so lazy with the tools in our toolkit, we fail to even evaluate if a particular instance of thing that looks like thing is actually the thing to which we want to reduce it.