That guy's name?
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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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.
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.
He's Bobby Tables' great uncle.
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.
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
Probably not smart enough...
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.
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 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.
Ah, that sucks to hear. I'm absolutely with the university on this. Not because he doesn't deserve a mental challenge, but because he deserves to be a silly kid.
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.
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 ~10^24 people.
~10^11 humans have ever lived on earth.
The most likely explanation is that he was from outer space
Smells like von neumann
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.
so what you are saying is that it has a cap, which is based on the number of people he is compared against?
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.
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Strictly speaking, a normal distribution doesn't cap, neither at 0 nor at 200. Maybe the scores achievable by standardized tests do, of course.
they usually cap at 150. but yeah it's not a hard cap, it's an asymptotic curve. statistically the chance of getting 201 or higher is the same as getting -1 or lower.
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.
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Yuppp, this smelled like bullshit from miles away. Thanks for corroborating!
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.
Depends on whose home it is
Diogenes has entered the chat
Diogenes refused to stay at home.
Home is where the hog is
Very dependent on what they’re jacking off to, unfortunately.
Your Carlin gets a Carlin:
Show me a tropical fruit, and I'll show you a cock sucker from Guatemala.
Yo.
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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.
"Autism didn't exist when I was a kid"
Them as a kid
He understood that money and fame don't really make you happy
While true, a severe lack of money can really make you unhappy.
"Ambition" is often just a "bell curve meme" situation, lol.
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.
Why do you need an island for that? You can read and think wherever you are.
i know. it’s a me problem. for sure.
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.
graduated CUM LAUDE in 1914 at 16.
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