[duhprey]

For some reason I want to read heavily between the lines of the wikipedia summary, and I find it incredibly sad. I mean in the first place my knee jerk reaction is to equivocate "I'm still good enough, even if I didn't solve diffeq problems at 6. My son's okay even if he still doesn't read at the age of 4."

But I don't want to imagine the kind of expectation people put on this kid (when he was a kid). Cynically, I suppose as I read I thought "oh yeah what's he done now? We still have cancer and no unified field theory. Does P=NP?! huh?" and yet under that was the expectation "well this guy should be curing cancer and resolving open problems!"

No wonder he escaped to something ordinary (poor Civil Engineers, though, what a bad rap that is ... my profession is the most ordinary!) People haven't changed much since the dark ages (or before). They still expect miracles and magic to cure their woes, they just expect it now from Science.

It agrees with me that accomplishment comes after the 120 IQ...heck I'm barely above the marker.. shwoo. But it comes in increments. It comes in mostly in pieces we have to put together. Einstein didn't make the world a better place single-handedly, it was the engineers who came after and created GPS (for instance) that did it. There's no reason this guy should have created miracles with his IQ, we probably don't have enough of the base research to solve that (whichever) problem, yet.

Instead, he's improved the world a bit (quite a bit in the sector of civil engineering apparently). Honestly, the universe is miracle enough. The fact that we can make it slightly better by our actions and increase joy in the miracle of existence at all is a good thing. Some people do a better job of that with much smaller IQs.