If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot

I might just be lucky, but I've had the opposite experiences in my corner of academia. Most jerks turn out to be at best moderately skilled in a narrow technical area of competence, while most brilliant people are quite pleasant and even humble.

Most of the dismissive/arrogant people I've met at conferences tend to be moderately intelligent junior professors with a chip on their shoulder. Meanwhile, the genuinely brilliant and famous folks are enjoyable to talk to; three of the nicest people I've met at a conference are probably three of the most famous (Robert Moog, Craig Reynolds, and Espen Aarseth).

Some could be the particular social dynamics of this area, e.g. junior professors are still trying to climb a career ladder and feel they need to network at conferences with important people, while already-established people are happy to talk to grad students. (And of course there are exceptions.)

The Halo effect is a well-known cognitive bias that almost everyone applies instinctively to some degree. You can try to avoid it, but chances are that you'll automatically rate someone who comes to your attention in a positive way (by writing great code, by being a pleasant conversationalist, or simply beautiful) as generally more competent and even morally superior to some degree.

I agree with you rationally, but I do see why people would do otherwise. To an extent I did so myself, and I'm abnormally rational.

I think it's because people see things that they consider 'good causes' (be it open source software or doing medical work in refugee camps in Africa) through rose-colored glasses. I guess that sounds like stating the obvious, but it's not until one does these things for long enough that one is really confronted with the realities and gets a more 'fundamental' understanding of these dynamics than just rationally 'knowing' but not internalizing it.

The reverse also applies. I have seen the sentiment that great hackers are antisocial, great artists are assholes etc. This is of course not (aways) true either.

If I understand you correctly, you think greater skills to some extend correlates with not beeing nice. This is not my experience. For some personalities skill leads to confidence, for others to arrogance.

There are common cases where the moral, ethical, and role model paradigms do, in fact, all apply because of what those persons represent (e.g. teachers and peace officers). Ethics of course has a much broader application as a fundamental part of what it means to be a skilled practitioner (e.g. the in fields of law, healthcare, finance, and civil service). Even in normal business transactions ethics and morals plays an important part in coloring our opinions from how we feel about Nintendo's right to brick one's hardware to our willingness to hire a crackhead as a janitor.

Because you usually think you have come to your "moral, ethical paradigm" by reason, therefore you expect intelligent people to share the same paradigm. We also usually take technical skills as a symptom of intelligence.

Like professional athletes, celebrities or politicians.

Interesting. By similar reasoning, getting most of your calories from fat would lead to the same result. That may be less troublesome than fasting.

the guy he was referring to: http://sam.ai.ki/cancer-2.html

Wrong thread?

Anti-angiogenesis drugs and supplements also show promise in shutting down cancer cells.

Sorry, perhaps it didn't quite work. Too subtle?

I was trying to combine the insinuations that we are generally too ready to call each other names and that all our judgements are relative.

Gun nut eh. I say, the right tool for the right job. I use a chain saw to cut fallen trees into logs. Therefore I am a chain saw nut.

Incidentally, the author of that article may or may not be guilty of crimes in Sweden.

This is how a programmer I deeply respect described her more aggressive years. (Piss and vinegar)

She attributed the same notion to a young programmer I hope will be able to make an impact on other coders.

Sounds like it might (piss and vinegar) might contribute to people hackin' stuff out that hadn't been tackled before.

I got pissed at Emacs the other day and solved a problem that had been bugging me, for example.

That's funny: exactly what I thought. The general shoddiness of BIOSes are the reason why I always have kept interest in http://www.coreboot.org/ (formerly known as LinuxBIOS), but I have yet to acquire a compatible motherboard.

Oh how my hopes rested on Reiser4...

In my experience, socialists make great bread.

That's why intelligent people deceive by their actions. See Operation Fortitude for an example.

Actually, nutjobs tend to be quite passionate people when you think of it.