I think the story of Billy Sidis, the purported prodigy with the highest IQ (250-300) ever known, is mostly fraudulent.
I first read about William James Sidis in the pages of Gift of Fire in the late 80’s. GoF was the journal of the Prometheus Society, a discussion group for those with measured IQ over 164. Amy Wallace’s book on Sidis, The Prodigy, had just come out, and Grady Towers took the opportunity to bring us up to speed on the early 20th C brilliant but eccentric child. That essay, "The Outsiders," is perhaps the best known of the articles to come out of the High-IQ societies. Its primary topic is the increasing difficulty of adjustment individuals experience the further from norm they are. Terman's studies in the 40's of gifted individuals showed that those above 140 IQ were better adapted than average. Grady looked harder at the data and decided that those from 140-150 were better adjusted than average, but beyond that things steadily worsened. The greater frequency of those from 140-150 masked the data of the few from say, 170-180.
It was perhaps inevitable that Grady would gravitate to the subject of Sidis. Grady qualified for the next society up, the Mega Society, for those with one-in-a-million IQ, cutoff 176. He had been a prodigy himself, almost completing a PhD in Anthropology at age 20, but by the time I knew him (via journal and correspondence), he was usually homeless, working odd jobs across the Southwest, writing on borrowed typewriters and sending mathematical proofs - usually number theory - to whoever would have them. He was murdered horribly in 2000 while working as a security guard. I liked corresponding with him.
I ran across a stray mention of William James Sidis while reading about the Pennacook Indians. (He had believed their tribal decision-making methods had deeply influenced the New England Founding Fathers, and hence the Constitution. Pure bunkum, to be discussed below.) I remembered the story, but not the name, and I thought I recalled that it was Gift of Fire, and Grady, where I had learned of Sidis. As I tried to get to the bottom of the story of the prodigy, I wondered if G Towers had uncovered some little-known source and had inside information on the boy who went to Harvard at 11, but spent much of his adult life collecting and classifying streetcar transfers and being rescued by his parents.
Alas, not so. Grady's info was pretty clearly drawn from Wallace's biography of Sidis. I have read only scraps of that, but she clearly has taken what Sidis and his family have claimed about him at face value. She wants to believe the tragic narrative of prodigy who just couldn't adjust, nor the world adjust to him. There was a time when I preferred that narrative, too. I fancied myself a prodigy, and could cherry-pick data to prove to you that it was true. But it wasn't. I was a very smart, creative child who was also arrogant and self-centered. No more than that. But the desire to be one of those - one of those special children who would show up occasionally in magazines, or on "I've Got A Secret," or in Ripley's "Believe It Or Not" - is very sweet. It provides a ready excuse for anyone not liking you, or you not fitting in. If you are that smart, then of course it is the school that has failed, not you, when you screw up.
Sidis's parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, she a physician, he one of the first psychiatrists, though a bit out of the mainstream. Certainly the type of people who you'd expect might have a prodigy. They seemed to have expected it as well. Boris Sidis had educational theories about how to raise children to be geniuses. How convenient to have one, eh?
The articles about Billy, including in Wikipedia, generally acknowledge that some claims about him were misunderstood, or even bogus. Yet they generally credit his prodigy status as essentially true. I did run across another doubter at a site called The Logics. I don't know anything about the writer (though I am certainly well-disposed to him right off the bat), so there's no implied endorsement of the site, which seems pretty extensive. I will give my reasons for doubting the claims about Sidis sometime this week, but the sneak preview should be obvious. There are numerous stories, many of which are quite plausible, about William James Sidis. The hard evidence behind them seems elusive. He was clearly quite intelligent. But the evidence that he was a genius...?
Baseball history fans may have had the story of Moe Berg occur to him while reading all this. A lot more examination has been done on him, but I may have some fun with that later as well.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query sidis. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query sidis. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
But If It's True..
But what if the story of William James Sidis, minus the obvious exaggerations, is essentially true? Where then does he rank?
Norbert Wiener, in his book Ex-Prodigy, quite clearly testifies to Sidis' brilliance in mathematics at a young age. That is the single most powerful bit of evidence in favor of the premise that Sidis was the real deal. Wiener was not close to him, but knew him at Harvard, had a class with him, and had some conversations with him. He also knew him later in life, when William was haunting the halls of MIT for employment doing computational work, of which there was plenty in the 1940's - but no more, because he did not want to get too deeply into mathematics any longer. Sparse contact, but real, not hearsay.
The short answer is that Wiener hints that Sidis' non-mathematical accomplishments, his languages and varied subjects of curiosity, are padded and his physics was suspect, but his mathematical potential was top-shelf. He also confirms some rumors of Billy's eccentricities and contradicts others. As Wiener was himself top-shelf, I take that seriously enough to accept the evaluation with no further evidence. Had NW said that about a laboratory custodian at MIT with no other credentials I would accept the judgement. That excellence in math, in turn, gives at least some support that the other precocities might be somewhat true. We don't have to believe that he taught himself Latin and Greek at 4, as his mother claimed, to believe that he was very good.
Yet these find no echo in his later life. The mathematics, though he came to avoid it, at least shows up off and on. The languages, not at all. Not even a passing mention by friends, family, interviewers, reporters later - only the languages that he supposedly knew when young. We might conclude that he had ability but no further interest, and let it slide, or that he kept the abilities only for personal use or amusement.He does not seem to have read widely in other languages, at any rate.
Language prodigies tend not to pan out. Languages as read and as spoken are different, and the subtleties of expression somehow do not register with them as well. In Sidis's case, social subtleties eluded him even in English, so it would hardly be surprising that nuance eluded him in other tongues. Math and music prodigies are most common, languages after that, and males far more common than females. They translate the literal sense of things, they know rules and constructions. They do not get called on to translate literature or diplomatic speech - those arts seem to develop slowly.
Still, Sidis might have known enough of many languages to understand much of what is written in them. What number we claim he "knew" - five or forty or a hundred - is likely to depend strongly on what we call "knowing." There was no fluency in Pennacook, as there were no native speakers but there might have been enough to cobble together a meaning from any document that came to light. A useful skill, and one that demonstrates high intelligence. But "genius" would seem to require more than mere accumulation.
The categorising of streetcar transfers makes immediate sense to anyone who understands the OCD or autism spectra. It gives pleasure, and there is no reason not to. But spinning lengthy theories about Atlantis, Red Men, and the Constitution with no real grounding, how do we rank that? Do we simply award no points in our estimate of his intelligence, or do we take them away? Similarly with philosophy stretched over physics - originality is a good thing, but what are we to make of a person who cannot look at his work and say "Wait, this just doesn't add up?"
