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Comment by danielmarkbruce | Hacker News Reader

Jim Simons has about 250 iq points. He may seem like a normal(ish) person, but he ain't. I'm not sure that anyone should ever assume they'll figure anything out the way he did.

And, he had lots of experience with math - he was insanely great at it. And then he took it and applied it.

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At one point the ancient Greek philosopher Thales took his (at the time extremely arcane) knowledge of weather patterns and managed to leverage that into great wealth by predicting the olive crops. Allegedly, he did this in response to a heckler who had asked why, if Thales was an intelligent famous philosopher, he had yet to attain wealth.

Thales was an all around great philosopher though, known to be one of the "seven sages" of ancient Athens. Amongst other feats, he managed to measure the height of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh when nobody else at the time could.

More importantly he learned how to manage genius. At his fund it’s not one or two people who are “the man”, each and every one of them are “the man”. This is what makes their outperformance so consistent. It’s incredibly hard to manage one genius in a room full of people across the IQ bell curve, let alone when all the employees (partners?) are in the 98th percentile..

Yup for sure. Nobody likes being managed by a relative fool, so you have about 10 people on planet earth who could have done the job. I'd guess it is waaaaay further out than 98th percentile though...

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