This story is especially clear and dramatic (and well documented) but I've often thought this happens in every generation: the people who lead (businesses and nations) when they are in their 40s and 50s are often people who boldly go out and discover the world while they are in their teens and 20s, and so they take on a bit more risk than the average citizen, and this includes physical risk (whether in travel or informal athletics), and so, "at the margins" as an economist would say, a certain percentage of them are dead before they reach the age of 30. So, for every generation, a few of the most brilliant lights are missing by the time the generation reaches its 40s and 50s. The people who do become leaders are, to an extent, the ones who simply got lucky -- many of them have some stories to tell about times they took a risk and were surprised to live. For obvious reasons, we don't hear the stories from the folks who took a risk and did not survive.
(One of my favorite anecdotes on this subject: One of the best entrepreneurs I know went down to Mexico and hitchhiked all over when she was 18 years old. And every family that picked her up told her that what she was doing was very dangerous and that she was very lucky to be picked up by that family, instead of someone more dangerous. But at the time she was very innocent. 20 years later I ran into her and I was like "You know what you did was crazy?" and she was like "Now that I think about it, I'm amazed that I survived.")
This isn’t really true except for random edge cases. The people leading countries go to school and get law degrees. People leading business got college degrees or worked in business for decades.
You can pull edge cases like Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, but even then he spent a lot of time in his 20s running his business.
If you define 'leading countries' narrowly enough, everyone in that category becomes a random edge case.
Less flippantly, you should expect people running high-variance strategies to be overrepresented at the top. The people leading countries may go to school and get law degrees, but if they stay the path of doing what everyone else does but better, they end up an unremarkable partner at a law firm or something, not POTUS or Bezos or Musk. They don't have to literally do life-threateningly dangerous things (although I'm sure the propensity correlates and that's what the previous poster was talking about), but they do have to be willing to risk the comfortable life that was all but guaranteed for them.
This logic would work if competition didn’t exist and no one ever made huge unforced errors. In the world as is Buffet, Gates, Bezos and Musk are among the richest people ever. Their parents were wealthy but nothing remotely comparable. The Carnegies and Rockefeller families are still rich but even if you add all of them together they’re not a shadow the importance the founders of the fortunes had.
Political dynasties are important but competition erodes them too. Who’s the most important Kennedy under 40? Whoever they are they’re not that important.
Coming from wealthy, well connected families isn't the only reason those people are where they are today, but it certainly helped. They had the resources they needed to start their companies readily available.
Within this comparison, will the various children of Musk or Gates or Buffet be as memoriable as their parents, or will they end up like the Kennedys, where yeah they exist and probably have a bunch of money, but they're "not important".
I'd guess those children will be even less important than the Kennedys. Among the voting public, last name recognition plays a large role. When publicly traded companies choose a CEO, last name recognition is much less important. Gates is also giving away almost all his wealth so his kids won't get it. For the others, inheritance tax will take a significant fraction, and the money will be divided between multiple children.
I'll believe it when I see it.
During the timeframe where he said he'd give away half of his money he did spend a whole lot on charity(idk if it was half of the initial amount but i doubt it) and avoided a lot of taxes that way but he also tripled his wealth. He's also the biggest single person landowner in the US I think which I don't see him handing over soon.
"Who’s the most important Kennedy under 40? Whoever they are they’re not that important. "
Well, the most famous Kennedy right now is probably Robert F Kennedy Jr. But he is over 40 and luckily is not a succesful leader. But he probably dreams about being one (fighting against the system of evil vaccination).
the overwhelming majority of leaders are careerists. If anything the one thing they have in common is that they tend to have the ability to progress through institutional positions quickly and tend to have uninterrupted biographies. If anything they're the opposite of bold risk takers, they tend to be methodical climbers.
That's why the overwhelming majority of representatives, both in the business sector as well as governments is lawyers, public servants, academics, engineers, long time party members, and so on. And of course inheritance is the other big factor. The most common form of business is the private family business.
Even in democratic politics inheritance is arguably one of the biggest factors. The Trudeaus and Bush's are your stereotypical leaders
This is not true. What the people who "lead the world" have in common most often is coming from a very privileged background. The idea that they are all iconoclasts or inherently in some way "better" than other people is a myth the wealthy tell themselves.
This is not true. What the people who "lead the world" have in common most often is coming from a very privileged background. The idea that they are all iconoclasts or inherently in some way "better" than other people is a myth the wealthy tell themselves.
The best of the best likely come from privileged background simply because of the access to resources.
The idea that meritocracy is some of egalitarianism is a myth.
Even if they did all go out and explore the world in their teens and 20s, the only reason they'd be able to do that is because they come from a very privileged background.
Most teens can't leave the town their parents live in. Student loans aren't gonna pay for your travel and for the folks not going to school, there is a crappy job waiting for them that might give basic health insurance. There simply aren't resources available that allow folks to explore the world.
I know a lot of people who have traveled the world over, taken a lot of risks as a young adult/late teenager, and are just unremarkable adults now doing unremarkable things.
Maybe you're imagining correlation where there is none?
30 years ago in central Texas we visited northern Mexico many, many times a year. 20 years ago we thought it was funny other people were starting to be scared to do so. 15 years ago we stopped going. We haven't been back since.
It's so weird that, from a central Texas perspective, we used to be a short drive from visiting another COUNTRY, which is now effectively a blank space on the map of the world around us. Ski west in New Mexico, eat easy in New Orleans, Hike north in Colorado. South? Here be dragons.
Maybe the next 30 years will be the same story in the opposite direction, but I don't know. I haven't seen anything to give me hope of that.
Edit: You have a last name only a Texan could pronounce ;-)
Similar experience with my family in South and Central Texas as well. They used to go multiple times per year, but never go now. Back then the cartels were more targeted with their violence. Over the past 10-15 years, it has become indiscriminate. A cheap tampiquena plate and a few drinks is not worth the risk.
