The Sad Tale of William James Sidis - The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived | Random Thursday

the brightest and hottest stars burn out the fastest it's true in the cosmos seems to be true with people when you think of genius you think of people who have changed the world Shakespeare Leonardo da Vinci Einstein Sir Isaac Newton just to name a few all geniuses no doubt but there are some people whose genius is unmeasurable people who are capable of almost godlike feats of intelligence people whose IQ is literally off the chart super geniuses if you will logic would hold that these are the people most likely to move society forward but that's not always the case sometimes the brightest stars burn out before they get a chance to make their mark such the case with William James situs possibly the smartest human being that ever lived [Music] William James Sidis was born in Boston on April 1st 1898 to two prominent doctors Boris and Sarah situs who were pretty impressive in their own right Morris was a Russian Jew who immigrated to the United States after a wave of anti-semitism swept through Russia he landed in the United States he didn't even know the language but he taught himself English eventually got into medical school and became a prominent psychologist his wife Sarah also an immigrant became a doctor at a time when women were never considered doctors women wouldn't even get the right to vote for 30 years it was sent in order to pass the entrance exam to medical school she had to learn six weeks worth of math in three days and she pulled it off both of William's parents believed that anything can be learned and given the proper technique and so when William was born he became something of an experiment to them to see just how smart you could make a human being Boris being a psychologist I'm sure it was a challenge he couldn't possibly resist so they spent their life savings on lessons and books for the young William luckily for them he had inherited their natural brilliance and by the age of two he was reading the New York Times and writing letters in English and in French by age six he was a polyglot with a mastery of English French German Russian Hebrew Latin Turkish and Armenian you know like you do at age six as his impressive abilities increased his parents turn him into a bit of a media celebrity a child prodigy that made headlines and newspapers around the world by the age of eight he constructed his own language called vendor good which he detailed in a book he wrote called the book of vendor good which also detailed the origins of Roman numerals in the base 12 number system in age now he wanted mission into Harvard what they thought that was too young and made him wait until he was 11 to enroll because that's more reasonable well there he proved that actually be smarter than most of the professors and gave lectures on fourth-dimensional bodies which drew hundreds of people he becomes something of a cultural phenomenon at this point hounded by the news media and the public alike it was said that he had an IQ fifty to a hundred points higher than Einsteins which would put him somewhere between 210 and 264 contacts the average person is between 85 and 115 women graduated laude from Harvard at age 16 and actually did a little bit of teaching and mathematics for a while and then he kind of dropped out of sight it seemed all the attention he was receiving throughout his life had begun to take its toll on him and he told a reporter quote I want to live the perfect life the only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion I have always hated crowds so perhaps the greatest mind of all time went into total seclusion until 1919 when he was arrested for holding a political demonstration which I didn't think you could be arrested for in court he blamed society's problems on religion and capitalism which clearly won over the judge because they gave him 18 months in prison after leaving jail william became something of a nomad moving from city to city working menial jobs always changing his name to remain private but that didn't stop his intellectual pursuits he wrote literally dozens of books on subjects ranging from cosmology American history anthropology transportation systems and weirdly on streetcar tickets which he collected he published books under a variety of different pseudonyms including one called the animate in the inanimate in 1925 in which he postulated that there were regions of space where time goes in reverse and would not emit light but due to all the different names he used we don't really know exactly how many books he wrote there could be dozens out there that he wrote that we don't even know about in 1930 he received a patent for a rotary perpetual calendar that actually took into account leap years and at age 42 he was reached out to by a reporter from the New York Times to find out what had happened to this child prodigy from back in the day and it wasn't really on the up-and-up she kind of seduced him and got him to talking about things that he wasn't comfortable talking about and it didn't really paint him in a good light the story kind of made it sound like he went crazy which okay maybe that wasn't very hard to do but William took offense to this and he successfully sued the New York Times for libel and then sadly and unexpectedly died two years later of a cerebral hemorrhage so much potential and yet he remains nothing more than just a historical footnote what went wrong was it too much pressure from his parents too much pressure from society was he just weird could have been worse another child prodigy was Ted Kaczynski he was accepted into Harvard at age 16 something of a math prodigy he graduated taught mathematics at the University of California and then retired and took out the hobby of mailing bonds to people he wrote manifestos against the evils of Technology and killed three people injuring 23 others in a bombing spree that lasted several years he's now no more ominously as the Unabomber now obviously history is filled with child prodigies in various fields from mathematics to the arts music literature and so on that grow up to be perfectly functional human beings some like Enrico Fermi went on to become part of scientific revolutions others never rose above obscurity and that's okay where we end up in life has very little to do with our intelligence I can't imagine the pressure that somebody like that must be under if you're brought up being told that you're one of the smartest people that ever lived I mean how do you live up to those expectations I don't know I might have freaked out too regardless people like William situs remind us of the unbelievable capacity of the human mind and the potential for us as a species so a good show you weird street car loving guy so there are literally hundreds of child prodigies a lot of chess grandmasters and types of people throughout history if you have somebody that's one of your favorites please share it in the comments below I just thought this would be a fun topic to just kind of throw out there and talk about maybe a footnote of history that many of you might not have heard of I thought it was interesting well here I thought I'd point out new shirts this is the evolution of the Falcon although it's argued that if this one was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away maybe it should be on this side but whatever it's a fun shirt many more just like it and answers a joke on select shirts please go check them out they're a lot of fun alright thanks for watching please like and share if you liked it share what you think in the comments below and if this your first time here check out some of my other videos hope you enjoy those maybe subscribe if you like them normally come back on mondays I'm now doing Thursdays and with that I bid you adieu you guys have a great rest of the week and I will see you on Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 2,171,971