We can't know what William might have been if he was brought up by a less driven father - or if someone had whacked his father a few times and made him see the obvious. Boris pushed and William broke. Would he have broken anyway? Would he have been brilliant anyway? Not only unknown, but currently unknowable.
Let us assign some modest percentage to the possibility that Norbert Wiener was fooled somehow - that reputation plus William's computational feats plus overidentification because Wiener was himself a prodigy with a driven father caused him to believe that young William was smarter than he was. The greater likelihood remains that Wiener sized him up correctly, and Sidis had it in him to contribute to 20th C mathematics at highest levels. Even at that, even granting everything, I don't see him at the very top. Smarter than anyone you are likely to run into this week, perhaps. But we are entering territory where the competition is stiff as well. There isn't evidence that William James Sidis did anything more than moderately special, he just did it younger. That's not enough. Precocity is not in itself proof.
We imagine that there is an arc to intelligence over the lifespan, and that a steeper trajectory in youth must mean a higher peak. There is some evidence for this. But in music, and athletics, in drawing, and performing, and chess, we know of examples of early promise that simply peaked before their age mates but ultimately rose no higher than the others in the top 1% in the field. Just earlier, not better. If we are going to speculate about some mind that William Sidis would have had if, we have to also take it as it is - ultimately not focused, not able to sort good ideas from bad, original but not precise.
So what is your estimate of his intelligence? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? A million? A billion?
Norbert Wiener, in his book Ex-Prodigy, quite clearly testifies to Sidis' brilliance in mathematics at a young age. That is the single most powerful bit of evidence in favor of the premise that Sidis was the real deal. Wiener was not close to him, but knew him at Harvard, had a class with him, and had some conversations with him. He also knew him later in life, when William was haunting the halls of MIT for employment doing computational work, of which there was plenty in the 1940's - but no more, because he did not want to get too deeply into mathematics any longer. Sparse contact, but real, not hearsay.
The short answer is that Wiener hints that Sidis' non-mathematical accomplishments, his languages and varied subjects of curiosity, are padded and his physics was suspect, but his mathematical potential was top-shelf. He also confirms some rumors of Billy's eccentricities and contradicts others. As Wiener was himself top-shelf, I take that seriously enough to accept the evaluation with no further evidence. Had NW said that about a laboratory custodian at MIT with no other credentials I would accept the judgement. That excellence in math, in turn, gives at least some support that the other precocities might be somewhat true. We don't have to believe that he taught himself Latin and Greek at 4, as his mother claimed, to believe that he was very good.
Yet these find no echo in his later life. The mathematics, though he came to avoid it, at least shows up off and on. The languages, not at all. Not even a passing mention by friends, family, interviewers, reporters later - only the languages that he supposedly knew when young. We might conclude that he had ability but no further interest, and let it slide, or that he kept the abilities only for personal use or amusement.He does not seem to have read widely in other languages, at any rate.
Language prodigies tend not to pan out. Languages as read and as spoken are different, and the subtleties of expression somehow do not register with them as well. In Sidis's case, social subtleties eluded him even in English, so it would hardly be surprising that nuance eluded him in other tongues. Math and music prodigies are most common, languages after that, and males far more common than females. They translate the literal sense of things, they know rules and constructions. They do not get called on to translate literature or diplomatic speech - those arts seem to develop slowly.
Still, Sidis might have known enough of many languages to understand much of what is written in them. What number we claim he "knew" - five or forty or a hundred - is likely to depend strongly on what we call "knowing." There was no fluency in Pennacook, as there were no native speakers but there might have been enough to cobble together a meaning from any document that came to light. A useful skill, and one that demonstrates high intelligence. But "genius" would seem to require more than mere accumulation.
The categorising of streetcar transfers makes immediate sense to anyone who understands the OCD or autism spectra. It gives pleasure, and there is no reason not to. But spinning lengthy theories about Atlantis, Red Men, and the Constitution with no real grounding, how do we rank that? Do we simply award no points in our estimate of his intelligence, or do we take them away? Similarly with philosophy stretched over physics - originality is a good thing, but what are we to make of a person who cannot look at his work and say "Wait, this just doesn't add up?"
In a rough chronological order, William James held a theory about reserve energy. Boris Sidis learned of reserve energy from William James. Boris claimed that William’s intelligence was in part due to the use of reserve energy. William Sidis pondered how William James’ theory of reserve energy might be removed from the metaphysical realm and brought into a scientific study. The Animate and the Inanimate is William Sidis’ pondering about how the second law of thermodynamics might apply to William James’ reserve energy theory…Does that even mean anything?
We can't know what William might have been if he was brought up by a less driven father - or if someone had whacked his father a few times and made him see the obvious. Boris pushed and William broke. Would he have broken anyway? Would he have been brilliant anyway? Not only unknown, but currently unknowable.
Let us assign some modest percentage to the possibility that Norbert Wiener was fooled somehow - that reputation plus William's computational feats plus overidentification because Wiener was himself a prodigy with a driven father caused him to believe that young William was smarter than he was. The greater likelihood remains that Wiener sized him up correctly, and Sidis had it in him to contribute to 20th C mathematics at highest levels. Even at that, even granting everything, I don't see him at the very top. Smarter than anyone you are likely to run into this week, perhaps. But we are entering territory where the competition is stiff as well. There isn't evidence that William James Sidis did anything more than moderately special, he just did it younger. That's not enough. Precocity is not in itself proof.
We imagine that there is an arc to intelligence over the lifespan, and that a steeper trajectory in youth must mean a higher peak. There is some evidence for this. But in music, and athletics, in drawing, and performing, and chess, we know of examples of early promise that simply peaked before their age mates but ultimately rose no higher than the others in the top 1% in the field. Just earlier, not better. If we are going to speculate about some mind that William Sidis would have had if, we have to also take it as it is - ultimately not focused, not able to sort good ideas from bad, original but not precise.
So what is your estimate of his intelligence? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? A million? A billion?
Saturday, October 19, 2019
#19 - William James Sidis - The Doubt
Originally published December 2011. This one is part of the Billy Sidis series, and not the first one. This is Part II. It is, however, far and away the most-visited. I don't understand why. This post was notable for an argument in the comments.
There have been a number of folks who maintained that William Sidis (1898-1944) was the most intelligent person who ever lived. I spent an entire series on that, and eventually concluded that he was very intelligent, but not in the category of the very best ever. Wikipedia and other websites do not give as complete information as I do here, so if you are interested in Sidis, this is probably your best stop. In the posts and comments, we also discuss many issues about IQ, accomplishment, genius, what is intelligence, and changes in education. It could keep you busy for a while, but I think it is entertaining as well as profitable. I provide links to the rest of the series at the bottom of this essay.