Would you mind elaborating a bit on what has changed from your perspective please?
I have never visited Mexico and would love to although I will admit hearing things of this sort and some of the footage I've seen of carjackings and machine-gun fire and the like is admittedly somewhat of a deterrent, but then I consider how many scary things happen here as well and I wonder what's true and what's an exaggeration or simply a case of uniquely bad luck.
People in San Diego used to treat Tijuana like part of the city, just split by a border is all.
And I have family that still visits there, but it is much more dangerous than it used to be. 30 years ago it was basically "don't drive a brand new vehicle and be polite" and now it's all sorts of things including knowing which highways to avoid, how to stay away from parts of town that may have drug lord activity, etc. There was almost an unwritten rule years ago that you don't mess with normal people or tourists; that rule has been significantly broken.
And the border waits are much more annoying, too; the people who do still cross now have to wait much longer, even with Sentri.
drug war, notably shift in power from Colombia to Mexico. Various power plays between different organizations advancing on eachother and government interventions. Much more dangerous for civilians in the 'wrong place at the wrong time'. But violence against tourists is by and large greatly exaggerated, even at the height of narco-violence in Mexico. It is still a safe place for a tourist in every single city and most rural areas.
I mean it seems like the biggest change in this story is you. It’s true there’s more cartel stories than before I guess but if you wanted to go there you would go. I spent a week in Monterrey this year, it was lovely.
Mexico is of course full of some lovely places, but cartel violence has been increasing since around 1990 (so 30 years) and has spiked quite dramatically in the past 20 years.
And the difference between "fly into a tourist zone" and "drive across the border into 'real Mexico'" is a huge one. If you do it, you should know quite a bit or have a local so that you can notice situations before they begin.
Sure, the chance of actually being beheaded by a cartel is probably relatively slim, but it's a risk you don't need to take.
Monterrey is a tourist zone? Huh? I’m talking about the largest industrial city in northern Mexico, one that’s closely linked to the Texas economy, not Cancun.
I speak fluent Spanish and have traveled all over these areas and I think the original poster’s idea that Mexico is now off limits is about 95% media fear and hype at best.
But hey if they want to stay home in Waco or Uvalde or wherever they live to avoid violent situations that is certainly their choice.
>(One of my favorite anecdotes on this subject: One of the best entrepreneurs I know went down to Mexico and hitchhiked all over when she was 18 years old. And every family that picked her up told her that what she was doing was very dangerous and that she was very lucky to be picked up by that family, instead of someone more dangerous. But at the time she was very innocent. 20 years later I ran into her and I was like "You know what you did was crazy?" and she was like "Now that I think about it, I'm amazed that I survived.")
Another example: From the use of "BRIC"/"BRICS" one might think that those nations would be similar in some way.
I have heard of at least two young Western women who in recent years hitchhiked across China, documenting their experience along the way. One could never, ever imagine doing that in the other BRICS countries (with prewar Russia being the safest of the four, but still pretty risky).
Likewise my 2nd generation German-American aunt hitchhiked by herself from Morocco to Cairo (and spent time in many, many places in-between) in the 1970's for about 6 months and had no issues at the time.
Well, hitchhiking in Morocco certainly still works, and a few years ago, before the war in Lybia started, I would say you could have reached Egypt without major problems. But yes, right now I would not recommend it.
You should check out the MBA programs at leading business schools (Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, etc.) - those classes are a fairly good proxy for the people leading companies and similar 15-30 years down the road.
Probably 60-70% of the classes have the same cookie-cutter Finance/Tech/Consulting backgrounds. Some of the most risk averse and carefully planned professionals you'll find.
History is interpreted by historians, from many sources (newspapers, findings, books, mindset etc), history is NOT "written" but interpreted, and that interpretation can change massively with just one new found source of information.
> Outside, the sky over Escalante Valley, Utah, is blinding blue and cloudless,
I don't enjoy articles that preamble about the lack of clouds in the sky.
Here's the meat:
> Kevin drowned in a kayaking accident at a friend’s birthday party. At 14, he had just published his autobiography. He was making plans to expand his 350-acre farm to buy up surrounding farms to convert to regenerative agriculture. He was saving money to build a house for his parents and another for his autistic older brother. He was polishing a movie script and a series of children’s books teaching business literacy for kids. He was looking for a celebrity to endorse his line of luxury toiletries made from the milk of his goat herd. He was breeding heritage turkeys. He was writing guest essays for notable bloggers higher up the political food chain. And, in his spare time, he had the task of grading the road to his farm using the John Deere tractor he bought new for himself for his 11th birthday.
and
> A friend once remarked, “You guys aren’t even raising him; you’re just kind of the audience watching him raise himself.”
The lack of clouds was relevant. The next few words you left out:
> promising no rain as it has for nearly a year
The area was experiencing a drought.
> And then, after 14 months without rain, the well that supplied their house went dry. For nine months the Coopers hauled water by the barrel for their household needs.
I mean, do we believe any of this? An 8 year old isn’t running a business and selling to restaurants in a different state. No business would purchase from an 8 year, no business would ship goods from an 8 year old, no bank gives a loan to a 9 year old. The list goes on and on. Incredibly sad that a child has died, but this reads as pure fantasy.
What's weird to me is that somebody would have such a hard time accepting verifiable facts about a gifted outlier who happens to be remarkably young but also reads Hacker News on a Sunday night, presumably because they see themselves as someone who is involved in the tech/startup economy.
The whole reason that there's a story here is because it's exceptional. If he hadn't been an outlier, there would be no story. There's no conspiracy to embarass your younger self, here.
