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Comment by tqi | Hacker News Reader

The idea that IQ and EQ are negatively correlated is dubious at best.

I would venture a guess that the vast majority of "Weird Nerds" are not Katalin Karikós, and instead are simply difficult jerks who are not nearly as smart as they think they are. Hubris mixed with obstinance is a recipe for misanthropy.

Also, the notion that the internet is a place where your outputs are judged solely on their merits, so that you don't have the "ability to sell yourself and your work", is absolutely hysterical.

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Your last paragraph is interesting. When I think back about at Perl, Python, and Ruby, all of them have/had charismatic leaders -- Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, and Yukihiro Matsumoto. This would help to explain part of the success of their programming languages. My guess: All three of them have high IQ and EQ. To be clear: I don't write this post to take anything away from the incredible accomplishments of those people. Rather, I am trying to say that having a good personality (and probably higher EQ) only helped their cause.

I would even argue that Linus Torvalds's famous abrasiveness is its own kind of charisma, well adapted to its target audience.

Oh, absolutely. Linux kernel hacking is a _dojo_ at least as much as it is a service to one's fellow man. You don't want to go to the gym with a bunch of wimps who are cheating on their curls, and you don't want to hack on the kennel all day when 90% of the people around you are more interesting in talking around the thing than in actually improving it, and improving their own skills in the process.

Linus's approach is very good at setting this precedent, while staying really quite friendly, and it's what attracts a lot of people to the endeavor.

I think what this article misses is that for most real-world problems, there is a) not an objectively "right" or "best" solution (just varying degrees of partial solutions that are imperfect in different ways), and b) there are reasons to coalesce around a single solution. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me that individuals who are able to be "the most socially adept and organized manager" could rally a community around their solution.

> The idea that IQ and EQ are negatively correlated is dubious at best.

How about: IQ and EQ are mostly fixed in any given individual. You can use one to simulate the other - e.g. using EQ to get help or bullshit your way through a problem your IQ is insufficient for, or using IQ to intentionally behave in a way that would be totally natural if you had higher EQ. So it's not that they're negatively correlated per se, just that if you're being pressured past your limit in one, the other will effectively drop.

I find it dubious to make this comparison in an article which does not talk about EQ, but about ability (willingness?) to play company politics. I'd wager that one is *at most* slightly correlated with EQ.

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