*********
There are solid bits of evidence that might support the claim that William Sidis was a child prodigy, but each has its own weakness as well. He did enter Harvard at age 11 – but his father, a psychiatrist and professor, had been pressing for this for years. Harvard had taken on a few other prodigies, including Buckminster Fuller and Norbert Weiner, and Boris Sidis pressured them into it. Billy did indeed give a lecture on four-dimensional bodies to the mathematics society at age 11, and Weiner, who was present, states it would have done credit to a first year graduate student. But it was not new information, as has often been claimed and was reported then. It was available elsewhere – Weiner simply doubted that William Sidis had access to it, and gave him credit for thinking it out himself. Yet it was not impossible that such material came his way, especially with a father determined to show the world his son was a genius (and his methods thus correct).
Boris Sidis made claims throughout his son’s childhood for his genius – that he read the NY Times at 18 months; taught himself Greek and Latin from 3-5 years old; mastered other tongues before age 8. William did indeed know English, French, Greek, and Latin at age 8 – but we do not know how well. It was claimed he had taught himself Turkish and Armenian. Which of his schoolteachers, pray, could evaluate that? Even if called out on it if someone pulled a passing Turk out to test him, Sidis could claim that he read the language, not spoke it, and the handwriting of natives in a language tends not to look like the printed matter, so he could dodge there as well. Among the Amerind languages he used to pad his total, some were extinct, existing only in a few manuscripts. I suppose he might maintain he knew them as well as anyone did, but my suspicions are running high at this point. Boris stated that William wrote a book on anatomy at age 5. No one seems to have ever seen even a portion of such a manuscript. William did graduate cum laude from Harvard. But entrance and even excelling then were not the accomplishment they would be now. It was fun to reread again, even for me, and the comments are exceptional throughout.
Here’s a bit about Boris’s career. He ran a sanitarium in Portsmouth NH at what had been the Frank Jones Mansion. The link will give you a flavor. In addition to educational theories, he specialized in hypnosis, dreams, and dissociation, and opposed Freud.
It is hard to be fair to Sidis from this distance. His book The Tribes and The States, about the 100,000-year history of American Indians, is insanely wrong. He gets their genetics, languages, and government badly wrong. But I am not certain what knowledge was available to him in the early 20th C. Though his theories did not turn out to be true, he may have had ideas worth exploring – no worse than the theories of other experts – based on what was known. I suspect not. He also believed in Atlantis, which figures prominently in his discussion, and reads into the known historical record with great certainty things that even then would have been highly speculative. He insists that “farthest Thule,” where Phoenicians and others raided for slaves was Newfoundland. There is simply no evidence this is so.
I have asked James of “I Don’t Know But…” (sidebar) to evaluate his treatise on reversible universes, and parts of our universe where the Second Law of Thermodynamics runs in reverse, The Animate and the Inanimate. It seems like a 70’s physics undergrad on weed, frankly. But then, most physics beyond Einstein’s Special Relativity sounds like that to me anyway, so I’m no judge. Perhaps it’s brilliant.
His later writing on freedoms and rights seems to be mere rambling. His sister claimed that Billy could speak all the languages in the world, others more modestly put his total at fifty, and Boris’s at 27. How do we know this? Who could tell? This sister, Helena, is also the source for his IQ being in the range of 250-300 – that he had tested on a civil service exam at 254 later in life. Actually, he had finished 254th in the country that year, according to another report. A creditable accomplishment, but not genius by any stretch.
The discussion from the first part about whether someone gets the adjective intelligent without some body of accomplishment is interesting, and I will not neglect it. The idea that Sidis was HFA/Asperger-y also deserves some consideration and may explain his thinking at least as well as the genius/fraud continuum. Yet I am hesitant to go there, as dishonest puffery does not tend to be associated with the Autism spectrum. It’s not unknown, but being offended by minor deviations from the truth is more common.
And Another One Bites The Dust - Part One
Prodigy (Sidis Part Three)
About That 1869 Harvard Entrance Exam (Part 3A)
Smart, Wealthy, Athletic - What It Means To Be Intelligent. A Digression On IQ.
But If It's True...
There have been a number of folks who maintained that William Sidis (1898-1944) was the most intelligent person who ever lived. I spent an entire series on that, and eventually concluded that he was very intelligent, but not in the category of the very best ever. Wikipedia and other websites do not give as complete information as I do here, so if you are interested in Sidis, this is probably your best stop. In the posts and comments, we also discuss many issues about IQ, accomplishment, genius, what is intelligence, and changes in education. It could keep you busy for a while, but I think it is entertaining as well as profitable. I provide links to the rest of the series at the bottom of this essay.
*********
There are solid bits of evidence that might support the claim that William Sidis was a child prodigy, but each has its own weakness as well. He did enter Harvard at age 11 – but his father, a psychiatrist and professor, had been pressing for this for years. Harvard had taken on a few other prodigies, including Buckminster Fuller and Norbert Weiner, and Boris Sidis pressured them into it. Billy did indeed give a lecture on four-dimensional bodies to the mathematics society at age 11, and Weiner, who was present, states it would have done credit to a first year graduate student. But it was not new information, as has often been claimed and was reported then. It was available elsewhere – Weiner simply doubted that William Sidis had access to it, and gave him credit for thinking it out himself. Yet it was not impossible that such material came his way, especially with a father determined to show the world his son was a genius (and his methods thus correct).
Boris Sidis made claims throughout his son’s childhood for his genius – that he read the NY Times at 18 months; taught himself Greek and Latin from 3-5 years old; mastered other tongues before age 8. William did indeed know English, French, Greek, and Latin at age 8 – but we do not know how well. It was claimed he had taught himself Turkish and Armenian. Which of his schoolteachers, pray, could evaluate that? Even if called out on it if someone pulled a passing Turk out to test him, Sidis could claim that he read the language, not spoke it, and the handwriting of natives in a language tends not to look like the printed matter, so he could dodge there as well. Among the Amerind languages he used to pad his total, some were extinct, existing only in a few manuscripts. I suppose he might maintain he knew them as well as anyone did, but my suspicions are running high at this point. Boris stated that William wrote a book on anatomy at age 5. No one seems to have ever seen even a portion of such a manuscript. William did graduate cum laude from Harvard. But entrance and even excelling then were not the accomplishment they would be now. It was fun to reread again, even for me, and the comments are exceptional throughout.
Here’s a bit about Boris’s career. He ran a sanitarium in Portsmouth NH at what had been the Frank Jones Mansion. The link will give you a flavor. In addition to educational theories, he specialized in hypnosis, dreams, and dissociation, and opposed Freud.