I bought my first hard drive, drums and television with profits from contract software development when I was 10. I was on my first (non-profit) board of directors when I was 14, and I got a small business loan - co-signed by my father - when I was 15.
None of this is as rare as you so righteously think. The key detail you may have glossed over is that while his parents are disabled, he was clearly very proactive about recruiting mentors and advisors online. He got really great at doing two things: teaching himself new things as they are needed, and developing a network of people who he could ask for help and advice. It's a winning strategy.
> What's weird to me is that somebody would have such a hard time accepting verifiable facts about a gifted outlier who happens to be remarkably young
Where are the verifiable facts? Where are the citations? You may see the story as just a list of 'verifiable facts,' but that's absolutely not what it is.
I'm not saying I think the whole thing is made up, but it isn't simply a collection of attestations that any individual can verify. It is an emotional, evocative lifestyle story published by an outlet that, as far as I can tell, is outright owned by the LDS church. And the author? They have one other story credit.
I don't know enough about the LDS or this particular publication to make a specific claim, but I guarantee this story has been affected by some kind of agenda or policy position. I find it interesting that the first two 'political bloggers' who 'discovered' his writing are Bari Weiss (a contentious figure certainly, but also one who has vehemently criticized formal/higher education in the US) and Hannah Frankman of the:
> ...Foundation for Economic Education, a nonprofit foundation focusing on teaching young people principles of entrepreneurship and economics, and promoting home-schooling.
Interesting. Oh, look at that:
> Frankman, too, was working on a story about Kevin as an unschooling success story when he died.
Listen, this is a feel good story, and it's not my intention to pick it apart, but don't go after people for taking a hard look at something they come across online. Further, it's possible your self-image (a young gifted outlier) impacts your ability to approach this critically (or see why other people would approach this story critically).
P.s.
There are also just weird anecdotes in the story that make me even more skeptical like the claim he bought a tractor at age 11. Okay, maybe it was a cheap, used tractor? No, the article later states:
> Kevin financed a brand new shiny green John Deere tractor for $50,000.
What? No. An 11 year old did not finance a brand new $50,000 John Deere tractor. There may be some kind of explanation wherein his parents financed it using their credit, but he makes the payments yada, yada, yada... but the very fact the following quote is presented without further explanation in the fifth paragraph of the story is telling:
> And, in his spare time, he had the task of grading the road to his farm using the John Deere tractor he bought new for himself for his 11th birthday.
I consider this rebuttal to be exceptionally well-argued, and I thank you for it. You do raise several excellent points, and I have no interest in being a shill for the LDS church.
And yes, Bari Weiss should be considered a red flag. My bad for letting her name slide past without a sniff test.
I stand by my point that we shouldn't be so damn skeptical that there are exceptional young people, because I've known them personally and arguably flown in the same formations. (I'm no prodigy, but I was encouraged into tech and business very early. Timing and privilege factor in, too.)
That said, I concede to your assertion that it's unacceptable for me to declare the statements in this piece to be "verifiable facts" at this time.
I remember reading some article about why there are no adult prodigy, only child prodigy.
It went something like, the reason there are only child prodigy, and no adult prodigy, is because other kids eventually catch up. And that child prodigies are basically just children that are ahead compared to other kids of the same age.
It looked at the data, and showed that once adult, child prodigies just distribute themselves similarly accross all levels of accomplishments, success and failures as any other adult.
It also said that, once adult, the difference between the best, second best, third best, and all following is much less pronounced, and therefore no one looks so far superior to anyone else who had similar training, opportunity, luck, etc.
Whereas with children, the difference is stark, so people take notice, and that's where the "prodigy" is born.
I can't remember the source, so take it all with a grain of salt, but I always thought it was an interesting article, and a good question, where are all the adult prodigies?
Edit: Also, I vaguely remember it saying that the data shows a higher level of depression and general less happiness in now adult child prodigees, which the article hypothesized might be either from the loss of "being special", or from the weird childhood that "being special" created.
As a counterpoint, if we look at the world of sports. I follow hockey quite closely. In hockey the term generational talent gets thrown around and assigned to kids, sometimes as young as 13-14. There is even an official recognition in the Canadian Major Junior system at 15 with "Exceptional Player Status" where a 15 year old is given eligibility to play in the league (normally 16+).
Some of these prodigies do level out, like you say. Often on account of their size being caught up to. But some truly remain remarkable into adulthood and actually hit that Generational talent level (Connor McDavid for instance). There's only been a handful of kids granted this status in the past 20 years (~7). The oldest 3, two turned into superstars (Tavares/Ekblad) and McDavid is generational, simply the best player in the world, full stop. The next is a bust, Sean Day, who at 15 was 6'2 when drafted into the juniors. That would be your everyone catches up example. The others are still too young to say, one is 22 and just beginning (but not looking like a superstar), one was just drafted this summer and likely will play his first game for Seattle this season. Another is the projected 1st overall pick next summer.
But there are definitely the handful of prodigies that pan out at least in the sports world and instead of being called a prodigy - they earn themselves superstardom or get talked about as GOATs (greatest of all time, for the unfamiliar).
If we also look at who are in the generational talent conversation (go in reverse), in the past 20 years all the players who might be mentioned (Crosby, Ovechkin, McDavid) were definitely prodigies as well. So much so that the next generation of prodigies is compared to them, McDavid being called the next coming of Crosby. We may see the next coming of Ovechkin in a young russian player named Matvei Michkov who has been a prodigy in the russian league. Sadly, we may never find out given the political situation and Russia seems more intent on keeping home grown talent in Russia more and more.
Maybe the issue isn't prodigies disappear, it's that in many fields we don't compete like children often do and get recognition? None of my friends have a GPA at work or a spelling bee to win. If all careers were like sports, maybe we would continue to recognize prodigies into adulthood?
