If one has been labeled 'smart' at one point or another (maybe when very young), one may also begin to identify with that label. The label becomes the identity. And, at that point, it becomes quite difficult to accept 'being wrong' because it's an attack on one's identity and reputation.
This seems to have become worse in the Internet-age, where a lot of 'smart' people have had their reputations branded into the permanent record. So much arrogance, rudeness, vitriol, etc. in order to 'win' at being 'smart'.
Ironically, I have recently discovered that it's often easier to channel Socrates and just act stupid. It's way too hard to be smart, these days. And, given that there's so much new shit to learn, who really wants to be?
Additionally, once branded "smart," people (young especially) want to avoid looking "stupid" so much that they shy away from learning new things in order to not look incompetant/inexperienced.
So much this. I recently posted a question on reddit about a technology stack I've been using for the last 10+ years I think (a long while) because there were specific aspects of the stack I had always avoided due to the way it forces you to work (and later versions of the tooling on top of the stack moved away from the approach, meaning my interpretation of it wasn't completely without merit).
So I have a client of a client ask me to help out with a problem they're having, the problem is, the tech usage falls right smack dab into the hole in my experience because of my earlier decision not to use the tech stack in this way.
So I ask a fairly specific question about it on reddit. The top voted comment was a snarky reply in which the respondent implied I was the one who created the initial problem and because I don't have the experience necessary, I should hire a freelancer with more experience in the tech stack.
The issue is that person in question was so far off base about what the problem could potentially be, I ended up solving it using exactly the methods they stated were bad assumptions on my part. This poster colored the entire question such that I got pretty much no good input out of it, and instead simply had to rely on what I did know about this aspect of the tech stack to piece together a solution.
It's a bit long winded, but I guess the point is that people are amazingly short sighted with respect to asking questions. The poster in question took my willingness to ask a question as an indication that I had no idea what I was doing.
And it's this propensity that causes everyone to put forth such a persona of arrogance. If my reputation is linked in any way to my financial success, I cannot be seen asking such questions publicly. That's just reality.
Colloquially, "channeling" X means behaving like X, or in a manner inspired by X, in this case, where X == Socrates.
This meaning is a natural outgrowth of the term's original meaning, a purported means of communicating with the dead: a psychic medium is supposedly possessed by a spirit -- i.e. the medium becomes the channel for it -- allowing it to speak through his/her body:
The other incarnation of non-physical mediumship is a form of channeling in which the channeler goes into a trance, or "leaves their body". He or she allows the spirit-person to borrow his/her body, who then talks through them.[22] When in a trance the medium seems to come under the control of another personality, purportedly the spirit of a departed soul, and a genuine medium undoubtedly believes the 'control' to be a spirit entity.
In reply to your edit:
I think ap22213 is referring to applying the Socratic method[1], although it might be a more obscure reference that goes over my head, as I am not well-read on Socrates.
But, Socrates is a guy from Plato's books who's is frustrated by all the smart people around him. They all seem really smart to Socrates, and Socrates wants to be smart, like them. So, he goes around asking all of these smart people lots of stupid questions. But, it turns out that they can't answer a lot of his stupid questions.
It may not be a good strategy though, because eventually they kill him, because he's an annoyance.
I assume you're being ironic. It's clear to me that Socrates did not for a moment think that all those other people around him were smart--more precisely, he didn't think they were as smart as they thought they were.
The Socratic method means something more specific than that. Socrates' basic MO was as follows:
(1) Find a thesis that the person you're talking to appears to believe, and get him to commit to it.
(2) Get the person to accept a few apparently innocuous assumptions.
(3) Get the person to realize, by repeated questions and answers, that the apparently innocuous assumptions lead to conclusions that contradict the thesis the person originally committed to.
This could be construed as "acting stupid" to start with, but if you're successful with the method, it will be obvious by the end that you are smarter than the person you're talking to. Which can be frustrating for that person, and since Socrates apparently did it to a lot of people, they eventually got fed up, as ap22213 says.
labelling it as smarter is a bit of a misnomer, they may very well be more knowledgeable and experienced than you in the field you're asking questions about.
You can question someone's assumptions without being 'smarter' than them.
they may very well be more knowledgeable and experienced than you in the field you're asking questions about.
But if they are, then the method will break down at either steps 2 or 3, because either the person will see that the assumptions you're trying to get them to accept would contradict their thesis, or they will be able to use their superior knowledge to convince you that the assumptions don't actually contradict their thesis after all.
You can question someone's assumptions without being 'smarter' than them.
Yes, but the method I described is more specific than just "questioning assumptions". It's a specific tactic with a specific objective: to force the person you're talking to to admit that a thesis they had believed up to that point is false, by making them prove it false for themselves. But to use this method successfully, you have to pick your targets: you don't use it unless you already know, in advance, that step 3 can be reached, which means you already know, in advance, that the person will not be able to head you off during the process. That knowledge is what makes you smarter than the other person.
It's worth noting, btw, that most of what we know about Socrates, and practically all of what we know about how he used this method, comes from Plato's dialogues, which portray Socrates as having a very high success rate with his method. We don't know how accurately Plato represented that aspect of things; the real Socrates might not have been as consistently successful at using the method as the character Socrates in the dialogues. My comments are really about the character Socrates; they are only about the real Socrates to the extent that the character accurately represents what he did and how well he did it.
well obviously you're right because you hold the opinion. If someone else held that opinion than it would obviously be wrong because then you would no longer hold that opinion, thereby nullifying the validity of said opinion.
This seems to have become worse in the Internet-age, where a lot of 'smart' people have had their reputations branded into the permanent record. So much arrogance, rudeness, vitriol, etc. in order to 'win' at being 'smart'.
Ironically, I have recently discovered that it's often easier to channel Socrates and just act stupid. It's way too hard to be smart, these days. And, given that there's so much new shit to learn, who really wants to be?