[placebo]

Not directly related to the article, but going through the comments, I felt the vibes and wanted to express my theory about what it is that irritates many of the commenters here

The highest pursuit is the search for truth. This includes the challenging act of discarding things that we'd really like to be true, but are false. The success of science can be attributed to extreme selfless intellectual honesty. The more ego gets in the way, the more the truth is compromised. Intelligence can be used in service of finding truth or in feeding our delusions. My view on the distinctions made here between genius and madness are that they correspond to the degree in which intelligence serves truth or delusions. Therefore I'd expect the most outstanding scientists in history were also very humble (perhaps someone with better knowledge on the personality of great scientists can shed more light on this).

And to keep things consistent - I might be wrong and thus welcome challenges to this theory :)

[vbuwivbiu]

While I definitely agree with you that this is the general pattern in life, the thing is that people aren't always either humble or arrogant, and it is possible to see the truth while being arrogant too. Even Wolfram must have days, or hours, maybe minutes - let's say seconds - when he's humble. And sometimes he also sees the truth while being arrogant.

Therefor it's a form of arrogance to dismiss (generally) arrogant people as always wrong. We have to be selective or we might miss something important they've seen.

Wolfram is a combination of irritating ego and inspiration.

[placebo]

You are absolutely correct and I even deleted an entire section in my original post how things are never just black or white but it got too long. Thanks for bringing it up.

[regularfry]

Newton was notoriously not humble. He's not the only one.

[placebo]

Interesting, thank you - I'll do some research.