Wouldn’t an “adult prodigy” be referred to as a genius? Surely you believe there are people who are far more accomplished than 99.999% of the population that could be considered as such.
Are there adult geniuses? I'm not sure either. Like I said, I can't remember the source, so now I can't validate anything, but I don't really ever hear of adult geniuses (if you prefer to call them that).
> Surely you believe there are people who are far more accomplished than 99.999% of the population that could be considered as such
This will obviously be a personal interpretation. One could consider the number 1 chess player an adult genius, but as I said, the article discussed that adults are no longer seen as such because the gap between the best and second best and everyone thereafter of similar training and experience is much smaller, so it no longer appears incredible, and people can very well imagine that someone else will soon come along and be even better than they are.
So it's not that there isn't ever one person arguably better at something than everyone else, but that they don't appear to be so due to a genius/prodigy gene, and they're no longer that much better that it seems impossible for anyone else to beat them ever.
Similarly, you'd expect that the best adults would likely have all been child prodigies no? And this appeared to be false based on my memory of that article.
I think you’d have to answer what the difference is between that group of chess masters and the rest of the population. Could you pick any random adult person off the street and train them to compete and win against the best of the best? Would their training take as long or longer than the current chess masters? My gut feeling is that the small differences between high performing people are evident of a population of geniuses rather than evidence against genius being a thing. If we were talking about athletic performance instead then I think it would be more evident, there are natural athletes who have some combination of physiological traits that allow them to perform better than others with the same training.
He couldn’t have financed the tractor himself, as people under 18 cannot legally sign a binding contract. I can’t see the bank or finance company letting that slide.
You may be underestimating the traditionally rural parts of America, which empower and encourage kids to start adulting at an age that may be surprising to many people. If you are from those regions, seeing a precocious young kid who is mature beyond his years is surprising but not entirely unexpected.
As a frame of reference, where I grew up, you could legally drive heavy agricultural lorries (think 5/10 ton dump trucks) on the highways at 14. You were personally running industrial agricultural operations, including running heavy equipment by 12 or younger. If you grow up in those societies, you learn the ropes young and are given the opportunity to grow into your capability. In a way, it was kind of cool because kids were allowed to assume real responsibility so young and some kids are capable of running the entire operation. (This is kind of a loophole in US child labor laws but it isn't grinding in factory or something like that. And traditionally the kids that do this make some fine money.)
In this specific case, I expect the Mormon connection was doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. Still, many rural areas encourage this kind of thing from a very young age and I can't say I wasn't a part of that. It is part of how they apprentice you into becoming competent at agriculture.
This. It is impressive to realize how distant the lifestyle of people living in cities and rural towns has become. I was raised in a rural area (30+ years ago, not in the US) and was direct witness of kids my age or younger doing things that only "adults" should do to survive and maintain their families. They didn't know better and considered their situation a totally natural and common thing for the lack of a comparison point. If they were lucky, their environment was supportive and it was not rare to see people in charge stretching the law for them if needed. The unlucky ones were abused with responsibilities and labor that no child should be exposed to.
I cannot attest about this particular case, but I can believe that in a similar situation today with all the access to resources through technology we have, the things that capable kids under these conditions could do would be far more reaching than ever.
My brother was stealing property (boats, go-karts, ATVs) and selling it to (mostly) legitimate businesses (run by adults) by the time he was 12. By the time he was 15ish he had a landscaping business with residential and commercial customers.
Things are different when it’s real rural.
Sure you can’t get a bank loan without an adult involved, but cash is cash. And if you need something for your business and a kid brings it to you, who’s going to look a gift horse in the mouth?
This is speculation, but most likelly he found someone who knew how to do that. In effect he was selling his rabits locally to a middleman, who sold the rabit meat in California to restaurants. And when the story gets told this get to be abbreviated to “sold rabbits to restaurants in California”.
Likely there's a kernel of truth here: a kid growing up in desperate poverty and having to be resourceful to survive. But it seems pretty clear that there are people who have a lot riding on his story: looking up "Cole Summers" brings up mostly blogs for me, typically associated with either the home-/unschooling movement or conservatism, presenting his story with the underlying message: "See what happens if you don't let schools/the government brainwash your child and just let them develop naturally. They will become entrepreneurial geniuses and restore American values." That's not to say that this story is a lie, just that the people telling this story have incentive to exaggerate the kid's achievements, and I see no reason to take them at their word.
I agree. I can believe any 1 or maybe 2 things on the list, but in aggregate, it's complete fantasy. There's just no way this kid has enough time and brain cycles to execute all these ventures with any level of quality. If it's true (big if) it probably meant he spent an afternoon dabbling, and the article decided to treat it as if it were some serious venture.
> At 14, he had just published his autobiography. He was making plans to expand his 350-acre farm to buy up surrounding farms to convert to regenerative agriculture. He was saving money to build a house for his parents and another for his autistic older brother. He was polishing a movie script and a series of children’s books teaching business literacy for kids. He was looking for a celebrity to endorse his line of luxury toiletries made from the milk of his goat herd. He was breeding heritage turkeys. He was writing guest essays for notable bloggers higher up the political food chain.
So, as a European I read: mormon paper (Deseret...) hails parents who made their child work their farm. Because reading things like:
> His spelling and grammar lagged behind grade level. He consistently misspelled the word “business,” and stumbled over the pronunciation of simple words.
doesn't really spell hidden genius of the 21st century but probably describes millions of peasants in Europe during the middle-ages. Family died of the plague, so son got a businessman at age 9. It happened a lot, but they were just some other serf and didn't have ideologists (recall the NYT-author who resigned because "woke") who celebrate going fullspeed back to the middle ages.
