He was a socialist and was arrested during a May day protest. He was tried and convicted of sedition. The media attention and the fact that America was in the middle of the Red Scare made sure that he didn’t get a fair trial. His parents made a deal to have him serve the sentence suspended and also be confined to a sanatorium for a year. This really changed his world view and he became very distrustful of media attention and central authority. Before these events he wasn’t really bothered by the attention and he liked having public intellectual discourse.
Anon is a child prodigy
Submitted 2 weeks ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/91496def-9a36-425a-8794-4d66d49210c8.jpeg
Comments
Kirp123@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Smartest guy is socialist. Government happens and he becomes an anarchist. Ergo I am a very smart boy cause I skipped step 1 and 2.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
May day protests were in 1886, red scare didn’t happen until 1917.
Got a source on this?
AzuraTheSpellkissed@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
entheo_a1@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Ah so he didn’t just decide he didn’t like public attention, he went to a socialist rally and went to prison for sedition as a result, THEN realised maybe he was better off out of the public eye, where his politics was less likely to kill him…
FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Also I’d bet going through college at such a young age wasn’t exactly conducive to decent mental health.
Dude was probably burned the fuck out at a very young age.
mech@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
No reliable record exists of Sidis ever taking a standardized IQ test. The frequently cited claim that he scored between 250–300 on an IQ test stems from a single, uncorroborated account by psychologist Abraham Sperling in his 1946 (2 years after Sidis’ death) book Psychology for the Millions.
The concept of IQ as measured by modern tests did not exist during Sidis’s childhood
lime@feddit.nu 2 weeks ago
i mean, iq is a normal distribution. it caps at 200. 160 represents the 99.996th percentile, and above that the error bars are so large that the result is uneless.
mech@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
It’s not capped, really. But the claimed 250 IQ would be 10 standard deviations from the mean, so he’d be the most intelligent person in a population of ~10^24 people.
~10^11 humans have ever lived on earth.Telemachus93@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Strictly speaking, a normal distribution doesn’t cap, neither at 0 nor at 200. Maybe the scores achievable by standardized tests do, of course.
taiyang@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I was going to mention the same thing. Even the “smartest man alive” would be in those useless upper bounds.
To explain that upper bounds issue to others, imagine being the top score on a leaderboard. Some of that’s going to be random chance and other factors, even if most of the time you score in the top 1% of scores consistently.
IratePirate@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Yuppp, this smelled like bullshit form miles away. Thanks for corroborating!
Summzashi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
IQ is pseudo science nonsense anyway.
MutantTailThing@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Show me a guy who just jacks off at home all day and I’ll show you a guy who’s not causing any trouble.
bampop@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Depends on whose home it is
GraniteM@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Diogenes has entered the chat
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Diogenes refused to stay home.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Very dependent on what they’re jacking off to, unfortunately.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Yo.
GeeDubHayduke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Your Carlin gets a Carlin:
Show me a tropical fruit, and I’ll show you a cock sucker from Guatemala.
petersr@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sounds like those guys could be friends.
agent_nycto@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also obsessed with tranfer tickets, would chase them down in the street, wrote a whole book about collecting them and would bore the fuck out of anyone who would listen about them.
Stern@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“Autism didn’t exist when I was a kid”
Them as a kid
IDew@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
He understood that money and fame don’t really make you happy
rumba@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
While true, a severe lack of money can really make you unhappy.
ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“Ambition” is often just a “bell curve meme” situation, lol.
flandish@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
i am in no way “smart” and all that but i have subjects i love to learn about. mostly philosophy and “thought about thought.”
one of the things that depresses me is how I kind of wish to be stranded on an island with unlimited free time to read and think. like if i were to die and end up in some sort of afterlife, i would miss most the lost time i had to simply learn stuff.
sometimes that spirals me. sigh.
Tja@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
Why do you need an island for that? You can read and think wherever you are.
flandish@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
i know. it’s a me problem. for sure.
Nangijala@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
Sidis deserves to be remembered. Not only was he smart, but he seemed like a genuinely good and reasonable person too. I also like that he took great interest in anthropology and languages. If I remember correctly, he even developed a couple of languages himself because he was fascinated by it.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Fancy_Gecko@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
graduated CUM LAUDE in 1914 at 16.
drolex@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
That guy’s name?
33 KB JPG
Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
His mother wasn’t creative
Penguin_1024@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
He was born in 1898. The idea of digitizing information didn’t really exist, much less the jpeg standard. I’say his mother was very creative.
DickFiasco@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
He’s Bobby Tables’ great uncle.