It is hard to be fair to Sidis from this distance. His book The Tribes and The States, about the 100,000-year history of American Indians, is insanely wrong. He gets their genetics, languages, and government badly wrong. But I am not certain what knowledge was available to him in the early 20th C. Though his theories did not turn out to be true, he may have had ideas worth exploring – no worse than the theories of other experts – based on what was known. I suspect not. He also believed in Atlantis, which figures prominently in his discussion, and reads into the known historical record with great certainty things that even then would have been highly speculative. He insists that “farthest Thule,” where Phoenicians and others raided for slaves was Newfoundland. There is simply no evidence this is so.
I have asked James of “I Don’t Know But…” (sidebar) to evaluate his treatise on reversible universes, and parts of our universe where the Second Law of Thermodynamics runs in reverse, The Animate and the Inanimate. It seems like a 70’s physics undergrad on weed, frankly. But then, most physics beyond Einstein’s Special Relativity sounds like that to me anyway, so I’m no judge. Perhaps it’s brilliant.
His later writing on freedoms and rights seems to be mere rambling. His sister claimed that Billy could speak all the languages in the world, others more modestly put his total at fifty, and Boris’s at 27. How do we know this? Who could tell? This sister, Helena, is also the source for his IQ being in the range of 250-300 – that he had tested on a civil service exam at 254 later in life. Actually, he had finished 254th in the country that year, according to another report. A creditable accomplishment, but not genius by any stretch.
The discussion from the first part about whether someone gets the adjective intelligent without some body of accomplishment is interesting, and I will not neglect it. The idea that Sidis was HFA/Asperger-y also deserves some consideration and may explain his thinking at least as well as the genius/fraud continuum. Yet I am hesitant to go there, as dishonest puffery does not tend to be associated with the Autism spectrum. It’s not unknown, but being offended by minor deviations from the truth is more common.
And Another One Bites The Dust - Part One
Prodigy (Sidis Part Three)
About That 1869 Harvard Entrance Exam (Part 3A)
Smart, Wealthy, Athletic - What It Means To Be Intelligent. A Digression On IQ.
But If It's True...
Saturday, April 26, 2025
William James Sidis
Another post with a lot of links to keep you entertained while I am away. Please comment here rather than at the individual links. Billy Sidis was reputed at one time to have the highest IQ ever, at 254. He was in Ripley's I think, the king of barely-sourced newspaper factoids. Most of my posts are longish, as are a few of the comments.
I first heard about Sidis from Grady Towers' essay "The Outsiders," in the late 80's. Perhaps vaguely before then, because he was from Boston. I wrote that up talking about Grady, whose story was also tragic and interesting.
And Another One Bites The Dust. An introduction as to why Sidis might not be the real deal. 7 comments, including the first of the argumentative ones.
The Doubt I discuss what the evidence of his IQ 254 or thereabouts is, and my initial suspicions that I want to "interrogate it" as we say these days. 14 comments, and things are heating up. One person accuses me that I thought Sidis was not all that smart, another calls him an outright fraud with no mathematical ability. Both thought it best to be insulting to me along the way as well. Thanks to Texan 99 for understanding what I actually said, deciding she agreed with it, and calmly defending it while I was getting testy with the others. Thanks to James for evaluating Sidis's writings about physics. Great fun, in retrospect.
Prodigy About whether genius always shows up in childhood. One comment, very decent.
About That Harvard Exam One of the critics suggested that entrance into Harvard in those days was always an indication of high intelligence, and therefore Sidis entering at 11 puts him in the absolute top rank. We examine the forbidding looking exam in detail and see that it is a bit less than that. 14 comments again, and this time even more snippy. I stand by my original opinion, thank you very much.
Smart, Wealthy, Athletic. A digression about definitions. One comment, quite to the point, by Texan99 again.
But If It's True We come to the final weighing. 4 comments, everyone has calmed down or left.
Monday, August 12, 2019
The 1%
I have written nearly 6400 posts, so we have now reached the 1% most popular, starting from #61-65.
Eastern Dialects. American language maps endless fascinate me. Update: I did not include a link to Aschmann's site, which provides a larger version of the map, for even more fun. November 2010.
Speaking of maps, Diversity is our Strength. April 2013
Other Victims. Many of the greater victims of scandals are invisible. October 2017
Church Music. I was opinionated, and it was controversial. I'm still right and you're all wrong. July 2015.
The Outsiders. Since I wrote this in July 2008 there is more to say about the author and the topic. The comments are irritating, including my own. I subsequently wrote in depth about William James Sidis, and I believe that series will be highlighted further along in the countdown.
It was perhaps inevitable that Grady Towers would gravitate to the subject of Sidis. Grady qualified for the next society up, the Mega Society, for those with one-in-a-million IQ, cutoff 176. He had been a prodigy himself, almost completing a PhD in Anthropology at age 20, but by the time I knew him (via journal and correspondence), he was usually homeless, working odd jobs across the Southwest, writing on borrowed typewriters and sending mathematical proofs - usually number theory - to whoever would have them. As I had been out of touch with the high-IQ societies for years at that point, I did not know about Grady's bizarre murder, and subsequent conviction of his killer. Going through old correspondence earlier this year I found I still have my letters from Grady in the 1980s.
Eastern Dialects. American language maps endless fascinate me. Update: I did not include a link to Aschmann's site, which provides a larger version of the map, for even more fun. November 2010.
Speaking of maps, Diversity is our Strength. April 2013
Other Victims. Many of the greater victims of scandals are invisible. October 2017
Church Music. I was opinionated, and it was controversial. I'm still right and you're all wrong. July 2015.
The Outsiders. Since I wrote this in July 2008 there is more to say about the author and the topic. The comments are irritating, including my own. I subsequently wrote in depth about William James Sidis, and I believe that series will be highlighted further along in the countdown.
It was perhaps inevitable that Grady Towers would gravitate to the subject of Sidis. Grady qualified for the next society up, the Mega Society, for those with one-in-a-million IQ, cutoff 176. He had been a prodigy himself, almost completing a PhD in Anthropology at age 20, but by the time I knew him (via journal and correspondence), he was usually homeless, working odd jobs across the Southwest, writing on borrowed typewriters and sending mathematical proofs - usually number theory - to whoever would have them. As I had been out of touch with the high-IQ societies for years at that point, I did not know about Grady's bizarre murder, and subsequent conviction of his killer. Going through old correspondence earlier this year I found I still have my letters from Grady in the 1980s.
Friday, March 16, 2018
William James Sidis
This kept coming up over at Quora, so I am linking to my several posts about William Sidis, from 2011. Many of you are in the comments, and James figures prominently. As this is multiple posts, I will let it cover a few days.
I no longer get notifications from Quora, and I am relieved. I kept nibbling back in, even though I told myself I was going to quit. I think I marked their email notification as spam by mistake, and haven't heard from them since.