They don't call him a genius though, they call him America's most remarkable kid, with emphasis on his business acumen. It seems unfair to say something like "he's not going to revolutionize science" when they never implied he would.
no, but about half the other posts here do - so I put down what my perception of the case is.
> with emphasis on his business acumen
To me, the business acumen of his parents seems a lot higher. On their twitter they start publishing his future books already :). Also there is a lot of financing (for example his John Deere) going on and while I can't see the full picture, I doubt that he signed those contracts...
Did you read on a couple sentences and see this part?
> Later, when opportunities came to publish his thoughts, the written word became more important to him and he found mentors to help him polish his communication skills.
Worthy of note is that he'd published a book by the age of 14, so was probably at least at grade level. Sounds like he just didn't learn things homogeneously, but rather focused on some things before other things.
> So in your view, it sounds like being able to perfectly diagram a sentence is more important than understanding tax law?
What's being described isn't the ability to diagram a sentence, but to write above a certain minimum standard. That skill is certainly more important for the average person than understanding tax law as most jobs that would require you to know tax law have good writing skills as a pre-requisite.
As part of my previous work in education I did a lot of interventions for "unschooled" children in the Bay Area and can confirm the results of even well educated parents were almost uniformly disastrous.
There's a lot of value in:
1. Being well socialized
2. Having the standard set of skills that are a base requirement for being a white collar worker
If you're missing either of these (as most homeschooled kids are) it can be very difficult to find your way in the world.
Actually yes! I've helped children with almost any challenge short of, say, Down Syndrome.
In short, children who don't learn to read or write well in school almost certainly would not learn to read or write well when unschooled, but most unschooled children who don't learn to read or write well do learn perfectly fine in a traditional schooling environment.
Schooled children who don't learn to read for different and harder to deal with reasons, a quick top 3:
1. English as a second language (ESL)
2. Learning disability that was never addressed
3. Severe behavior problems that interfere with schooling (this is often caused by problems at home)
These problems are exacerbated by parents who are poorer or themselves ESL.
Unschooled kids, conversely, tend to have relatively affluent parents who speak fluent English. Overwhelmingly, the reason they can't read or write is that either no attempt at teaching was made, or it was made with no reference to educational theory. This failure mode is much rarer in schools.
P.S.
I don't want to give the impression here that I think the US education system isn't a tire fire or that there aren't different pedagogical approaches that might be radically better for most children. I'm just saying I have nearly a decade of experience showing overwhelmingly that "unschooling", even when performed by some of the most educated and affluent people in society, fails overwhelmingly compared to even the sub-par experience of standard schooling in the US.
Well, to understand tax law, you need to understand language quite well (see another post these days on the frontpage...) - which usually comes with some skills in applying it. It smells a bit fishy, if you claim a person can do the first, but not the latter.
I don't know, but I guess that the intricacies of tax law are written down. And to study that (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/112b here?) you need to be able to be quite proficient at reading. And usually proficiency at efficient reading of laws translates to an ok command over speaking/writing as well (which apparently is not the case here)... if you read weird words a 100 times, I expect a moderately intelligent person to remember how to spell them...
I work in tax. Yes, you need to be able to read and write well to understand the changing tax law in the US. The tax code is also used as social policy in the US, and it's important to know for liability reasons that even the person you're paying to do it for you is doing some parts correctly. Did your payroll employee not withhold key taxes? That's a pretty large headache and fine you have coming.
Interestingly, this sounds like a paraphrase of an Elon/SpaceX quote, something like "if you want to win an argument, you better have Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein on your side."
I feel like there is a huge elephant in the room here of how shitty Utah’s support system evidently is. No money to assist his disabled parents and his autistic brother. This whole family was living in desperate, grinding poverty, and that gave this kid a super strong urge to try and get out of it instead of having a childhood.
With you on the first part, not so much on the second. He seems to enjoy what he does and retain a sense of child-like wonder about the world. If the article is accurate, his curiosity and drive were fueled rather than suppressed.
You wish to take away the very condition which made him uniquely special. He seems like he was enjoying his childhood. Adversity breeds character and this kid had more than character than some entire classrooms.
Yes.. When you are struggling to put food on the table, you are not enjoying childhood.. Adversity breaks more people than building character. Which is why, we insist that kids have good food, good environment to grow up in etc. It is not right that 1000 kids suffer for one to build a character (as you may call it). You can build character in better environments too.
I lost a significant number of my teeth as a teenager because I grew up in poverty and decided that what little money I had was better put towards my career rather than fixing dental issues.
Do you think this is a positive example of how adversity breeds character?
I hate this story and I hate most of the comments here. I homeschooled. I know a lot about homeschooling and giftedness and yadda.
People who don't know anything about homeschooling and the myriad ways it differs from public school and private school -- it's a little like a bunch of Christians commenting on the life of a Muslim individual, having never studied their religion or culture or a bunch of Europeans in big cities commenting on the life of someone in a rural village in Africa.
I wrote a wall of text and deleted it. I just don't know where to begin to try to explain and have it not go sideways.
I’ve been curious about homeschoolers and their perceptions and interactions with age ranges. I’ve heard criticisms about weird social distortions that manifest from the whole age stratification we find in schools through the grade system. Basically the values and preferences of a given age take on exaggerations among a bunch of peers that don’t get tempered by the opinions and thoughts from older peers and others outside the age cohort. Sounds feasible but real experience of the homeschoolers would be great to hear about.
I don't know that I really understand what you are trying to say. Simultaneously, I feel like the answer to the question is probably "It's far worse than you think."
You take, say, 30 kids who happen live in the same area and are born within a particular year and shove them together in a class and they are all being shaped by the same teacher, the same curriculum, the same school system, their parents may know each other or may not etc.
I think you are likely attributing overly much to the children per se and not to the forces shaping a group of children. And I think we have done a lot of harm to how humans think about age differences generally. I feel like as a society we have an excess of baggage concerning dating someone of a different age, as just one example.