Rating: 4.8832116 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, william james sidis, william sidis, boris sidis, child prodigy, smartest man of all time, highest iq ever recorded, vendergood, child genius, genius, supergenius, polyglot

Id: qsDD93pSppw

Length: 6min 49sec (409 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/KVYNgaming]

Is this what YouTube is nowadays? Reading off the Wikipedia article while looking into camera and pasting a picture from Google Images every 10 seconds?

[u/Timedoutsob]

Turns out a lot of this may be balony

"I have been researching the veracity of primary sources of various subjects for about twenty-eight years, and never before have I found a topic so satiated with lies, myths, half-truths, exaggerations, and other forms of misinformation as is in the history behind William Sidis"

source wikipedia

[u/Blizk]

Omg this is like so me lol. I’m above my peers by millennia but I just can’t escape my crippling depression and social anxiety. When I was 9 I wrote my own book on the potential of graphite molecularly in a journal I kept below my bed. Unfortunately when I was 14 I hit my head hard on a swing set which I’d often go to think about the failures of string theory and more importantly how I could explain it to my brain dead peers haha, and ever since then I don’t think as good ya feel me. Now I just sit around smoking weed and playing checkers all day. Oh well guess it could be worse I could be stupid like u lot. Anyways that’s enough talking with the commoners for one day, toodles~~ Owo

[u/Stephen_P_Smith]

Lost, but now redeemed!

His book on The Animate and the Inanimate was years, and years, ahead of it time. Sidis only makes one mistake, in my view, and then everything fits together:

​

See what I wrote here, and comments are welcome there too:

​

https://www.reddit.com/user/Stephen_P_Smith/comments/9bof0j/sidis_found_the_singularity_well_before_ray/

[u/shyam14111986]

Looks like New York Times has been sending their journalists to seduce sources for a very long time. Even recently, there is the case of Ali Watkins.

[u/wazoheat]

What I got from this is not that this kid was the smartest person who ever lived, it's that you can seriously fuck up your kid by pushing them too hard, both in education and in publicity.

[u/JohnWesleyHorner]

Great piece thanks for sharing!