This guy is clever but his arrogance alienates him strongly. So he ends up being brushed off by other clever guys...
High IQ individuals tend to come across as arrogant, because invariably they must push against the inertia if they want to "do the right thing".
Tell me if Eric Raymond doesn't sound arrogant here in
Ego is for little people.
I’m not speaking abstractly here. I’ve always been more interested in doing the right thing than doing what would make me popular, to the point where I generally figure that if I’m not routinely pissing off a sizable minority of people I should be pushing harder.
I’m going to use myself as an example now, mainly because I don’t know anyone else’s story well enough to make the point I want to with it. I’m the crippled kid who became a black-belt martial artist and teacher of martial artists. I’ve made the New York Times bestseller list as a writer. You can hardly use a browser, a cellphone, or a game console without relying on my code. I’ve been a session musician on two records. I’ve blown up the software industry once, reinvented the hacker culture twice, and am without doubt one of the dozen most famous geeks alive. Investment bankers pay me $300 an hour to yak at them because I have a track record as a shrewd business analyst. I don’t even have a BS, yet there’s been an entire academic cottage industry devoted to writing exegeses of my work. I could do nothing but speaking tours for the rest of my life and still be overbooked. Earnest people have struggled their whole lives to change the world less than I routinely do when I’m not even really trying. Here’s the point: In what way would it make sense for me to be in ego or status competition with anybody?
I envy his writing skills. Also you will not find him arguing in blogs other than his own, where he has absolute authority to censor. Wise, but less adventurous. I am more adventurous.
Btw, I am quite nice and popular when I am not pushing to "do the right thing" or debating technical issues. Unfortunately it is
painstakingly tedious tsuris to be perceived as nice and also do the right thing, because a fact of the bell curve of IQ is the MAJORITY IS ALWAYS WRONG (as a groupthink,
individual diversity is very important though).
Any way, I will remove myself from the landscape. I don't want eyes on me. I don't want to be famous or a personality here. I was just trying to "do the right thing" in terms of creating some awareness of the need to fix Bitcoin, as I perceive it.
P.S. Long ago I tried to start some discussion on topics in a nice way in bitcointalk. And what invariably happens is I was attacked and belittled by the gatekeepers of Bitcoin and others were too ignorant of the issues to perceive that the gatekeepers were fooling them. So the only way to really accomplish "the right thing" was to attack more cleverly than they could. In order to penetrate the groupthink and reach the individuals here.
I am sure I also did not do this perfectly. I surely dropped my bad mood on others needlessly at times too. It is a tough job to take all these stones thrown, sometimes I get pissed off too.
