| When the post start with appeal of authority(blog post, nonetheless) and a humble brag, the likelihood of non-thought-out content seems to be greater. Seems like most of the points are quite shallow, and I especially have trouble with his description of genius. He seems to conflate genius and elitist. >geniuses understand complex things, they design complex systems that no one understands. Their loneliness makes them unique masters of their subjects, thereby nurturing their self-esteem. Knowledge remains in their heads and their presence becomes necessary for every decision. In my experience, these are more often a pretender that comes from being the "big fish in the small pond" with self-esteem closely tied to the performance, and often nothing more than a facade to hide a underlying self-esteem problem. Almost every person I've met that have showed "genius" qualities, (and 10 years later, shows in their track record) have been incredibly humble and spend a lot of effort explaining their thoughts, solutions and products to great length. At least at one point in their life they understood that behaving like mentioned "genius" by the author, leads to nothing and is a unproductive (pseudo-intellectual) behaviour. Even in academia. So the authors point of "Professional > Genius" is not really a university issue. If anything should be something one experience in a university, through peer interactions. Maybe the top1% might go out without this insight, but sooner or later this will hit you. Not something one needs to focus in college, though. |
He probably conflates genius and "people who call themselves genius". Like, the kind of people who come introduced by someone in the management as "big experts", who insist that you rename all Java classes so that they start with "C", and all interfaces so that they end with "Intf", and after a few months when things get difficult they leave to join another project which will better appreciate their wisdom. Sorry, bad memories...