Yah I think there’s something to that. There’s this age delta in dating that’s a huge exaggerated deal if someone dates another a year or two older/younger in age cohort schools. There’s almost this disbelief and shock from the peers when they witnessed this narrow age gap being crossed. I used to always attribute the shock to the larger percent differences in age that are calculated in the younger years where a year relative to 10 or 14 is a much larger percentage of one’s age than at 26 or 35 and beyond. Come to think about it yah what was that shock all about and I think I agree that it probably has carried over in weird baggage into the adult age ranges. There’s like a weird mental adjustment upon first finding out about age differences in a given couple from split second shock and disbelief to like “oh yah that’s not that far apart anymore”. The problem with the age cohort model is that all people are assumed to develop at the same rate uniformly. That’s probably not true.
Same could be said about social distortions that manifest in the modern toxic public/private school environment. Different people weight the pros and cons differently. Also what has worked in the past for public school may not be true now when it is highly politicized.
This is incredibly frustrating that such a remarkable kid died in such a stupid preventable way. Wear a life jacket. Learn to swim.
Reading this again and trying to find some way there was something not preventable and not finding it makes me angrier and angrier. Why the hell are you in a boat without a life preserver if you can't swim.
Swimming is perhaps one of the most important skills anyone can learn regardless of where you live. At some point in your life you will probably fall into water too deep to stand. Don’t let yourself be at the mercy of someone saving you or sheer dumb luck.
Also, if you can’t swim, don’t be embarrassed! A lot of people can’t and honestly no one is judging you because you can’t swim. Go to your local pool and see if they offer adult classes and if not see if there is someone willing to teach you.
Is it really possible no one instructed them to wear life jackets? Or is it more likely he typically wanted to prove everyone wrong? Obedience is taught to instill discipline. Sounds like Kevin already had plenty of discipline, yet apparently self-taught himself to never listen to anyone. Sounds like a combination of both Daedalus and Icarus.
The trick with helmets is when the risk takers are wearing them. Then wearing a helmet can become a signal you ride hard.
I think that’s a good part of why helmets took over skiing in Colorado but not California. In Colorado, the extreme skiers wore them, and the rest followed.
> He was making plans to expand his 350-acre farm to buy up surrounding farms to convert to regenerative agriculture.
Kudos to him.
Every death is unfortunate, but I understand why the death of someone who shows deep care for people around him, for nature, for the world, is especially saddening.
Has there been any profile of this kid prior to his death? Surely a human interest story about an 11yo buying a tractor or a 9yo running a rabbit farm somewhere?
I read the article. In my reading it implied the whole family were disabled, the parents housebound, and that for half of his life the kid was effectively permanently engaged in self-directed business-linked study outside of the house.
Was there any indication that this kid would have been happier or “better off” in any other situation?
It sounds like he thrived in the specific set of conditions that he was raised in. Would that be true if he had grown up middle class and went to a traditional public school and force-fed common core nonsense?
I mean, my daughter goes to public school, leading a mostly "cookie cutter" existence, and several of her peers who she interacts with there have memberships in a swimming pool of some sort or another.
Given that we wanted her to be able to swim with them, we paid a professional to give her swimming lessons.
She's now 11, but any time in the last ~5 years, tipping over in a canoe or kayak would not have been fatal for her (even without a life vest).
I imagine he'd be cookie like all the other cookies; as in cut by a cookie cutter that limits the majority of all the other minds cranked out of the formal K - 12 mill.
I know a number of teachers. All of them want to do the best job possible. Unfortunately, a good number of them are in systems that don't support them as well as they should. That said, I'd take it a step further and say the (USA) culture doesn't do enough to support the systems and the teachers.
What goes in, trickles down, and comes out the other end. With the power structure, teachers have some, but others have far more. That's where the accountability (read: blame) needs to go. Blaming the powerless is a fool's errand.
That is, for example, we can sign off billions to foreign countries, and at home our teachers are going out of pocket for supplies. Huh? I'm not suggesting that we don't help others. I am insisting that if we can do that, we can certainly do better for teachers, and other similar high-value (to the future) professions.
I did not mean to blame teachers themselves and also believe there are systemic and cultural challenges. Not just in the US but globally. This is not surprising given the way in which education and media are often politicized, the use of access to tertiary education as an effective class battleground, and the scale and scope of recent technology impact on our culture.
We agree. I simply wanted to add some context / depth, because as you mentioned, the media is so good at over-simplification. And that too often skews the ability to have a full informed conversation.
I'm willing to believe he did accomplish all these things, because the things he did aren't really intellectually complex. It is more of a matter of having social intelligence and patience, and perhaps arithmetic knowledge. A sufficiently motivated child with enough intelligence could accomplish them, especially if he had not much else to occupy his time.
The people celebrating this story seem weird to me because this looks more like a nightmare. It's having your entire childhood traded away in order to function in a system that's responsible for making your entire family poor.
I know some people look at it as the whole 'self-made capitalist can do anything' sort of ideal but to me I see the failures of multiple systems.
I often find nebulous discussions around "systems" tiresome, not because there aren't better or worse systems, not because we can't make improvements, but because very often it results in a waste of time and energy spent on grievance and kvetching and wanting the stars to align perfectly instead of making the best of your situation.
Countries rise and fall by systems. If the US adopts an unschooling strategy that minimizes math learning, then it will certainly take the country in a direction. It’s a topic that powerful people are clearly taking sides on. I think it’s valid to discuss what the implications would be.
In general, I don’t really understand the dismissal of the use of systems language for social topics. Other domains on this site are debated in very analytical terms looking at historical factors and second order effects.
What makes social issues different where it’s uncouth to perform the same type of analyses?
