I get the opposite impression. The facts of many of these anecdotes would force you to believe that he must have unfathomable genius. But he honestly seems to believe that luck played a huge role; sometimes, the only role. I remember one story where someone puts a huge blueprint in front of him of some kind of plumbing installation of immense complexity. It’s not working right. He feels overwhelmed, so, just to have something to say, he points at random at a valve and asks what it does. That turned out to be the key that let them solve the issue. He thinks this is just blind luck, because he had no idea what anything did in the diagram. I think it’s more likely that his genius subconscious saw something.
I agree with you except for that last sentence—but in that anecdote he didn’t even know if the symbol he was pointing at was supposed to be a valve or a window. I think a much more likely explanation is just selection bias: if he’d asked “what happened if this valve gets stuck?” and they’d replied “oh, this pressure release over here will activate” the anecdote would have simply been too boring to make it into the book. Take the “best of” anecdotes from a busy lifetime and add a flair for storytelling and of course you’ll get an inflated view; the alternative would be a lot less likely to produce discussions on HN.
