7 ms·

This is something that puzzles me. I've met many people like him who I know objectively speak are highly intelligent. But still on many levels they just come ac

• sotojuan 11y ago
  I see this a lot. You could argue RMS fits this category. I don't think he's stupid, but somewhat strange for someone who could've been a first rate Physics or Computer Science researcher. A few weeks ago someone commented how some academic was disappointed that Gates had become an entrepreneur, calling it a "waste". It is interesting to think about what him, Ballmer, or Stallman would've done in academia.
  • enraged_camel 11y ago
    >>It is interesting to think about what [Gates], Ballmer, or Stallman would've done in academia. Considering the current state of academia and the many articles regularly posted here, they probably would have burned out and left. That would have been the real waste in my opinion.
  • josephcooney 11y ago
    Let's not even start on ESR.
    • sfilipov 11y ago
      Who (or what) is ESR?
      • pdpi 11y ago
        Eric S Raymond, wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, co-founder of the OSI (Open Source Initiative)
      • adl 11y ago
        Erick S. Raymond: http://esr.ibiblio.org/ http://esr.ibiblio.org/ Author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
      • angersock 11y ago
        Eric Scott Raymond, a very bright and often abrasive person. Wrote Cathedral and the Bazaar, and was responsible for a lot of the realpolitik and branding that got Open Source to where it is today. Had varying amounts of a hand in gpsd, ncurses, reposturgeon, and various other tools people actually use. The big problem is that his worldview is exceptionally conservative culture war while at the same time being fairly social liberal. If something isn't productive to expanding Western Civilization (by his definition), for whatever reason, it must go. This includes Islam, this includes a lot of SJW theory, this includes homosexuals (not out of malice, but because they by definition can't make more population), and so forth. He's quite interesting to read, and he makes very interesting points--unfortunately, if you have a visceral reaction to his politics it is quite hard to bear him. He also has an annoying habit of claiming expertise and skills that aren't quite there, such as forensic critique of a police shooting. "Interesting insufferable intellectual independent" would be my classification of him.
        • PhantomGremlin 11y ago
          Eric Scott Raymond It's Eric Steven Raymond. That Scott fellow has a Wiki entry but it's not who you're talking about. Here's the ESR guy's Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
        • deleted 11y ago
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        • moron4hire 11y ago
          Eeeeh, have you ever actually met the guy? Cuz I have and I came to the conclusion that he does have a lot of overt malice towards almost all minorities. He's just like every other old, bigotted white dude. He and my grandfather and father-in-law would get along quite well. He literally believes that black people are biologically incapable of being as smart as white people and that they are genetically predisposed to violent behavior. His delusions even extend to his own health status. He thinks he could use martial arts to beat up an intruder on his house. The guy has cerebral palsy so bad he can barely stand. It'd be tragic if he wasn't such a dick.
      • darkr 11y ago
        Some guy who wrote a HOWTO on cunnilingus
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • cgag 11y ago
    Seems like a strange argument to make given RMS' gigantic impact on the world.
    • sotojuan 11y ago
      Good point. I should not devalue his work (nor Gates' or Ballmer's), but it is nonetheless interesting to think about.
  • soofaloofa 11y ago
    Microsoft now employs 118,584 people with many of them working in research laboratories. Had Gates pursued academia he could have at best accomplished a fraction of what he has.
    • Polyphonie 11y ago
      That's 118,584 - 7,800 employees that were laid off in July or 2015 (the 118K number was from March 2015).
• boxy310 11y ago
  Being smart in a particular subject requires a certain coalescence of talent, training, and timing. Most people do not have the prerequisites to be smart in all subjects, or even a significant amount of them. The economic division of labor also encourages specialization rather than general expertise. This is why one should be wary of experts speaking far afield of their expertise.
• pound 11y ago
  That may be a certain relaxation point, way to entertain themselves. No need to seriously analyze something, just having fun going with it. Especially if you don't really care about what other people are thinking about you.
• philwelch 11y ago
  Intelligence and nuttery/crackpottery are two separate things. In fact, intelligence can even enable nuttery because an intelligent nut is better at rationalizing his own nuttery than an unintelligent nut. Someone can be literally a world-class brain surgeon and still believe that the pyramids were constructed to store grain, for instance.
