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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

I find that brilliant people come from all walks of life. It's not obvious why you would think mental aptitude would translate to healthy, gentle, or sociable personalities.

Richard Feynman is known to have a temper, and Einstein was known to be extremely callous in intimate affairs. We've also seen MIT professors display a lesser regard for lesser minds in math. We've also seen brilliant top-of-their field sportsman display great arrogance and disregard to lessers. The guy who writes "The Haskell Book" isn't known to be nice, but people still acknowledge that it's one of the top texts. Linus Torvalds isn't known to be nice.

You might not consider these people to be "geniuses", but they are certainly brilliant in some way, participating heavily in their field in some way.

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I'm sorry but you're making a massive stretch by implying the either Einstein or Feynman were known as toxic assholes by basically anyone (except maybe Einstein's wives).

And while one can of course say that someone is a genius at a sport, I meant specifically intellectually, and even more specifically I wanted to combat the notion that it is common for software engineers to be geniuses and total assholes. I just haven't seen that frequently, and in fact usually the pattern is that the engineers who are typical assholes are, correctly, the least secure in their own skills and try and mask that with needless complexity (in code, communication etc).

I guess maybe my meta point is that I think intelligence generally fights toxicity, not the opposite. I'm sure you can find counter examples as humans are complex.

There are plenty of geniuses throughout history who were asseholes but still brilliant. EQ and IQ are not highly correlated at all.

> There are plenty of geniuses throughout history who were asseholes but still brilliant.

Agreed, as I said humans are complex and I'm sure you can find exceptions. Just talking about general trends here.

> EQ and IQ are not highly correlated at all.

Assuming by EQ you mean being a nice person and intelligence are not correlated I don't agree. Tons of studies backing this up (as well as correlation with overall happiness). Here are two:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12061571

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12309/full

EQ means emotional intelligence, the ability to empathize with people effectively, allowing people to take hints via social cues when they are being annoying or otherwise engaging in asshole-like behavior.

As geniuses are already extreme outliers. For one thing, they do not typically fit in very well with their peers, often leading to seemingly anti-social behavior.

None of the articles you link directly correlate EQ to intelligence, they corrleate it to civic minded ness, and getting good grades in school. Social people do well in social environments is not surprising.

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