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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Newton was an asshole too. The whole "apple fell on his head" story came about because he was so mean to people.

I won't say that most geniuses are inempathetic, but many are. Einstein wasn't, some say Gauss was. Beethoven was. Linus is. And we'll accept Linus's attitude for being an aversion to bullshit, just the quality that we need in a kernel maintainer.

I'm glad to see that Linus finally realizes that he has a problem, but truth be told I'd selfishly rather that he keep his problem because I doubt that he could steer his ship without it. I hope to be proven wrong.

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Thinking that Newton's success is caused or strongly correlated to him being an asshole seems to be begging the question. Why can't we just as well argue his achievements were intrinsically linked to his fanatical religious belief? After all, we can at least quantify the latter -- it's said that at least half of his writing was on religious subjects.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newto...

[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/05/newton-papers-q-and-a/

The discovery of gravity specifically was the result of Newton looking for a way to manipulate distant objects without physically touching them.

Einstein's letters to Mileva make me feel that maybe empathy wasn't his strong suit, either.

That is correct. He was a colossal asshole to her. He only played an empathetic scientist/statesman on TV.

Those letters long predate TV. People are complicated. Lumping a person together into a scalar judgment is too simple.

Newton was an asshole in an era when men being assholes was, in essence, acceptable. There is no evidence that being an asshole is a requirement for being a successful innovator or leader.

It takes effort to be not be an asshole because you have to expend energy to model and simulate the feelings of others outside of you. That's an objective fact. Being a genius may require not expending such energy.

Of course there are other geniuses that find things easy and they behave very nicely, but then they may not be reaching their "true" potential, heh.

It's really quite surprising how much energy/effort can be required to wind back that lizard brain in all of us when we're particularly agitated.

It's really hard to respond effectively when someone is doing the WRONG thing or they completely misunderstand your stance & modus operandi.

It takes a lot of effort to mentally model the other parties in the conversation and generate the empathetic response that hopefully is interpreted by the others in exactly the way you intended, so that everyone is back on the same page. An impossible endeavour.

Yes, the assholishness probably comes from the same place as the drive that makes things happen. However, Linus isn't a lone scientist, he's a leader, so exercising more self control will make him more effective. He isn't going to lose his drive, he's just going to discipline his expression of emotions. He does seem to grok this so I'm not worried.

> just the quality that we need in a kernel maintainer.

I disagree this is the case. "This is how it's been done" is a terrible excuse for anything. This attempt at protection of the status quo is wrong because almost without exception the status quo is sub optimal.

> because I doubt that he could steer his ship without it

There is no reason to believe this.

Are we seriously putting Linus in the same category as Newton

Its an analogy, not a classification. If you want to go by that logic then no one can be in the same category as Newton as he was the ultimate genius who revoutioned maths and physics singlehandedly.

I mean Galileo arguably did more, he just doesn't get as much credit for being smart because his discoveries aren't at all difficult to understand.

Euler, Al-Khawarzmi, Gauss, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, von Neumann, Fourier, Laplace, Aristotle, Ampere, Descartes, Kepler, etc.

Linus does not fit in that list.

Why not?

He's not really a scientist - at least one as theory heavy as the names above.

However, his work with linux and git is at least comparable to that of other big scientific names known more for their engineering impact - like Van Leeuwenhoek. I'd also say the impact of Linus is greater, in part because of his insistence on making Linux GPL early on, rather than the secretive approach taken by someone like Van Leeuwenhoek.

I'm not sure that the comparison is completely invalid. Linus, via Linux has IMHO had a fairly profound impact on the world.

Newton was much more humble. Shoulders of giants and all.

Newton wasn't so humble! He said that, but only as part of a deliberate insult to one of his rivals, who was short.

At least he was capable of clever insults.

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