If I were smarter, what would I be doing? I had a roommate, David Carlton, in my first year at Harvard, who studied mathematics and computer science just like me, except he seemed much smarter--a strict superset, in fact. He took the silver or bronze medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad; his best friend, Jordan Ellenberg, took the gold and also won first place at the Putnam math competition. I think he graduated summa cum laude at Harvard. He was always taking more advanced classes and one or more steps ahead of me. Check out one of his posts on sci.math.research. He was a fan of Go, whereas I preferred chess; one difference is that computers can beat people at chess.
He would always look down on other classmates, who jumped into the Microsoft ship, like I did. In addition to being smart, he was very hippish. He had a beard, dressed down, walked outside on the streets in bare feet, and looked like Jesus Christ. He still looks like Jesus Christ with glasses.
I recently looked at the Internet to find out what he was up to more than ten years out of college. It looks like he did his doctoral studies at Stanford, taught at a few universities like Princeton, Berkeley and MIT, married and had a daughter. He also seems to be a Linux Junkie, writing parts of GCC, the gnu compiler, and GDB, the gnu debugger. He then worked for a startup, Kaelia, which appears to have been bought by Sun, and it seems that he is at Sun now.
It looks like if I were smarter, I would be working on open source projects and using Linux. Now, my question is, what if I were smarter and rich?
The really smart thing to do is to not want to be rich!
Posted by: Hippy | September 10, 2004 at 12:14 AM
You have to find that fine line before you get too smart and spill over that line and become crazy.
Posted by: haacked | September 10, 2004 at 09:40 AM
Jordan pointed me at this; nice to see you again. Yes, I'm at Sun via Kealia. I was working on GDB a lot (though only dabbling with GCC); these days, though, I'm working on proprietary software. Which would make me sad, except that the software is really neat and GDB development has some pretty dysfunctional aspects. (And I really love programming in C++.)
Anyways, what makes you think I'm not rich now, given that I was part of a startup that got acquired? (Oh, Sun's stock price. Right.)
Posted by: | September 10, 2004 at 10:28 AM
The world is very small. Ive been reading your blog for several months but had no idea we had a real-world connection. I grew up with David but haven’t seen him since high school.
Posted by: Nils Jonsson | September 10, 2004 at 11:04 AM
1. If your friend is smarter than you and your friend works on open source projects doesn't imply that if you were smarter than you would work on open source projects. You are working on AI-based software so you should know formal logic pretty well.
2. "Smartness" isn't exactly a scalar quantity.
3. Smart people often do stupid things.
Posted by: Low IQ Moron | September 10, 2004 at 09:19 PM
I claim "literary license" that allows me to temporarily transcend logic. Would you want me to start writing boring posts from now on.
Posted by: Wesner Moise | September 11, 2004 at 02:06 AM
You're a tool.
Posted by: | September 11, 2004 at 02:46 PM
Are you saying there are always going to be people smarter and richer than I am?
YOU BASTARDS HAVE CRUSHED MY DREAMS WITH YOUR CRAZY BLOG POSTS!
Posted by: Jeff Atwood | September 12, 2004 at 12:28 AM
Also, it's pretty lame to post anonymous personal attacks.
p.s. No, YOU'RE a tool!
Posted by: Jeff Atwood | September 12, 2004 at 01:40 AM
why don't you just present a direct opportunity instead of being vague or illuding to similarities. what are you afraid of? it's obvious to me what is possible vor very few to understand. how can you be sure you are as smart as you think, after all you could only know what someone wanted you to know about how much they really knew...especially if they've known their entire life.
Posted by: Ben Shelton | October 30, 2004 at 06:00 PM