  • scoot 11y ago
    Or any number of otherwise intelligent people who hold spiritual beliefs.
    • spinchange 11y ago
      His example is poignant because it falls out of even normative doctrine in the cultural/religious context it's referencing. It's like a double-inconsistency and yet...the guy can separate conjoined twins at the head. (Shaking mine.)
  • fleitz 11y ago
    Smart people are outliers, hence their ideas are also outliers. Also, never underestimate the intelligence required to tailor a message to its audience.
  • frenchy 11y ago
    > still believe that the pyramids were constructed to store grain, for instance. But, in civ 2, the pyramids gave you a granary in every city, so obviously they were for storing grain!
    • rtpg 11y ago
      I really like the idea that Carson played Civ and thus holds this tidbit of knowledge
  • cat-dev-null 11y ago
    Four factors: 0. Intelligence is hard to "measure;" and even informally, there are mostly inferred attribute from a subject's performance filtered through the viewer's (fallible/biased) perception. 1. There's many domains of intelligence: - critical thinking (i.e., lawyers) - fact memory - abstract thinking - spatial - problem solving - social - political - emotional ... and far too many others to list. 2. Biases - upbringing, environment, experiences and so on tend to influence a person's preferences and beliefs, and they may be expressing what it is their social group expects or how they view themselves. 3. I'm sure there is at least one belief each of us clings to that others find wacky. Sometimes person don't pick up that a certain view is social unacceptable. Examples: - The guy in Starbucks with backpack supporting "the missile men of gaza"... de-facto endorsement of terrorism. - I happen to be vegetarian (not driving around with "meat is murder" and slaughterhouse shame pictures)... a lot of people are offended by that and heap on certain biases. - People struggling to survive, yet don't support unions, basic income or higher taxes on large trusts and estates, and are still libertarian "completely unregulated market" types.
• ajnin 11y ago
  Maybe they're actually right and they see connections on a broad scale that other people are too stupid to make. Intelligence is after all often described as the ability to discern the hidden structure behind things. (half kidding ;))
• cerebrum 11y ago
  I guess I qualify a bit in that respect. The question I ask you: how do you know they are nuts and not in fact correct?
  • mattlutze 11y ago
    You learn the nature of a thing by developing and testing hypotheses around it, I would suppose.
• deleted 11y ago
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• brownbat 11y ago
  Two hunches: 1) Expertise may cause certain types of bias. Recent studies have examined this idea of "earned dogmatism": the idea that once you gain expertise in something, your ego builds, and that actually makes you less open minded and less able to revise or challenge your existing beliefs.[0] 2) Overcoming bias is different than overcoming ignorance. Categorically different, and perhaps massively harder. A different study found expert philosophers exhibiting cognitive biases at the same rate as nonprofessionals, even when dealing with undergraduate-level philosophy problems.[1] [0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115001006 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115... [1] http://cushmanlab.fas.harvard.edu/docs/schwitzgebel&cushman_2012.pdf http://cushmanlab.fas.harvard.edu/docs/schwitzgebel&cushman_...
• rooster8 11y ago
  Some smart people carry the scars of having accidentally hurt someone's feelings in conversation by inadvertently making them feel dumb. Consequently, some smart people choose to play down their intelligence during conversation because it's disarming to do so, and they want to help people feel at ease.
  • chipz 11y ago
    Good point, never think of it.
• moron4hire 11y ago
  There is a tendency among a lot of people to make a post-hoc rationalization that--because certain, historical, geniuses were eccentric--being eccentric makes you a genius. There are other, similar, false rationalizations around being "complex" vs just being difficult, being "brave" vs just being reckless, etc.
  • darkmighty 11y ago
    Also sampling bias, since the wacky or loud geniuses may get more publicity.
• solipsism 11y ago
  It's easy to understand if you just abandon the idea that stupid-to-smart is a single 1-dimensional spectrum. There are all kinds of intelligence, and having one doesn't imply having others.
