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.
Answered my own question.
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.
I’m not seeing “anarchist” anywhere
That guy’s name?
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His mother wasn’t creative
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.
William James Sidis’s mother, Sarah (Mandelbaum) Sidis, was a medical doctor who graduated from Boston University School of Medicine in 1897. Sarah and her family immigrated to the United States. in the late 1880s, escaping the pogroms in Russia. Sarah married psychiatrist and psychologist Boris Sidis in 1894.
Sounds like she lead a pretty interesting life as well.
He’s Bobby Tables’ great uncle.
FYI William James Sidis (Wikipedia)
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…
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.
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
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.
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 ~1024 people.
~1011 humans have ever lived on earth.
IQ is pseudo science nonsense anyway.
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.
Diogenes has entered the chat
Diogenes refused to stay at home.
Home is where the hog is
