The arrogance and dismissive contempt for others always irked me, but I set that aside in the spirit of "separating the art from the artist."

In retrospect, someone who is that brashly confident in themself is perhaps less likely to take seriously the possibility of their own failure, to question their own assumptions, to seek to disprove their own results. We've seen it in science, now we see it in engineering.

I am recalibrating how I assess people who build things. Humility doesn't merely make someone more pleasant to deal with, I now believe. Self-doubt, so long as it is not crippling, is a virtue of the utmost importance.