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Comment by blackrock | Hacker News Reader

Ballmer was actually insightful and philosophical, when he isn’t throwing chairs around?

Having a temper doesn't prevent one from being intelligent. Gates and Jobs had famously bad tempers too.

Was Jobs really that smart? Not sure that's the niche he filled successfully. More like Kinski, talented in some domain... but smart?! Jobs died pretty much by Dunning-Kruger effect, no?

People can be very intelligent on one area, and not as much in others.

There are many scientists who have very high standards for proof and evidence in their professional life, but accept other theories as truth without a shred of evidence in their personal lives.

Sure, but I think it's also easy to conflate success and talent with intelligence. I think many successful scientist are not particularly smart, but rather dilligent and educated; most innovation is not a leap, but a steady incremental progress which may accumulate in a "innovative" product at some point.

I don't know much about Jobs, that's why I asked. From what I got, he was rather a charismatic leader with a good intuition, but I wouldn't call those attributes intelligence per se. Is there any evidence for a particular intelligence of his?

What exactly do you consider an evidence of intelligence?

Idk. But surely, you can't make your point without it, do you? I think success and fame is not an appropriate proxy.

So what is? If the visionary genius of Steve Jobs doesn't qualify for intelligence, what does?

I think this might have been one of those infinite monkeys moments.

To be fair, this was nearly universally know for decades by the time he became CEO of MS.

He is just not old enough for working in a time this was new.

Wasn't he the leading advocate of stack ranking at Microsoft, though? That's not particularly insightful or philosophical, it's just lazy management.

It's almost like humans are complex creatures...

He backed the HR lead personally; I think it was their thing.

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