Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me. Contrast with Roger Penrose and you couldn't meet a more humble, interesting and interested conversationalist
> Somehow people who are most convinced of their genius are the least interesting to me.
I know some people who are great in their area of research, but are, to put it very midly, not the most humble persons (to give an example of one such person (a great research): "the people who could learn a whole lot from me are all tenured professors in my area of research"; just to be clear: his judgement is right :-) ).
In my experience, great researchers who are full of themselves nearly always had to work/fight very hard for where they are now, and are thus very bitter about worse researchers who have it easier.
Murray Gell-Mann said exactly this. He basically got tired of working with him because everything about his personality was to generate stories and mythologies about himself.
To me, this whole idea shows what a fool the average man is.
As if we all know so much about Richard Feynman compared to Murray Gell-Mann because of what a great scientist Richard Feynman was. When OBVIOUSLY, the reason is because of the degree Feynman self promoted himself compared to
other scientists.
Yeah, very obviously a highly intelligent man but it's immediately obvious that he was very carefully crafting how he wanted to be perceived by others in several of his self aggrandizing memoirs.
or Penrose's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...