[hga]

"... difficult" was my trying to be minimally polite, I'm quite sure from even our short interactions over the last few days that there's at least an order of magnitude difference. E.g. his baseline does not include "pretty laid back, inclined to go along, to get along".

More like "Do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, without regards for consequences, including lethal harm to bystanders." The latter lost him more than a few friends/acquaintances.

Which biography would you be referring to?

[Mz]

I don't recall which biography off the top of my head. I kind of am under the weather this weekend, so the brain is not in gear.

Sorry, I don't mean to dismiss your observation that he is difficult. But I see it as more complicated than "he is just difficult."

My oldest son is genuinely difficult, but I get along well with him. One of the reasons I get along well with him is that I recognize that his IQ is higher than mine, so unless I have a specific objection, I have a tendency to go along with what he wants because it tends to get better results, even though my default personality is risk averse and his default personality is risk seeking, so he really makes me crazy at times. I have long experience with dealing with difficult people and doing so in a manner that makes them easier to deal with rather than making them more intractable. Most of the time, difficult people are dealt with in a manner that causes them to dig in their heels.

So while I don't doubt that Stallman can be genuinely difficult, I also don't doubt that the degree to which he has been given crap while being repeatedly proven correct most likely only makes his bad habits intractable when they didn't necessarily have to become so. My son gets real respect from me on things where he is more knowledgeable than I am and he gives me real respect and defers to me on subjects where my knowledge is superior. If I just crapped on him all the time, there would not be a two way street of respect.

It gets really difficult to put a stop to a negative social dynamic once it gets going. At this point, it is probably impossible to break rms of his bad habits because, from his perspective, it probably never seems to matter if he is right, if he is polite, etc. It does bad things to someone's personality to be consistently right and get no respect because people do not like what you are saying. I have had a taste of that, so I have sympathy for his side.

I'm sorry that probably makes no sense to you.

[hga]

Part of the problem is that RMS is an all or nothing proposition. Look at some of the major things he rails at, like closed source and DRM. He's got lots of company (and it's near universal when it comes to DRM), but if you don't buy into his "copyleft is more important than software quality or uptake in the real world" approach, you're not just wrong, you're evil. GCC, one of the two biggest crown jewels of the GNU project, is in dire straits and being replaced by the non-copyleft LLVM, not so much because of the different licenses, but because of his totally inflexible ideological stewardship that is not allowing GCC to do some things that are now expected of compilers but that would make it easier for Software Horders to use GCC in ways anathema to him. (As a steward of software development projects, he's really, really, REALLY bad, large parts of which are due to those "bad habits" discussed below.)

Your eldest son may be a risk taker, but does that go so far as (truly futilely) hitting on a gangster's moll while eating with a group of innocents who didn't sign up for that level of danger when they went for a normally routine run to the favorite late night Cantonese restaurant?

As for his "intractable" "bad habits", they were set in stone long before GNU/FSF, and as for respect ... hmmm, I don't know, he's weird about that. But not very flexible (I'm not the best person judge all that, seeing as how you grant me a degree of respect or else, and he did that).

[Mz]

Stallman sounds really socially clueless. My son doesn't hit on gangster's molls, in part because he identifies as asexual so he doesn't hit on anyone. He was born really socially deficient and still gets reactions like people would like to strip search him for using his debit card to pay for pizza in the presence of his mother.

My son probably qualifies as ASD, though he has no formal diagnosis.

I am sure I wouldn't want to be within 30 feet of Stallman. I did not watch the video of him eating something off his foot, but I have a compromised immune system. For me, cleanliness is extremely important and I will end relationships over people being unable to abide by my (necessary) standards of cleanliness.

There is probably little point in me trying to convince you of my view of how social dynamics work. Perhaps we should leave this for now.

:-)

[hga]

Heh. I have no trouble with your view of social dynamics, I just don't see its relevance WRT to RMS, and that's probably why you think you're not getting that part of your message across.

You can safely assume it's accepted and that I'd be happy to, e.g., share a meal with you at a restaurant with high levels of cleanliness (assuming they even exist, or do you e.g. depend on cuisines where they do a good enough job of killing the food dead?).

[Mz]

Oh, well, I see it as relevant because I was briefly Director of Community Life for The TAG Project while homeschooling my profoundly gifted sons. I have no official recognition anywhere of my expertise in the social and emotional challenges of gifted individuals, but I have reason to suspect that I understand the unfortunate interplay between group dynamics and the problems of highly gifted individuals far better than average. So, to me, Stallman's difficult personality traits are well established as a side effect of being genuinely smarter than most people around you and routinely crapped on because of it. Plus, traits like OCD, ASD, and ADHD are so commonly associated with high IQ that some people refer to them as "co-morbidities" for lack of a better term.

I think the social problems typical of high IQ can be significantly ameliorated, but my private parenting blog only has two subscribers and life has gotten in the way of me updating it this past month. So my views are unlikely to start changing things anytime soon, if ever.

Best.

[hga]

Ah, I see what you're saying, and, yeah, there are most assuredly pathologies that crop up the "profoundly gifted".

And, yeah, I have no idea what things were socially for him before he attended Harvard, and that can be an ... unusual place for the really intelligent, very possibly one reason he gravitated to MIT, although MIT being one of the world's top 4 CS schools, and the world's #1 engineering school, and Harvard being ... not so good in those two areas is almost certainly a bigger part. I only know of RMS as of when he showed up to MIT ... and there, he was an outlier amongst a whole bunch of outliers. But no apparent co-morbidities (is high intelligence a morbidity? I sometimes wonder :-) besides perhaps ASD, which really wasn't a "thing" back then and which I have essentially no knowledge of.

But certainly his fairly fixed by then personality is consistent with your hypothesis. He certainly fits into the Sigma category in this fascinating socio-sexual hierarchy essay: http://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2011/03/socio-sexual-hiera... and you don't get there without ... well, as the essay mentions at the end, "Sigmas usually acquired their outsider status the hard way; one seldom becomes immune to the social hierarchy by virtue of mass popularity in one's childhood."