[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."