• overgard 11y ago
  I have a pet theory on this. Smart people tend to go in depth on things in a way the average person doesn't (generally more to laziness rather than capability). The one trait I noticed in smart people is they never just stop at the convenient answer, it has to fit into a coherent world view, and they tend to integrate ideas into larger wholes. Lets say you try to explain quantum physics to a lay person. We know quantum mechanics is basically correct, but it sounds batshit insane if you try to go directly to the conclusions of quantum mechanics without starting at the first principles. You can't just go from A-Z, you have to go A-B-C...Z. The average lay person just goes from A->"wow quantum physics are weird, murdering cats and stuff" The thing is, we can believe some of the more outlandish claims of physics because physics is a trusted institution and we know claims are checked, etc, so we don't need to check it ourselves. So that works for science; because smart people made it work, but what happens with things that aren't science? The same people smart enough to study quantum physics might also be just as interested in politics. So maybe their thoughts start at the mainstream, but they keep growing sideways off it in their own unique branch. In science, these branches get clipped when they're falsified by the community, but other areas don't really have a bar for determining the correctness of a theory, those branches don't necessarily get trimmed. Anyway, I guess my point is that if you know a very smart person and they're saying something seemingly insane, what you're probably hearing is step Z in their thought process, but for it to make sense you have to hear the preceding chain of thoughts A..Y that led to that. Not to say their theory is right, it probably is loony, but since they probably haven't gotten anyone to critique their A..Y coherently, when they get called a crackpot they probably rightly assume that nobody quite understand what they're getting at.
  • Iarivu 11y ago
    Outstanding. Clarification
  • codewritinfool 11y ago
    Lol murdering cats. Great explanation!
  • LiweiZ 11y ago
    Context matters;)
• blueprint 11y ago
  Intelligence is different from wisdom is different from knowledge. Wisdom is the eyesight (degree of visual acuity) of a consciousness. Your knowledge is what you've heard and experienced and accepted through your individual consciousness. The issue is that knowledge can be right or wrong – because people hear what they want to hear, generally speaking, and are not aware of the difference between their thought and the reality. Plus, people understand the same things in different ways, when they do not have sufficient wisdom to see the thing itself. The problem is that some conspiracy theories end up being completely true. Others do not. My question to you is, given that 'theories' are commonly defined as things still unproven, by what criteria do you distinguish a wacky conspiracy theory from one that seems plausible?
  • 746F7475 11y ago
    In my opinnion the flaw in your question is that 'all' conspiracy theories are wacky or can be made wacky by the believers. At that point all you can do is weight the evidence for and against and come to your own conclusion, but at the end of the day the conspiracy theorists have the burden of proof.
• marincounty 11y ago
  I have seen this phenomenon a few times. I think because they got so much positive reinforcement early on; they feel at ease spouting off their wacky theories? After all, they are geniuses. They are allowed to say what ever comes to mind, but only later in life? After they carved out a comfortable life? I've seen the same behavior in way too many wealthy individuals. Just because they are filthy rich; they can spout off whatever comes to mind, and we give them a get out of jail card because we assume intelligence equates with wealth. Trump comes to mind. I don't know much about Balmer. I just saw a huge, out of shape guy, playing cheerleader for Gates. Sorry--it's just what I saw on the tube. It was obvious Apple, and open source was going to trounce Microsoft. I do think Balmer saw the fall of Microsoft comming--maybe before Gates? Hell--I'm being modest--we all hated Microsoft. He did his best at milking a sinking ship. That is genius, but wouldn't a simpleton do the same? I have met very few geniuses who were wealthy. The extremely smart individuals, I have known, or watched, did not become very wealthy. Their intelligence seemed to hold them back in too many situations, or maybe they had a higher level of integrity? That integrity that needs to be broken/desimated in too many business situations? That integrity that need to be twisted when becoming very wealthy? What really bothers me most is way too many of the best students/best minds had nervous breakdowns. I have seen too many great people just crack? I wish we would stop calling these guys geniuses just because they are wealthy in business. It's getting old. Now the guy who can carve out a comfortable life, not steal, not take advantage of the weak, has a few people who truly love them, add a few original ideas to this thing we call life; that smart?
• rpgmaker 11y ago
  I don't think "stupid" is the right word to describe Ballmer. Maybe unsophisticated but not stupid.