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.
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.
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.so what you are saying is that it has a cap, which is based on the number of people he is compared against?
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.
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.
Yuppp, this smelled like bullshit from miles away. Thanks for corroborating!
IQ is pseudo science nonsense anyway.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