I no longer get notifications from Quora, and I am relieved. I kept nibbling back in, even though I told myself I was going to quit. I think I marked their email notification as spam by mistake, and haven't heard from them since.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Prodigy (Sidis Part Three)
Back in 1988, Adragon DeMello was big news in the IQ societies. A math wizard graduating from a university in the California system at age 11, his father was looking for a graduate school which would accept him. It didn't go well from there. He had just scraped by to get the degree, it later was revealed, no graduate school would touch him, his parents fought over custody, and eventually a SWAT team had to pull him from his father's house. He then went to junior high school under another name and "got his childhood back." Watching that story unfold is perhaps why I am so suspicious of Boris Sidis.
Opinions were all over the map in the newsletters. Some were angry that graduate schools could be so blinkered as to not accept a genius just because it didn't fit their norm. Others were worried about the emotional impact on the boy, wondering if this father were pushing him too much (he was). A third group wondered if it were all quite true. In that pool of people, many of whom had been prodigies themselves, the claims seemed just a bit too far. I was well out of my league in that. I had thought I might lay some claim to significant precocity before joining a few of those groups, but quickly had that theory slapped down. There, more than anywhere, I learned that there is always a faster gun. In many cases, much faster.
Only one person I recall asked why there seemed to be an assumption that the highest IQ's must also be early bloomers, precocities of the highest order. He had not seemed more than above-average as a child, even to himself, and challenged the assumption that genius had to show at young, even ridiculously young, ages. I don't know why that didn't impress me more then. I barely considered it. It didn't fit my narrative, I suppose. But I have come to regard it as an excellent point. IQ is fairly stable over time, but the sample set is too small to see if that correlation is as strong at the extremes as it is in the middle ranges. We simply don't know.
We tend to expect that musical and mathematical, and related types like chess geniuses must have been prodigies. Often they were. But I don't know if we should consider that the only possible narrative. We don't have the same expectation for writers, artists, or philosophers.
Opinions were all over the map in the newsletters. Some were angry that graduate schools could be so blinkered as to not accept a genius just because it didn't fit their norm. Others were worried about the emotional impact on the boy, wondering if this father were pushing him too much (he was). A third group wondered if it were all quite true. In that pool of people, many of whom had been prodigies themselves, the claims seemed just a bit too far. I was well out of my league in that. I had thought I might lay some claim to significant precocity before joining a few of those groups, but quickly had that theory slapped down. There, more than anywhere, I learned that there is always a faster gun. In many cases, much faster.
Only one person I recall asked why there seemed to be an assumption that the highest IQ's must also be early bloomers, precocities of the highest order. He had not seemed more than above-average as a child, even to himself, and challenged the assumption that genius had to show at young, even ridiculously young, ages. I don't know why that didn't impress me more then. I barely considered it. It didn't fit my narrative, I suppose. But I have come to regard it as an excellent point. IQ is fairly stable over time, but the sample set is too small to see if that correlation is as strong at the extremes as it is in the middle ranges. We simply don't know.
We tend to expect that musical and mathematical, and related types like chess geniuses must have been prodigies. Often they were. But I don't know if we should consider that the only possible narrative. We don't have the same expectation for writers, artists, or philosophers.
Monday, April 18, 2016
Post 4900 - Education
This came up in an email exchange. It is not well-edited on my part, yet I though it would have some interest. If you have been reading here long, not much will be new to you. The link to a previous post of mine includes a couple of you in the comments section, in fact.
The occasion for my response was an essay by Patrick Dineen at Notre Dame, How A Generation Lost Its Common Culture. I remember it when it came out this winter. It is a good example of a standard theme in discussing modern students.
My response:
So everyone had that as
shared culture. We have a much more fragmented culture now, so that
only popular culture is held in common. I think that will increase. I
hate it, but I think that is what is. This is also the response when activists against the Eurocentric, Dead White Males version of civilisation complain that there are no women, no blacks, no gays, non Eastern philosophies, no Latinas, no indigenous peoples represented in our culture. They don't know the half of it. Tolkien fought to have English Literature added to the syllabus at Oxford in the 20th C! Beowulf, Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, were optional add-ons. American authors were not even mentioned, and that was largely true even in America until after WWII. You read those things on your own, or got together with like-minded others to discuss them. Those were not considered required material to be held in common. The Bible and/or the Book of Common Prayer were read by everyone who could read - on their own. That was largely true for Shakespeare as well, though he had made inroads. At school for the educated it was Latin and Greek. Ancient History. Trigonometry.
The fragmentation of our shared literary and historical culture, then is simply a place farther down the road we started traveling decades ago.
The occasion for my response was an essay by Patrick Dineen at Notre Dame, How A Generation Lost Its Common Culture. I remember it when it came out this winter. It is a good example of a standard theme in discussing modern students.
But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno? Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?
My response:
First, most people have never known these things, even in our
previous ages of supposed great educational system and common culture.
ED Hirsch and Allan Bloom were moaning about this 30 years ago as if the
collapse had already occurred and we could just now be brought back
from the brink. CS Lewis says something like it in his 1954 Inaugural
lecture De Descriptione Temporum at Cambridge where he was appointed to a chair in Medieval and
Renaissance Literature near the end of his career.
Think of that: At one of the two elite universities in England in
1954, in a much more hierarchical culture where the middle and lower
classes seldom qualify, speaking to students who are actually studying
many of the great works of common heritage, Lewis is conscious of a
divide between his culture and theirs - a loss of common ground that is
new in the world with their generation. And Lewis pushes it very far back indeed. "As for the area and the tempo of the two deaths, if one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth."
A
personal example. You may remember that I went to College with Glenn
Close, back when she was Glennie Wade. She was a year ahead of me at
W&M in the Theater dept and we had four courses together. She ended
up Phi Beta Kappa, and was generally knowledgeable about Stuff. When
she did that movie...hmmm...hmmm..."The Big Chill" they played Trivial
Pursuit on the set a lot which was one of the things that launched the
game in popularity, and she was known to be very good at it. She was
also something of a missionary kid, as her family joined Moral
Re-Armament a rather cultish Christian groups when she was 7. When we
discussed John Osborne's play "Luther" in class, she barely knew who he
was. She had no idea what the 95 Theses were, and this would have been
her senior year. Nor did several others in the class. So even among
those who know a great deal about our common culture, there are gaps We
falsely remember that we "knew about" Plato when we were 16, when the
reality is we had heard of him at 16, and gradually added bits of
knowledge about him over the years. The common culture of even the
wealthy sons who read Greek and Latin was pretty narrow. They all read
Livy in high school, and no one reads Livy anymore, so it looks very
impressive when they publish entrance exams or graduation tests from the
19th C to intimidate the modern reader into how smart those previous
students were and how little we know now. Whoa, look, there's Livy,
who is a really obscure Latin writer that they apparently knew a lot
about. Wow, they musta been really smart! Not really. I wrote about it a couple of years ago, when discussing William James Sidis, who
supposedly had the highest IQ ever. (Sidis didn't, BTW. He was very smart, but the claims are overstated.)
