His mother wasn't creative
Early_To_Risa 70 points 7 days ago
Penguin_1024 53 points 7 days 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.
velma 21 points 7 days ago
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.
ChaoticNeutralCzech 8 points 7 days ago
I think the closest thing back then was a fax, which could transmit monochromatic documents. Halftone (grayscale) fax was invented by Arthur Korn in 1902, enabling newspapers to send/receive photographs via telephone. That used mechanical parts, electronic ADCs were developed in the 1920s.
As for the newest word in the acronym: The word bit only appeared in 1946, the word bite (machine word) probably shortly after, spelled with a Y since 1956.
DickFiasco 33 points 7 days ago
He's Bobby Tables' great uncle.
Kirp123 240 points 7 days ago
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.
SupraMario 36 points 7 days ago
Answered my own question.
SaharaMaleikuhm 30 points 7 days 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.
Amnesigenic 3 points 4 days ago
I'm not seeing "anarchist" anywhere
AzuraTheSpellkissed 103 points 7 days ago
FYI William James Sidis (Wikipedia)
entheo_a1 131 points 7 days 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 36 points 7 days 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.
Kirp123 32 points 7 days ago
He was smart but emotionally he was a kid. He was prodigiously intelligent for his age but emotionally he was developing at the normal pace for a kid. He was an 11 years old kid surrounded by 18 year olds and older. The university faculty even pushed back against him being admitted so young but his father pushed for it until they admitted him.
AngryCommieKender 8 points 7 days ago
I was basically shoved through graduation by the time I was 15. I had teachers and administators trying to graduate me when I was 13. I refused. I'm glad I did now. My reaction was that I wasn't ready to be responsible for bills and food. I should have been far more worried about dealing with other people. I can tell you first hand that 18-23 year olds don't appreciate having someone several years younger than them in their classes.
mech 94 points 7 days 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
mech 54 points 7 days 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.
Poem_for_your_sprog 6 points 7 days ago
Smells like von neumann
Buddahriffic 6 points 7 days ago
It's capped in practical terms by the highest score a test can be given. Unless getting a perfect just means you have another harder round.
Feathercrown 5 points 7 days ago
No, but without people to compare against, there is a limit to how high the scale can stay accurate. This is different from it actually having a cap, though.
Telemachus93 13 points 7 days 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.
NigelFrobisher 3 points 7 days ago
That’s just how clever he was, silly.
taiyang 2 points 7 days 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 8 points 7 days ago
Yuppp, this smelled like bullshit from miles away. Thanks for corroborating!
MutantTailThing 28 points 7 days 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.
AngryCommieKender 2 points 7 days ago
Diogenes refused to stay at home.
idiomaddict 8 points 7 days ago
Very dependent on what they’re jacking off to, unfortunately.
GeeDubHayduke 3 points 7 days ago
Your Carlin gets a Carlin:
Show me a tropical fruit, and I'll show you a cock sucker from Guatemala.
agent_nycto 15 points 7 days 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.
ArgumentativeMonotheist 8 points 7 days ago
"Ambition" is often just a "bell curve meme" situation, lol.
flandish 7 points 7 days 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.
Fancy_Gecko 4 points 6 days ago
graduated CUM LAUDE in 1914 at 16.
greentext
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greentext
@sh.itjust.works
8380
1942
4977
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
go to feed...
That guy's name?
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