There is no way that men like Da Vinci and Newton were easy to be around, they were so beyond the norm in intelligence that they probably came off as abrasive and severely arrogant.
I think Newton was, especially to women. But Da Vinci strikes me as much more cordial and eager to fit into higher society, at least in his younger years.
I’ve read some of Newton’s letters while doing research at the Royal Society archives. He definitely comes off as severely deficient in social skills just from the random sampling I looked at - I think one was complaining about his land lady offering him food. Granted, it’s impossible to know many things “for sure” in history but “Newton had a difficult personality” is a pretty good bet, based on those letters and the bios I’ve read.
Another fun fact from the letters - Newton invited the con artist George Psalmanazar over for lunch at some point circa 1703. Psalmanazar claimed to be a Taiwanese prince but had long blonde hair and a faint French accent. Unclear if Newton was taken in, but Halley was able to stump him with an astronomy-based question. Sounds like something from the Baroque Cycle but it all really happened.
Yeah, he asked him if there was ever a time of year when the sun shone directly down Taiwanese chimneys. Psalmanazar said no, not realizing that Taiwan was on the tropic of cancer. He attempted to recover from his mistake by saying that chimneys in Taiwan were Z-shaped.
Actions. Newton’s actions depict a miserable prick, Jobs’ an intelligent sociopath, etc. Jobs died because he thought he was smarter than medicine when it came to beating cancer; hardly the first self-destructive and impulsive action in his record. Newton probed his own eyeball, tried to erase Hooke from history, etc.
Unless you're a doctor who treated Jobs, I doubt we can make any claim about whether his choices killed him or not.
Let's not forget that Jobs underwent a surgery to remove the first round of cancer, and then ended up getting a liver transplant (probably because his pancreatic cancer has metastised into this organ as well). Because of the immunosuppressive medication one has to take for the rest of one's life after a transplant, recurring cancer is extremely dangerous because the cancer can grow unbounded.
I don't really see how surgery and a transplant align with "smarter than medicine."
You can never know for sure but with enough data points you can draw some conclusions. For example, it seems Wozniak was/is a very nice guy where Jobs was a more difficult guy to say the least.
I have grown up surrounded by two people with extraordinarily high IQs, and they were normal people. They have more curiosity than normal people, and they have lots of interests that span many, many subjects, but for all intents and purposes they are normal in manner and demeanor.
This fashion for conflating intelligence (of all kinds) and egotism is utterly beyond me.
Agreed. If you're really smart and a prick, well, then you're just a really smart prick. Intelligence and emotional mastery are divorced from one another.
Intelligence and creativity are also divorced from one another. Unlike Newton, da Vinci, Einstein, most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense. Their creativity is rather directed towards fitting in more effectively and being more social than the norm. Which in extreme cases looks like multiple personality disorder, i.e. changing one's responses according to context, the opposite of integrity, including the intellectual integrity required to create new stuff.
> most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense
I would beg to differ. Most of the people I know of high intelligence seem to be a jack-of-all-trades, with almost all of them having, if not a heavy love of language, a decent dollop of it.
Ultimately, there is art and creativity in everything, you just need to know where to find it. The type of creativity that creates a stunning artistic composition is the same sort of creativity that creates a masterful Rube-Goldberg system, and the same sort of creativity that creates complex formulas to describe and generalize real life occurrences. Your brain knows the constraints, sub-patterns, and has an array of tools that allow it to intuitively define the form, and you go through processes to fit it.
What I mean is that intelligence and creativity are independent of each other and since most people don't make significant contributions to culture then neither do most intelligent people.
Outright dismissing quantum mechanics because of a personal belief in an linearly causal universe is not really what one would call humble. He's full of rather snarky quotes to express such dismissal ranging from "God does not play dice with the universe." to describing quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance." Interestingly, the sarcasm of the latter has been lost in modern context and the former mostly used as an false indicator of religion from Einstein.
I think Einstein's perceived humility was mostly a consequence of the fact that he was mostly right on everything he said, and people quickly acknowledged as much. Relativity overtook aether theory shockingly quickly for instance. There's the old quote that science progresses one funeral at a time. The meaning there being that people tend to obstinately hold onto past beliefs, so it is frequent that it takes the passing of one generation for progress to be effectively made by another. One of his only views that was not widely accepted was that of his view of quantum mechanics - and that's where his snidery started to emerge. But in other cases having your revolutionary ideas rapidly and universally adopted is going to make it rather easier to speak softly knowing your big stick is certainly up to task. And that's probably one too many quotes for a single post...
You're being unfair to the poor guy. It's not as if those quotations are without context and basis. It's also not as if he doesn't have a whole raft of other recorded quotations which provide evidence for his humility. Consider, for example,
> A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...
The dice quote makes more sense when you consider Einstein's personal philosophy, which had led him to discover relativity and aspects of QM. He strongly believed that once you uncover nature's secrets, not only do you understand the universe more, but you see why nothing else could possibly have been the case. Quantum mechanics as it was formulated/interpreted in his time violated this principle, thus he was motivated to look for the deeper secret. We're still arguing whether there's something deeper to this day. The particular type of model Einstein was exploring may have been dismissed, but you cannot fault his motivation - all physicists need one.
While I admire him and read his writings with a lot of interest, I have got to admit : it sounds like he was a complete prick to absolutely all the women in his life.
