Intellectual arrogance

Being a little arrogant about the way you understand things is beneficial for you.  Imagine that you are trying to understand something in mathematics and assuming you can think critically, you don't understand why a certain procedure is needed to solve the problem. If you use a little arrogance in this situation, you can try to solve the problem without using the procedure you don't understand and see where that will get you. Of course if you get to the wrong answer and you can see what difference using the procedure makes and this will deepen your understanding of this problem. Now let's look at the other way you could have gone with this, you could have gone on the internet or asked your teacher and I can guarantee they will give you a surface answer and from there I can guarantee you at that point you will just assume they are right and think you are stupid for not understanding. This is because understanding isn't valued.

This way of thinking will get you far in these times where everyone around you seems to be blindly following others.

Arrogance is a moronic personality trait. If you don't reject everything that's moronic, you're part of the problem.

If you look at the title, I didn't put arrogance in their as itself. I related it to a specific domain (intellectual) so the way I'm using this is in related to thinking about things, not a personality trait. Even if you are not an arrogant person you can convince yourself to think about things as if you were an arrogant person if you were to apply this way of thinking.

There are people that apply this way of thinking without realising, this is for people that have confidence problems in understanding.

Doing things well requires both intelligence and conscientiousness.  Misplaced arrogance may lead to sloppiness which is the opposite of conscientiousness.  This is a big problem in areas where there is a cost to undoing mistakes.  Math is an area where there is little cost to mistakes but even here thinking before starting on an idea can save time.  I think the best way to develop conscientiousness is to play a game like Go where you are punished for making mistakes.