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Comment by NateEag | Hacker News Reader

I suggest you read the articles linked in the posted link, and also this story by Steven Levy:

https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of...

Threatening to kill yourself if someone won't go out with you is terrible behavior at a bunch of levels: https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... (search for "When I was a teen freshman").

It's clear that Stallman was not just "trying to joke around and be charming".

Even if that were his actual intent, acceptable intent does not justify bad behavior.

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"The fall of the clueless nerd" indeed. The headline in the wired story linked triggers the hell out of me. I suppose we have come full circle, Nerds suck, then they were cool and now they have been consigned back to uncool again. For the life of me, based on the snippets i've seen regarding his interactions with women, the only advice I can give him and ppl like him if they could have a do-over is stay away from women period. Which causes other problems but I will gladly have those problems than have an icon of an industry/space that I love be exiled in such an ignominious fashion.

> the only advice I can give him and ppl like him if they could have a do-over is stay away from women period

Stallman could have been a quirky, uncompromising, and passionate personality and still treat women like equals. Being a "genius" is not a good (or even sensical) excuse to treat people poorly. If anything, it shows you're not really a genius after all.

> If anything, it shows you're not really a genius after all.

Plenty of geniuses have not treated people well. Newton was a complete asshole. Even Einstein, who was a staunch defender of civil liberties at a time when most of his peers weren't, wrote some rather unpleasant things about the Chinese in his personal journal.

I agree completely that being a genius is no excuse for treating people poorly. But unfortunately history is littered with such people.

> Plenty of geniuses have not treated people well. Newton was a complete asshole. Even Einstein ... wrote some rather unpleasant things about the Chinese in his personal journal. ... being a genius is no excuse for treating people poorly. But unfortunately history is littered with such people.

I suspect that many of these "geniuses" only became difficult personalities after they recieved recognition and had a taste for power. Power corrupts, it allows people to do things without regarding people that may be affected by their actions.

I don't think there's just a simple correlation between people deemed geniuses and them having difficult personalities. Rather, I suspect there's a causal effect between being granted the "genius" title and abusing the accompanying power that leads to a difficult personality.

Whenever something like this happens some sort of accusation around this sort of behaviour always seems to emerge, I really have to question the validity of such claims

I guess it wouldn't occur to you that the claims are valid, hence the reason they keep cropping up...

I considered that and dismissed it because it's frequently been proven that these accusations have had no merit.

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