The Smartest Person I Know

Background: I have a Meeting with Ballmer next month, part of the week where people get locked away with him for a few days, throw around ideas and think about where to take the company in the next few years. It's apparently a Big Deal and, in fact, is a Bigger Deal than I was expecting. Part of this Deal is doing a whole bunch of prep-work, i.e. write a bio so Ballmer knows who you are and your background, write a summary of 3 ideas you think might be interesting, fill out this Form a month in advance. Okay, fine. I'm working on the Form which is actually a form of Intelligence Test. One of the questions is; who is the smartest person you've met?

This is an Intelligence Test in that, I strongly suspect, if you fill in Ballmer or Gates, you will fail to progress to the meeting.

This is a Good Thing, but it did get me thinking about my answer.

First I want to distinguish between Intelligent and Smart. I know LOTS of intelligent people, based on types of friends I make, my education, work etc. I'm a good estimator of IQ to within 5 points (until you get over 165 where IQ is, for all intents and purposes, not reliably measurable). However, Intelligent is not necessarily smart. Many of the most intelligent people I know have crippling intellectual pathologies which prevent them from progressing, e.g. phobias, delusions, self-consistent/self-contained personal mythologies which reject any outside evidence (not religion here, but personal beliefs about their own intellectual infallibility), etc. This keeps a depressingly large number of highly intelligent folks from being smarter than they should be. I try to root this out when I see it but realistically I've never been successful. It's a waste and, unfortunately I have to strike those names from the roster.

Smart, on the other hand, is rarer and only loosely coupled to intelligence. It's impossible to measure objectively, but I look for things like knowledge from multiple disciplines, free thinking, novel approaches to problems using synthesis from other fields (i.e. not necessarily coming up with a new idea but recognizing similar problems in other fields and transferring solutions over). Further, rather than a strict hierarchy, I have a bin of the 100 smartest people I know (and another of the smartest 1000) and occasionally add or remove names form the bin. FTR, I am *not* in the bin of 100, but I am in the bin of 1000. To qualify, I need to have had a conversation with the person of more than a few minutes and exchanged a few ideas.

So, winnowing the bin down to 10, I was left with this list (in no order).


Stephen Hawking (astrophysicist)
Moti Yung (mathematician)
Daniel Blaize (poet)
Ted Harrison (astrophysicist)
Carl Sagan (astronomer, butthead-class)
John Flemming (financier-Morgan Stanley)
Paul Tsongas (politician)
Alan Greenspan (Federal Reserve Chairman)
Dennis Maroney (moral compass)
Alistair Reynolds (writer)

and now, it gets tough. Some of these folks I know well (Dennis, Ted) some I've only met once or a few times (Greenspan, Reynolds). It's tough to say, and tougher to rate. In the end though, I decided to look at whose thinking has most directly effected my actions, thoughts or views. That narrows it down to:

Ted Harrison
Carl Sagan
Alan Greenspan

Finally, taking into account intellectual diversity, practicality and just sheer talent at being smart it comes down to:

Ted Harrison

Which was not the answer I was expecting, but I am very comfortable with it. If I could end up as smart as Ted, I'd be a very happy camper.