Yea I got the same feeling. Like those “inspirational” stories like the kid running a lemonade stand to pay for his school lunches or a family getting enough GoFundMe donations to afford cancer treatment. There’s nothing inspirational or wholesome about these. They are macabre depictions of our unnecessarily cruel social systems.
I took off my rose tinted glasses after getting to this part of the narrative:
“Then Kevin discovered the wealth of information in county property and tax records, including the concept of “lawyers’ liens.” A lawyer who is owed money from a client can put a lien on the client’s property to get paid when the land is sold, just like a tax lien. And lawyers’ liens can be bought and sold. Kevin found one such lien languishing in the Iron County property records and bought it for half the value from the lawyer who had forgotten it was there. Kevin doubled his money when the property sold within a few weeks.”
The hand waved details of this purchase and sale illuminated the authors intentional bias for me.
And was born to a very rich noble family as almost a polar opposite, which likely led him to pursue more abstract things and forget about the material.
I would imagine this kid was on a similar level of genius, but seemingly more interested in making as much money as humanly possible instead.
No, it is very typically stupid. Exactly the kind of thing young men and boys do often, which is engaging in risky behavior without thinking. Most of the time the result is stupid fun. Unfortunately some are unlucky.
It's believable but then again had a distinct too good to be true fairytale feel. I hate to sound jaded but I keep waiting for a shoe to drop about it's accuracy or even validity.
Okay so, I have to say, at first this was a pretty feel-bad story for me.
I then noticed a tidbit of information in another article about it that somehow made me feel different: Cole Summers didn't know how to swim. He was out on the water in a kayak, with no life jacket, with only an autistic child for company - and didn't know how to swim.
Somehow it stopped feeling like a tragic accident and more like carelessness and stupidity, and I just didn't feel as bad. I'm sorry it happened, and my heart goes out to his family, but this was avoidable.
Somehow among all the crazy stuff he learned and accomplished at such a young age, basic common sense seems to have been dodged.
It's hard to hear about any 14 year old boy dying, particularly one with such promise. To salve our feelings, to make sense of it, it might feel important to grasp some detail that makes it not so tragic. Resist doing that. It was a tragic accident.
No, it was blatant stupidity of all the people surrounding him. Life jackets exist for a reason. They save people who can't swim! It's tragic that it is such a stupid preventable death, not an accident. It's like saying someone drove around their whole life without a seatbelt and then died in a car accident at 14. Angry at his stupid parents, or whoever gave him the kayak.
"Life jackets exist for a reason. They save people who can't swim!"
Just wanted to add that they save folks that can swim as well. A lot of folks can swim a little, but not enough to get to shore if they are in the middle of a lake and wouldn't handle a current really well. Heck, even if you swim well, exhaustion is a danger. Life jackets help folks. Period.
To tack onto this a little, I can easily swim across a lake, but when I tried swimming in a peaceful looking patch of open ocean, I could barely keep my head above water. Play it safe out there!
I was taught as a child to avoid "peaceful patches of ocean" as they can be rips (currents) that pull you out to sea.
The other lesson repeatedly drummed into us by our mother is to never jump into water without checking it first. There are also many stories of people becoming paralysed after diving into water.
The last lesson is to be careful of people drowning. If you get too close they can grab onto you, pulling you underwater and cause you to drown. If someone is drowning, either grab them from behind, or use a stick or I guess be at a distance where they can't pull you under.
One last lesson I learnt as a kid was to stay clear of dogs swimming - if they get too close they can claw you while doggy paddling.
This is no longer about the original topic, instead I'm going off on a tangent inspired by your comment.
I'm curious if you could do something with this short comment: I only really felt I "got" swimming when I felt as comfortable under as above water, and more importantly, dynamically mixing the two. As long as my swimming mode, in the early days. concentrated on staying above water, from today's point of view it was maybe the quarter of the way to swimming safely at most.
Staying completely submerged during swimming while you don't need air saves a lot of energy, you can just swim through big ocean waves without being bothered, etc. Also, being used to spending most of the time completely submerged makes it easier to deal with when it happens accidentally.
A swimmer trying to keep their head above the water at all times, I don't think that this works very well unless conditions (of oneself too) are ideal or close to it.
Even then, I think I heard it in one American astronaut's interview about his training, additional high-stress training under water that you can't usually get because it has to be well managed by other people including safety divers, would still be missing from a normal person's experience. As a new diver I got into a very mild panic only once, fortunately close enough to shore (California kelp forests off a Monterey beach), and it was bad enough. I would not want to be caught in some eddy unable to surface with mounting alarm. Still, being comfortable doing most of the swimming submerged already is a huge step up from head-above-water mode swimming.
One should also have reviewed the local water currents and what to do when one is caught, but that's another issue.
Yup I think it's really easy to overestimate your swimming ability. The first time I swam laps in a 50m pool, I remember being really surprised at how much effort it took to swim the length of the pool. And after about 500m or so I got a cramp in my leg.
If I were 500m from shore, weighed down by clothing, and dealing with waves and/or currents, that could be a disaster.
To clarify my words, what makes me feel bad is fate reaching out of nowhere in an inevitable way to take someone away. A drunk driver driving in the wrong direction on the highway - literally nothing you can do but hope it doesn't happen to you, or that you're in a different lane (which I was - he passed by me on the inside lane, or I wouldn't be here typing this.) I dread something like this happening to someone I care about, and I hate hearing that it happened to anyone else, even a stranger.
By contrast I don't feel that bad hearing secondhand stories about easily preventable deaths. There were like 4 ways to prevent this - use a lifejacket, know how to swim, be with an adult, or at least don't fall out of your boat. I don't spend time worrying about how people I care about could die if they made a series of specific stupid decisions stacked on top of one another.
