"I actually think Bill Gates is conventionally smarter, even though it's a dumb word, but mental processing power - I've watched him use four different screens, process information, get to the right answer, boom boom boom"
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Isaacson is doing two things at once: praising Bill Gates while quietly policing what counts as “smart.” He nods to the cultural embarrassment around raw-IQ talk (“it’s a dumb word”), then reinstates it under a more respectable label: “mental processing power.” That little linguistic shuffle matters. It signals that he knows “smart” is socially loaded - elitist, reductive, a magnet for backlash - but he still wants to smuggle in a hierarchy of minds.
The scene he paints is pure late-20th-century techno-meritocracy: four screens, high-speed synthesis, instant correctness. “Boom boom boom” turns cognition into percussion, a performance of efficiency. Intelligence isn’t framed as wisdom, imagination, empathy, or moral clarity; it’s throughput. Gates becomes not a thinker in the philosophical sense but a human CPU, and Isaacson, a biographer famous for admiring world-changing operators, is telling you which kind of brilliance history rewards.
The subtext is also comparative and slightly defensive. “Conventionally smarter” implies an argument in the room - smarter than whom? In Isaacson’s orbit (Silicon Valley, high-status founders, celebrity innovators), debates about greatness often hinge on whether vision or execution deserves the crown. He lands on execution: the ability to ingest complexity and collapse it into an answer fast.
Contextually, it’s a biographer’s eye at work: intelligence as observable behavior, not mystique. But it also reveals a bias of the genre. When you write the canon of “genius,” you start valuing what photographs well in a meeting: speed, certainty, dominance over information. The quote flatters Gates, yes, but it also flatters the worldview that made Gates legible as exceptional.
The scene he paints is pure late-20th-century techno-meritocracy: four screens, high-speed synthesis, instant correctness. “Boom boom boom” turns cognition into percussion, a performance of efficiency. Intelligence isn’t framed as wisdom, imagination, empathy, or moral clarity; it’s throughput. Gates becomes not a thinker in the philosophical sense but a human CPU, and Isaacson, a biographer famous for admiring world-changing operators, is telling you which kind of brilliance history rewards.
The subtext is also comparative and slightly defensive. “Conventionally smarter” implies an argument in the room - smarter than whom? In Isaacson’s orbit (Silicon Valley, high-status founders, celebrity innovators), debates about greatness often hinge on whether vision or execution deserves the crown. He lands on execution: the ability to ingest complexity and collapse it into an answer fast.
Contextually, it’s a biographer’s eye at work: intelligence as observable behavior, not mystique. But it also reveals a bias of the genre. When you write the canon of “genius,” you start valuing what photographs well in a meeting: speed, certainty, dominance over information. The quote flatters Gates, yes, but it also flatters the worldview that made Gates legible as exceptional.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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