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Given his upbringing, I would say he never had the potential in the first place. From how he talks about his time at NASA, it seems like he was used as an equation-solving tool 10 years.

“At that time, I led my life like a machine ― I woke up, solved the daily assigned equation, ate, slept, and so forth. I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I was lonely and had no friends,”

His choices now are the result of how NASA as an institution treated him.

Having the highest IQ is great for problem solving. But why should he empathize with the problems of the world when no one did the same for him?