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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

I would say the opposite. Only gifted leaders and developers are able to keep things really simple, when working on complicated domains/problems.

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Those leaders are gifted with a lack of intelligence. People with lower IQ don't necessarily appear less intelligent. In fact they can be more charismatic and appear more intelligent.

Steve Jobs was not an intelligent person when compared to Woz. Yet Steve is often referred to as a genius. I don't think Woz could ever come up with the design ethos that Steve Jobs had around products and this is due in great part to Woz's higher level of general intelligence (IQ).

Is there some research you can point out that establishes cases where a lower IQ has been advantageous?

I don't know about anything that points to a statistical advantage. I'm sure you can find some small studies via google. Since statistical evidence is rigorous and hard to find, a good portion of the knowledge of an intelligent mind must be derived from induction and anecdotal evidence with lots of assumptions. The origins of my argument are anecdotal in nature. Statistical evidence is stronger but so hard to establish that if all my arguments are always based off of statistical evidence I would hardly have anything to argue.

Additionally statistical conclusions are already established. Hardly worth arguing about all together. It is the things that aren't backed by statistical evidence YET, that are more interesting and worth talking about.

So basically you've come up with a way to rationalize that people who write cleaner code than you are just dumber.

Other way around. I consider myself as someone who writes extremely clean code. I consider many people who write messier code than me as people who are smarter. I self depreciate my own intellectual abilities in service of rationality. I write cleaner code because I am not intelligent enough to write messy code.

Honestly, I detect a thinly veiled personal ire in your response. Perhaps the bias is with you. Perhaps you write clean code and you use it to justify your supposed intelligence. If so, you wouldn't even know it. Such is the nature of bias.

Writing "clean code" is in actuality a simple endeavor with high euphoric rewards. All you're doing when writing "clean code" is following conventions and modularizing your code. It feels good to organize your room just like it feels good to organize your code, but organizing your room is not an intellectual feat just like how writing clean code isn't either. Think about it, cleaning up your own code is really, really easy. To have it function as the pillar of your intellectual self esteem is a weakness.

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