Both of Harry's parents howled with laughter at that, like they thought it was all a big joke. "Oh," said Harry's father, eyes bright, "is that why you bit a maths teacher in third year."
In second grade, I was shocked to learn that my math teacher didn't know what a logarithm was.
Huh.
Later, in chapter 6, we get this:
I'm too smart, Professor. I've got nothing to say to normal children. Adults don't respect me enough to really talk to me. And frankly, even if they did, they wouldn't sound as smart as Richard Feynman, so I might as well read something Richard Feynman wrote instead. I'm isolated, Professor McGonagall. I've been isolated my whole life.
The funny thing is that the Feynman anecdote books are full of stories where the theme is that you never know when you'll meet an interesting person, and people are worth talking to even if they're not booksmart. The cool taxi driver, the guy who is Distinguished Professor of getting out of barfights....
There's also a whole lot of him being a negging creep.
Most of the people in the world who can still think are not in any one community. Sometimes they even find one other person like themselves, who also read Richard Feynman as a kid and learned the right things.
Let's compare that to Yudkowsky's memoir about the unbearable weight of smartness:
Huh.
Later, in chapter 6, we get this:
The funny thing is that the Feynman anecdote books are full of stories where the theme is that you never know when you'll meet an interesting person, and people are worth talking to even if they're not booksmart. The cool taxi driver, the guy who is Distinguished Professor of getting out of barfights....
There's also a whole lot of him being a negging creep.
Compare a Yudkowsky tweet from June 2023 in which he declares,