I
don't think, as is blithely claimed, that every age thinks that the
previous eras were smarter and the rising generation poorly educated,
but there's no difference every century really. I believe something of
both claims. We are much smarter now, and since nutrition started
improving for the general population in the past few centuries, we are
smarter every decade. I think that accelerated about a hundred years
ago and topped out in the late 20th C. If you traveled in time to 1880,
nothing would impress you so much as what dolts people were, and how
hard it was to find an intelligent conversation. On the other hand, the
amount of common culture among the educated and even partly educated
was much greater than now. Everyone, absolutely everyone in America read
the King James Bible and Shakespeare. Even when they misunderstood
what was in front of them, because they extracted what meanings the
could from single texts - "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit" -
it was at least a single stewpot that everyone was eating from. Did
you ever wonder why memorising single verses and relying on proof texts
is so common in the Church, and most of what we know of Shakespeare is
individual phrases that have embedded into the language, even though we
forget where they come from? That's why. There were two things people
read, plus maybe Pilgrims' Progress or something about
agriculture or etiquette or a copy of the Constitution, and if you were
lucky a book of ancient history might show up. And newspapers once/week.
Only if you had a tutor or later schooling did you hear about Plato or
Marcus Aurelius. Though if you did have a tutor or later school, that's
who you got. There weren't many choices on the menu, as there are now.
The fragmentation of our shared literary and historical culture, then is simply a place farther down the road we started traveling decades ago.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
About That Harvard Exam (Sidis Part 3A)
An anonymous commenter linked to the 1869 Harvard entrance exam that was dug up by a NYTimes writer and made the rounds last year. It looks pretty intimidating at first glance, and the commenter used it as evidence that Billy Sidis's entrance into Harvard in 1909 was a pretty solid accomplishment in itself. Interestingly, the boy's getting in was probably even better than the exam would indicate. Harvard was no great shakes in 1869, but had improved considerably by 1909, and was one of the world's best by then. I will note that it was still not what we think of today. Competitive university admission is mostly a post WWII, or even post 1960 phenomenon. Many of the brightest did indeed go to the Ivies, the Little Ivies, or the Seven Sisters,* but you simply couldn't count on it. The rich and the alums got their kids in, and nationally, people stayed closer to home and many of the brightest went to other schools, far more than, say, in 1990.
The gap exactly covers the period of Charles William Eliot's presidency of Harvard, if you want more background than I will give here.
But the test. That Latin and Greek looks awfully impressive right out of the gate. If you are older, and/or a reader of history, and/or a traditionalist, you may still have Latin Envy, believing that a "proper" education must include it, and Greek! Why, that just seals it. A different alphabet and everything. Weren't they smart, then?
No, not especially. They had had six years of Latin and four of Greek by then, whether by tutor or at academy. If you took any languages at all in late 20th C, and make the mental comparison of what, exactly, they were being asked to do, it looks much less impressive. Note also, there was a standard set of works studied in those languages, which these questions are drawn from, plus frequent drill in grammar. Even if you had Latin yourself, you should note that the primary authors studied now are not quite the same as studied then, nor in quite the same way. These exam questions are essentially "Did you have proper teachers, are you reasonably bright, and did you make a moderate effort these last few years?"
Before I get into the math, let me note the major difference, then and now. Look at what is missing in this exam. There is no biology, no chemistry, no physics, and certainly no other sciences such as geology or economics. There are no questions on English Literature - no Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton - and certainly no American literature (horrors! To even imagine such a thing!). No modern languages, no history other than ancient, no world events, no weather, no basic medicine. Even deeper, no methods of research, and no use of reference materials. Because these were not taught to young men. They were taught English Composition and Grammar, Latin and Greek, Ancient History, and the mathematics you see here. That's it.
Thus, their facility with L&G is dropping even farther down the list of impressiveness. Most of what 7th-12th graders have to learn today they did not have to even pretend to know. They were being trained to be gentlemen. The push for more useful arts was just beginning in this country.
The mathematics would look worrisome at first, but on closer examination, not so. The arithmetic is mostly just big numbers, and irritating, tedious working by hand. We forget mathematics that we don't use very quickly, but these students were still immersed.
Two stories: I was a math wizard, but I had to relearn a lot of it each time a son got beyond the first few weeks of algebra in HS. The terms and symbols were familiar, but I couldn't remember where they went. I could get it back, but I had to sit and stare, consult the index, and trial-and-error a bit. All year, for both algebra and geometry. (And as the first two seldom needed help, I was even less prepared for the others.) Story 2: There was a math magazine when I was in school, which posed problems each month. It printed the names of those who solved them the next month. I did a few months of that in 12th grade. Because of going to St Paul's for summer studies, I recognised the names of many of the other NH students who got problems right. One month, there was a problem where I was the only kid in the country to submit a right answer - something about rotating one parabola along another and describing where the focus went. Very cool. I pretended, in my conceit , that I was the only one able to get it, which was insane. How many students, even the nerdy math ones, read magazines and submitted problems? Fast forward one year. I was in a different type of math at college, but for some reason wanted to review my accomplishment from the year before. Narcissism, likely. I could not follow the solution I had myself written, only one year later.
We lose new abstract thoughts quickly, unless they are used. Look at the logarithms, trig, and plane geometry in the exam. Even if you can't even remember how to begin to solve it now, do you recognise the words and ideas? Do you have some recollection of solving problems sort of like that? Then in all likelihood, you could have done those problems when you were in 11th-12th grade. And especially, if you didn't have to study any Biochem, Shakespeare, or Intro to Psychology as well. If you had the same five subjects pretty much year after year, you'd know 'em quite well.
Also - there was some different emphasis in what maths were taught then. Trig was the top shelf, and you got two years of drill in it. No sets, calculus, or statistics for you.
Also - read the directions. See how few questions were required.
Also - it doesn't say what a passing score was, does it?
185 out of 215 applicants got into Harvard that year.
*Fun trivia test for you: name 'em. I got five on my first try, then a sixth popped into my head a year or so later (this was before internet). I never did get the seventh until I looked it up.
The gap exactly covers the period of Charles William Eliot's presidency of Harvard, if you want more background than I will give here.
But the test. That Latin and Greek looks awfully impressive right out of the gate. If you are older, and/or a reader of history, and/or a traditionalist, you may still have Latin Envy, believing that a "proper" education must include it, and Greek! Why, that just seals it. A different alphabet and everything. Weren't they smart, then?
