Some people are astonishingly intelligent

[XmisterIS]

I was watching an interview with Mark Zuckerberg the other day, he was the guy who founded facebook. He comes across as being unbelievably intelligent.

He was describing how he started and he said his flatmate (roommate?) wanted to help him but knew nothing about programming computers. Zilch. Nada. Nix. Zero. So on the Friday evening, MZ gave him a book to read, which myself possess - "Beginning Perl", by Wrox Press. It is fully 647 pages in length and is pretty dense too.

Anyway, bearing in mind that the guy had never ever programmed anything in his entire life and knew nothing whatsoever about programming, he read the book from cover to cover in a weekend! That's not all. He then gave it back to MZ saying, "yeah, I get that", and, "doesn't seem all that complicated, anyway there were a few mistakes in there". He then began writing high-quality Perl, right from the word go on the Monday, having never even programmed anything in his entire life before!! He didn't even have to work through any of the examples or exercises, he just did them all in his head!!!

Now that feat wouldn't be all that surprising for someone who had spent years writing code - I picked up Python and wxPython in a day, but then I've written a lot of commercial code in my time. This guy went from zero to expert in two days flat. He simply sat down and memorised the entire book and understood it too, and corrected the author's mistakes, on the fly, in his head.

You've got to be yanking my chain! Pulling my fat one! Having a slight jape!

I quite simply sat there, listening, with my mouth hanging open ...

 

[Fnaar]

Knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one... keep going till you have a scarf. Or something.

 

[Red Light]

I was watching an interview with Mark Zuckerberg the other day, he was the guy who founded facebook. He comes across as being unbelievably intelligent.

He was describing how he started and he said his flatmate (roommate?) wanted to help him but knew nothing about programming computers. Zilch. Nada. Nix. Zero. So on the Friday evening, MZ gave him a book to read, which myself possess - "Beginning Perl", by Wrox Press. It is fully 647 pages in length and is pretty dense too.

Anyway, bearing in mind that the guy had never ever programmed anything in his entire life and knew nothing whatsoever about programming, he read the book from cover to cover in a weekend! That's not all. He then gave it back to MZ saying, "yeah, I get that", and, "doesn't seem all that complicated, anyway there were a few mistakes in there". He then began writing high-quality Perl, right from the word go on the Monday, having never even programmed anything in his entire life before!! He didn't even have to work through any of the examples or exercises, he just did them all in his head!!!

Now that feat wouldn't be all that surprising for someone who had spent years writing code - I picked up Python and wxPython in a day, but then I've written a lot of commercial code in my time. This guy went from zero to expert in two days flat. He simply sat down and memorised the entire book and understood it too, and corrected the author's mistakes, on the fly, in his head.

You've got to be yanking my chain! Pulling my fat one! Having a slight jape!

I quite simply sat there, listening, with my mouth hanging open ...

Well they are at Harvard which is one of the top universities in the world so if they are not that smart I would worry about their entrance criteria.

 

[albion]

Knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one... keep going till you have a scarf. Or something.

Yep. That sums it up.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Don't know about Perl. If he could read Bjarne Stroustrup's manual on C++ in a weekend and understand it, I'd be impressed.

 

[XmisterIS]

Well they are at Harvard which is one of the top universities in the world so if they are not that smart I would worry about their entrance criteria.

Yebbut .. there's clever and then there's unbelievable! Perl, in and of itself isn't that complicated, but the book in question goes into heuristics in depth and also goes into all the ins and outs of running a web server, etc. The guy simply devoured in two days what most people (even clever ones) would take at least a few months to learn competently (from a standing start). I imagine that he has a photographic memory combined with a very high IQ. That's a particularly rare combination.

I suppose my point is that you see all sorts of comments on the 'net about how Zuckerberg just "got lucky". He didn't. He has the incredibly rare combination of very high academic intelligence and very high social intelligence. People like that come along once in a blue moon. It's great to see that he's made excellent use of his talents.

 

[Bobtoo]

He's not that good at programming. Facebook is, and always has been, unbelievably clunky, resource hungry and unstable.

 

[Red Light]

I suppose my point is that you see all sorts of comments on the 'net about how Zuckerberg just "got lucky". He didn't. He has the incredibly rare combination of very high academic intelligence and very high social intelligence.

From what I've seen of him he actually has low social intelligence. The Social Network crassly made fun of it but he appears to me to be borderline autistic and I'm not alone in that view.

 

[ASC1951]

Well they are at Harvard which is one of the top universities in the world so if they are not that smart I would worry about their entrance criteria.

George Walker Bush? Yale then Harvard Business School.

 

[XmisterIS]

He's not that good at programming. Facebook is, and always has been, unbelievably clunky, resource hungry and unstable.

A bit like Windows then ...

From what I've seen of him he actually has low social intelligence. The Social Network crassly made fun of it but he appears to me to be borderline autistic and I'm not alone in that view.

I'm not so sure - he clearly knows very well what people want and how to give it to them.

 

[Beebo]

Mozart could write classical music at 5, Constable could paint masterpeices, some people can speak 20 languages, others can decipher detailed legal text with ease.

I will never do any of those things because my brain is not programmed that way.

It is a sobering day when you realsie you have reached your natural limits. You have to accept what you have and make the best of it. The real shame is peole with natural gifts who waste them.

 

[User482]

The depressing thing is, that instead of doing something useful with their talents, they invented a tedious exercise in narcissism.

 

[MissTillyFlop]

From what I've seen of him he actually has low social intelligence. The Social Network crassly made fun of it but he appears to me to be borderline autistic and I'm not alone in that view.

I think I'd rather be a billionaire and socially incapable than the impoverished social butterfly that I am.

I can't look at people like Mark Zuckerberg or Winston Churchill. Their achievements make me feel suicidal, frankly.

 

[XmisterIS]

I think I'd rather be a billionaire and socially incapable than the impoverished social butterfly that I am.

Too much yakkin' and not enough graftin'?

 

[MissTillyFlop]

Too much yakkin' and not enough graftin'?

I work, but I just don't have a business bone in my entire body! It upsets me because I can't even imagine how a
Person even thinks of these things.