Yes, this works just as well if you regard arrogance and rigidity as false-to-fact, fairly independent, non-usefully-cognitive emotions that cloud the intellect.
But we (LDC and I) both have, or at least we're trying to - that's exactly our point. Yes, Lee Daniel Crocker is smarter than 95% of the list, and I'm a Specialist, but that doesn't matter. What difference does the bell curve we find ourselves in make, or where we find ourselves in it? It matters nothing to our actual selves; the curve may shift however it pleases, and we will remain the same. We know enough cognitive science to define ourselves in terms of the stuff we're made of, and not by reference to other people or our place in the social matrix. And - I'm not sure I can speak for anyone but myself on this, but it remains true - I've spent enough time dreaming of entities that are far enough Beyond to make all of humanity look like a single point in the Hamiltonian space of intelligence that all humility and arrogance becomes irrelevant.
Subtract both arrogance and humility, and what's left is an offhand estimate of one's percentile that could move an order of magnitude in either direction without us caring much. Saying "I'm smarter than everyone on this mailing list" isn't intrinsically arrogant - it may be a bit sloppy (what do you mean by "smarter"?), but it's only arrogant if you're careless enough to invoke the emotion of arrogance.
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sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way