No, not especially. They had had six years of Latin and four of Greek by then, whether by tutor or at academy. If you took any languages at all in late 20th C, and make the mental comparison of what, exactly, they were being asked to do, it looks much less impressive. Note also, there was a standard set of works studied in those languages, which these questions are drawn from, plus frequent drill in grammar. Even if you had Latin yourself, you should note that the primary authors studied now are not quite the same as studied then, nor in quite the same way. These exam questions are essentially "Did you have proper teachers, are you reasonably bright, and did you make a moderate effort these last few years?"
Before I get into the math, let me note the major difference, then and now. Look at what is missing in this exam. There is no biology, no chemistry, no physics, and certainly no other sciences such as geology or economics. There are no questions on English Literature - no Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton - and certainly no American literature (horrors! To even imagine such a thing!). No modern languages, no history other than ancient, no world events, no weather, no basic medicine. Even deeper, no methods of research, and no use of reference materials. Because these were not taught to young men. They were taught English Composition and Grammar, Latin and Greek, Ancient History, and the mathematics you see here. That's it.
Thus, their facility with L&G is dropping even farther down the list of impressiveness. Most of what 7th-12th graders have to learn today they did not have to even pretend to know. They were being trained to be gentlemen. The push for more useful arts was just beginning in this country.
The mathematics would look worrisome at first, but on closer examination, not so. The arithmetic is mostly just big numbers, and irritating, tedious working by hand. We forget mathematics that we don't use very quickly, but these students were still immersed.
Two stories: I was a math wizard, but I had to relearn a lot of it each time a son got beyond the first few weeks of algebra in HS. The terms and symbols were familiar, but I couldn't remember where they went. I could get it back, but I had to sit and stare, consult the index, and trial-and-error a bit. All year, for both algebra and geometry. (And as the first two seldom needed help, I was even less prepared for the others.) Story 2: There was a math magazine when I was in school, which posed problems each month. It printed the names of those who solved them the next month. I did a few months of that in 12th grade. Because of going to St Paul's for summer studies, I recognised the names of many of the other NH students who got problems right. One month, there was a problem where I was the only kid in the country to submit a right answer - something about rotating one parabola along another and describing where the focus went. Very cool. I pretended, in my conceit , that I was the only one able to get it, which was insane. How many students, even the nerdy math ones, read magazines and submitted problems? Fast forward one year. I was in a different type of math at college, but for some reason wanted to review my accomplishment from the year before. Narcissism, likely. I could not follow the solution I had myself written, only one year later.
We lose new abstract thoughts quickly, unless they are used. Look at the logarithms, trig, and plane geometry in the exam. Even if you can't even remember how to begin to solve it now, do you recognise the words and ideas? Do you have some recollection of solving problems sort of like that? Then in all likelihood, you could have done those problems when you were in 11th-12th grade. And especially, if you didn't have to study any Biochem, Shakespeare, or Intro to Psychology as well. If you had the same five subjects pretty much year after year, you'd know 'em quite well.
Also - there was some different emphasis in what maths were taught then. Trig was the top shelf, and you got two years of drill in it. No sets, calculus, or statistics for you.
Also - read the directions. See how few questions were required.
Also - it doesn't say what a passing score was, does it?
185 out of 215 applicants got into Harvard that year.
*Fun trivia test for you: name 'em. I got five on my first try, then a sixth popped into my head a year or so later (this was before internet). I never did get the seventh until I looked it up.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Smart, Wealthy, Athletic – A Digression on IQ
We can’t measure any of the above with precision, because their
meanings are elusive. We have approximate, somewhat similar ideas what we mean,
but can’t nail them down. We think if
Rasheed Wallace had been just a little smarter, then he could have (fill in
the blank – mine is “kept himself in just a little bit better shape in 2010 and
won us a championship). But his POV is “I made millions of dollars, won
championship rings, had a great time, didn’t force a disabling injuring –
explain to me how I’m the one who got this wrong.” Uh, good point,
that. Literature is full of smart people
figuring out how to win at life in quiet ways that don’t look as
successful – Mycroft Holmes being a good example.
We can measure riches by reading the Fortune 500 list –and
we can play with the list to take liquidity, control, or security into
consideration. But philosophy, religion,
and literature are likewise chockablock full of discussions of True Wealth,
True Riches. The most entertaining is
the Talmudic give-and-take recorded by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
"Who is wealthy? He who has pleasure in his wealth": this is the view of Rabbi Meir. Rabbi Tarfon said: "He who possesses a hundred vineyards, a hundred fields, and a hundred servants working in them". Rabbi Akiva said: "He who has a wife who is comely in good deeds". Rabbi Jose said: "He who has a toilet near his table"This was the kind of table-talk in which the rabbis delighted, coming at a subject from all angles, and perhaps not too seriously. Rabbi Meir gives a philosophical answer: wealth is a state of mind, rejoicing in what you have, whether it is much or little. Rabbi Tarfon won't have any of it: wealth is wealth, and let's not evade the issue. Rabbi Akiva tells us frankly that someone who has a good wife is wealthy whatever else he lacks. And Rabbi Jose replies in the spirit of "If I were a wealthy man". Oy, If only I didn't have to go so far to the toilet, that would be riches indeed.“Wealth and Poverty, a Jewish Analysis” Social Affairs Unit 1985
Every four years we call the winner of the Olympic Decathlon
“The World’s Greatest Athlete,” then forget who he is and pay 100,000 other
people more money to be athletes. So we
don’t really mean that. If we are
pressed, we will define athletic along some measures of strength,
endurance, speed, coordination, and flexibility. We know what we mean approximately, and we
know it when we see it.
When I use the word intelligence in discussing Sidis or
other prodigies, I am choosing a meaning closer to IQ than to smart,
not because I think IQ is more important, but because we already have a word
for smart, and I am making a distiction.
Intelligence is g-factor, candlepower. It has components of analogising, processing
speed, and memory (at least) and is not quite definable. (In New England, we
often make the distiction with our favorite intensifier. Smaht could mean cleverness or wisdom
– and can be used ironically, but wicked smaht is something closer to
the IQ meaning of intelligence.)
Thursday, July 17, 2008
The Outsiders
I had a fascinating correspondence with Grady Towers in the pre-email days of my Prometheus Society membership. Grady succeeded me briefly as president. I remember this essay coming out in Gift of Fire, the in-house publication poorly-printed in the days just after mimeographs. It convinced me to stick around and give the society one more chance. The essay starts with a discussion - fascinating but based on unreliable (and probably exaggerated) information - of William James Sidis, who, it is claimed, had the highest IQ in history. But the meat of the essay is the extended discussion whether the superintelligent are more likely to be socially inept and isolated. Grady and many others lean toward the explanation that people of high-to-very-high IQ are better socially adjusted than average, but that something starts to happen around the 155 range, and there is a large percentage of misfits.
