alt Hacker News> I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it
You're actually doing the problem behavior right here: denying the validity of the experience of seeing exactly this happen, not as a one off, but repeatedly in completely separate situations and institutions.
> that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.
I mean the problem is they're arrogant. The two aren't mutually exclusive, far from it.
My point is that wanting things redone because you don’t understand it is dumb behaviour, not smart behaviour.
There wasn’t even a denial of the validity of experience, I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?
> The two aren't mutually exclusive, far from it.
Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative. While you can be intelligent and arrogant, you can’t really learn things without the humility to say you don’t know stuff. In my experience, most physics grads I know constantly say they don’t know stuff, way more than people from other disciplines.