It's still sad for those involved, but from a distance I can no longer relate to it emotionally.
Eh this is a weird take -- if you are poor and everyone you know is poor, I don't think life jackets are the #1 thing you worry about, or even the #100 thing.
In rural communities, people are dying of many things, like not having medical care, drug addiction, murder, suicide, etc.
Obviously fate made this outing seem like a bad idea in hindsight, but I'd also say that leaving a 14 year kid to support a family of 4 is a bad idea in foresight.
i.e. if this is your takeaway, (respectfully) consider a different perspective
This reminds me I need to teach my kids how to swim. I realized it recently having been around a bunch of rivers and lakes recently that they don’t have that skill and I forgot all about that while we were enjoying the water.
Yup, drowning is a leading cause of death for children in the US [1]:
> More children ages 1–4 die from drowning than any other cause of death except birth defects. For children ages 1–14, drowning is the second leading cause of unintentional injury death after motor vehicle crashes.
Definitely worth taking seriously - and not being able to swim is a risk factor. My kids have been taking lessons since they were in preschool, but even then I don't let them out of sight when we're in the water because they still aren't very strong swimmers.
This is some real inspiration porn. The kid sounds amazing, and it's tragic that he died so young. I have family that practices unschooling, and in their case, that means fundamentalist indoctrination, no math, no history, near illiteracy, no saleable skills or motivation to get a job or do anything independently. And I just know that they're going to send this to my mom as evidence that they're doing the right thing.
Like the "small schools" movement, it turns out that all systems are fundamentally affected by the quality of their participants. There are some colleges that feel more like "un-schools", and go-getters who attend these can go really far, while ordinary students flounder and founder.
For the truly remarkable (and the subject here seems to fit that), sticking them in any factory-like school setting is a waste. Un-schooling the majority of children would be an interesting social experiment that I'd rather see in a different country first.
The brightest candles burn out the fastest, wasn't that they saying, roughly?
What a peculiar word to use. And, I actually disagree in this specific case. This kid is a statistical outlier to a degree I'm unwilling to even guess at. It's the kids around and below average who are hurt the most by a lack of structured education.
I think requiring standardized tests of homeschooled kids is a pretty good compromise… The standardized tests are ridiculously easy to ace if you're smart, and they'd catch kids who aren't learning reading or basic arithmetic
Except that even what you're testing them on may not be really the most useful or applicable stuff. Any such testing would need to take into account what they actually have been doing and learning. Since the point of much learning is to be able to do, looking at accomplishment is super important. And a productive evaluation of people like the subject here might be challenging to system educators with a vested interest in our factory schooling.
The normal requirements we expect in an industrialized society are the basics of reading and writing, and some math. Unschooling sure has its benefits, but the child will have to navigate an adult world where that is table stakes. We don’t want to consign students to a life of poverty because of a lack of literacy. https://archive.ph/1xaHW
I think the challenge is less about the mechanics (reading, writing) and more about the content expressed via these, as there has to be some element of common content as well.
Their criteria is pretty basic “you need to be able to comprehend a 800-word news article”, and we are often failing to meet those standards with alternative education (which isn’t even just homeschooling, parochial systems have issues here too.)
At the end of the day, a service worker needs to be able to read the prices being wrung up on the cash register, and a factory worker should be able to read an instruction manual and safety rules. Not meeting those basic standards basically relegates you to a very small amount of jobs.
I've heard there's evidence that delaying literacy and numeracy has meaningful and potentially desirable effects on brain development. If a child and parents want to test that out, why not allow them to do so?
Yes if you mean starting to teach them read and write at 7 instead of at 5.
No if you mean cutting away majority of curriculum and teaching the rest by having kid doing sheets alone on kitchen table until isolated bored kid slows or gives up.
The US school system seems different than mine, and although we have issues, if only for the socialization, being in school is better than not.
Especially, what my father explained to me (he directed projects and extracurricular 'homework help' (+ free food) for kids in the poor neighborhood of my city at the time) was that the most important for success in school was parental implication, and that if you compared kids in 'regular' school with present and interested parents (often children of teachers, or children with one stay at home parent and few siblings) to kids in 'special school' (Montessori at the time i think), there was no practical difference on their success later. He told us his job was to try his best to have his street educators bridge the gap between parents and school, and if it wasn't possible, to offer a more collective and affirmative way of learning/doing in his extracurricular center.
(weird translation, sorry if it isn't understandable, there is a lot of specific vocabulary i tried to simplify then translate).
It was only his impression, but I've worked with children from my 14th birthday to my 25th, and my personal experience (i taught science through experiment with an association both at public schools and at summer camps) tends to confirm that what's really matter in engagement from the parents.
The experience of schooling varies so incredibly much depending on where you lived and when you attended that all of these conversations are kind of... pointless to have with anonymous people (probably) far away.
I feel like abuse is a stretch of a word. His parents's hands were tied and he stepped up. If you asked him, he was running the family and doing it well. His success in strife should be celebrated even if it wasn't an ideal growing environment.
> that means fundamentalist indoctrination, no math, no history, near illiteracy,
it looks like it was the same here. He essentially practiced the life of a middle age peasant. I guess many had their farm going by the age of 12 ... and probably didn't have some weird capitalistic, and nationalist inspiration porn ideologist in the background (because writing a pseudonymous book and then dying to young sounds like that... also the wondrous mentors...)
(One of my favorite anecdotes on this subject: One of the best entrepreneurs I know went down to Mexico and hitchhiked all over when she was 18 years old. And every family that picked her up told her that what she was doing was very dangerous and that she was very lucky to be picked up by that family, instead of someone more dangerous. But at the time she was very innocent. 20 years later I ran into her and I was like "You know what you did was crazy?" and she was like "Now that I think about it, I'm amazed that I survived.")