The update is that Asperger Syndrome was little-known and poorly understood at that time. There is growing speculation that some manifestations of AS or High-Functioning Autism are common in the extreme range of ability for certain disciplines, which would be a confounding factor in measuring the social adjustment of those of ultra-high IQ. Incidentally, I no longer see or classify myself as an ultra High. I think test accidents and personality traits made it look that way, but were partly an illusion.
The update is that Asperger Syndrome was little-known and poorly understood at that time. There is growing speculation that some manifestations of AS or High-Functioning Autism are common in the extreme range of ability for certain disciplines, which would be a confounding factor in measuring the social adjustment of those of ultra-high IQ. Incidentally, I no longer see or classify myself as an ultra High. I think test accidents and personality traits made it look that way, but were partly an illusion.
Saturday, April 09, 2016
Calvin Openshaw, MD,
...Of Hutchinson, KS, years ago.
I was emptying an old filing cabinet with an eye to getting it out of the house. I don't know yet whether metal filing cabinets are useful to anyone or just go to the dump now, but in either case, it is not useful here. There is a lot of pre-internet reference material here: menus of local restaurants, driving maps, chords and lyrics to songs, handouts from Bible studies.
A few surprises: I had gotten rid of what I had thought was an enormous amount of Dungeons & Dragons material a few years ago: Cities with sketch information on hundreds of shops and shopkeepers, calendars of made up saints days for clerics to choose from, lists of library titles from wizards' castles. I found an equal or greater amount again, and chucked it all. When I look back over my life and wonder what I have spent my time on and where it all went, I am again reminded that in the early 80's I spent hours every week creating alternate worlds. Not especially good ones, but about as good as those that were commercially available, and more detailed. I am good at naming things, or was.
Surprise #2 was correspondence from small Christian publications that had published my stuff in that era. I have always regarded myself as someone who didn't write for publication until I had a blog site. That's almost true, but I was reminded it's not quite true.
Surprise #3 was all my 1980's material from IQ societies. I had thought I had only kept some back issues of Gift of Fire and offloaded the rest to Goffstown recycling twenty years ago. Apparently not. Conceit or nostalgia kept them in Drawer 2. This time I did trash a lot more. I still may keep back issues, as they are hard to replace. Though I have to think that if even I don't want to browse them again no one else is going to either.
What struck to the heart was the correspondence. There were a few letters from Grady Towers. Grady is still remembered in IQ circles for his essay The Outsiders. I agreed with much of it at the time but have since become more suspicious. He relies too heavily on the biography of supposed IQ record-holder William James Sidis, who I have discussed at length here. Still, there's something to it.I lost touch with him in the 1990's, and he seemed to be growing paranoid. In the last few years I learned he had been strangely and horribly murdered in 2000. Reading his odd handwriting and odd ideas gave that shiver we experience when we encounter the uncanny.
Sadder but more comforting were the many letters from Cal Openshaw who was an enormous encouragement to me in those years. I had not yet made my peace with not being famous and admired and felt very much a failure. Dr. Openshaw was a generation older, a member of the same societies, and admired my writing. This encouragement came at its most needed time, I still quote some to the things he wrote, even though it was not his intent to give me advice. When I think of him it reminds me to be encouraging, especially to those younger than myself. I used to be good at it.
He was diagnosed with cancer in 1990 and died the next year. I have long held onto his statement after receiving the diagnosis: "Let's see if I can do myself what I have been telling my patients to do all these years." I quoted that to a physician friend who had his own cancer diagnosis this year.
I see no need to keep the letters - I wrote to his widow years ago telling her how much Cal had meant to me, asking her to pass this on to his children as well. She replied graciously, thanking me for remembering. I think of him in certain contexts anyway, even without the physical reminders. Yet I can't quite put them in the recycling bin with the imaginary countries and 2002 maps of Kentucky. They may live to see another weeding at a later date.
I was emptying an old filing cabinet with an eye to getting it out of the house. I don't know yet whether metal filing cabinets are useful to anyone or just go to the dump now, but in either case, it is not useful here. There is a lot of pre-internet reference material here: menus of local restaurants, driving maps, chords and lyrics to songs, handouts from Bible studies.
A few surprises: I had gotten rid of what I had thought was an enormous amount of Dungeons & Dragons material a few years ago: Cities with sketch information on hundreds of shops and shopkeepers, calendars of made up saints days for clerics to choose from, lists of library titles from wizards' castles. I found an equal or greater amount again, and chucked it all. When I look back over my life and wonder what I have spent my time on and where it all went, I am again reminded that in the early 80's I spent hours every week creating alternate worlds. Not especially good ones, but about as good as those that were commercially available, and more detailed. I am good at naming things, or was.
Surprise #2 was correspondence from small Christian publications that had published my stuff in that era. I have always regarded myself as someone who didn't write for publication until I had a blog site. That's almost true, but I was reminded it's not quite true.
Surprise #3 was all my 1980's material from IQ societies. I had thought I had only kept some back issues of Gift of Fire and offloaded the rest to Goffstown recycling twenty years ago. Apparently not. Conceit or nostalgia kept them in Drawer 2. This time I did trash a lot more. I still may keep back issues, as they are hard to replace. Though I have to think that if even I don't want to browse them again no one else is going to either.
What struck to the heart was the correspondence. There were a few letters from Grady Towers. Grady is still remembered in IQ circles for his essay The Outsiders. I agreed with much of it at the time but have since become more suspicious. He relies too heavily on the biography of supposed IQ record-holder William James Sidis, who I have discussed at length here. Still, there's something to it.I lost touch with him in the 1990's, and he seemed to be growing paranoid. In the last few years I learned he had been strangely and horribly murdered in 2000. Reading his odd handwriting and odd ideas gave that shiver we experience when we encounter the uncanny.
Sadder but more comforting were the many letters from Cal Openshaw who was an enormous encouragement to me in those years. I had not yet made my peace with not being famous and admired and felt very much a failure. Dr. Openshaw was a generation older, a member of the same societies, and admired my writing. This encouragement came at its most needed time, I still quote some to the things he wrote, even though it was not his intent to give me advice. When I think of him it reminds me to be encouraging, especially to those younger than myself. I used to be good at it.
He was diagnosed with cancer in 1990 and died the next year. I have long held onto his statement after receiving the diagnosis: "Let's see if I can do myself what I have been telling my patients to do all these years." I quoted that to a physician friend who had his own cancer diagnosis this year.
I see no need to keep the letters - I wrote to his widow years ago telling her how much Cal had meant to me, asking her to pass this on to his children as well. She replied graciously, thanking me for remembering. I think of him in certain contexts anyway, even without the physical reminders. Yet I can't quite put them in the recycling bin with the imaginary countries and 2002 maps of Kentucky. They may live to see another weeding at a later date.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)