William James Sidis was a child prodigy. By 18 months old, he could read The New York Times. He entered Harvard University at the age of 11, and a year later he was holding a lecture on 4-dimensional mathematics to professors. I found out about his story in a YouTube video (see below), and his Wikipedia page agrees with it - at least in broad terms.

The story is a very sad one, and I’d like to highlight 3 things about it:

  1. His father appears to have been correct: geniuses are made, not born. The ethics of this don’t look good though.
  2. Being extremely smart does not make somebody wise, nor happy. (I don’t really believe the IQ of 250-300, but that doesn’t really matter.)
  3. People suck. I mostly agree with the video’s conclusion that it was the world that failed William.

This is not the only story of a genius made that I know of: Judit Polgar is the other example:

Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster, widely regarded as the strongest female chess player of all time. […] Polgár was a chess prodigy, and at age 12 became the youngest player to break into the FIDE top-100 rating list, ranked 55 in the January 1989 list. In 1991, she became the youngest player at the time to achieve the title of Grandmaster… […] Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father, László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. “Geniuses are made, not born,” was László’s thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject.

So it does look like that it’s true, or at least has truth to it: geniuses are made, not born, which I do think is a noteworthy discovery. But the ethics of it? Oh, man. I do not think it would pass any university’s ethics board, and for good reason. If nothing else, I would argue that doing this intentionally sets the child up to be miserable, growing up into a world that they don’t and can’t fit very well into. Plenty of people get that experience already: we should not add to it.