July 7, 2012

"Sometimes when people ask what do you do for your fun time, he says I just learn, and people just don't understand that."

Tanishq Abraham, the brilliant 9 year old.



His mom: "Home schooling is much better than normal, regular school." (Because there's no way for regular school not to be boring.)

Tanishq: "It's never boring, talking to any college student... With my friends from kid classes, you get to play with them, and that kind of stuff... I kind of miss having friends, I guess."

In the end of the video, we hear him say he'd like to be a scientist or a President of the United States. As President, he'd "make the United States more healthy for us and more efficient."

61 comments:

Triangle Man said...

I'm sure he means a healthy free-market economy and efficient small government.

PS He will be a scientist.

Moose said...

More power to him I guess - however he's not going to grow up human. He's going to be very lonely.

Rusty said...

I got a neice like that.
Scary smart in math.

FleetUSA said...

Scary as a President. Haven't we had enough of the so-called smartest guys in the room (Carter and B0)

traditionalguy said...

The boy seems to be a great communicator of ideas that he absorbs so easily. He is fortunate that his parents recognize that as a gift and not as a threat to themselves.

Among the super intelligent, another intelligent person is often seen as someone smart enough to be a threat to their control over whatever they are deriving their success from.
It can be like a town not big enough for two gunfighters.

Cedarford said...

fleetusa said...
Scary as a President. Haven't we had enough of the so-called smartest guys in the room (Carter and B0)?
==============
Just because Reagan and FDR were of only average intelligence does not mean we should bar future Lincolns, Jeffersons, Garfields, Wilsons, Nixons, and Clintons from office.
The big problems with Carter and Obama, Kerry, et. al. came in part from they and their adorers thinking they were smarter than they actually were.

The failure of GW Bush was that he thought he could skip around his mental laziness and haphazard thought processes by being the almost always correct "Deciderer" that didn't need no eggheads hashing over things when he could just go with his gut that Putin and the Wall Street Bankers were good fellahs because he looked 'em in the eye. And he just knew the Iraqis were noble freedom-lovers that wanted to be friends with America and its Special Friend Israel and would be right after an inexpensive cakewalk liberation that would pay for itself in lower oil prices and by Deomocracy defeating Islamic Extremism.

So while GW Bush was likely stupider, an even bigger idiot than Carter or Obama...at least he didn't do as much harm as those two guys did to us.

Bruce Hayden said...

Scary as a President. Haven't we had enough of the so-called smartest guys in the room (Carter and B0)

The problem there is that we really have little indicia that either was the smartest guy in the room. Obama, in particular, esp. since he appears to have been the ultimate AA admit - black and foreign. I am assuming that the reason that his records have been so assiduously hidden is one or more of that they show him as a mediocre student, that he was admitted as a foreigner, or his SATs and LSATs were lousy.

Oh, and throw in Woodrow Wilson.

In any case, I agree that a President thinking that he is the smartest person in the room is dangerous. In Obama's case, it also seems to have made him intellectually lazy and incurious.

The bigger danger though is the typical socialist conceit, that they, and the brilliant people they surround themselves with, are smart enough to plan the economy better than the free market can. And, of course, they cannot, and we are, again, seeing the massive failure that results from that conceit.

Bruce Hayden said...

The big problems with Carter and Obama, Kerry, et. al. came in part from they and their adorers thinking they were smarter than they actually were.

I think that you need to throw in Clinton too. Apparently he had abysmal SAT scores, possibly in the Kerry range, if not lower. The level that would get you admitted to a junior college these days. Kerry, of course, prepped well, going to that Swiss boarding school, and so got himself admitted to Harvard at a time when where you prepped was much more important than SATs. And, Clinton has that charisma thing going on. (standardized testing can be inaccurate as a guide to intelligence, but in Kerry's case, we have had absolutely no indication over time that he is smarter than indicated by his low test scores).

Interestingly, it is probable that Romney is notably smarter than Obama. We will likely never know, but Romney did graduate first in his class from BYU. Also shows a lot more drive and hard work than a former member of the Choom club could muster - which likely means that Obama's golf record is not under immediate threat. Also, that the day at the White House would likely start closer to 7 than 10 or 11, and be filled with work, instead of Obama's one or two non-political activities on the average day.

Shanna said...

What is your cite for Clinton's scores? He went to Gtown from Arkansas, with no money or connections, and then to Oxford. I don't think Clinton is stupid.

Robert Cook said...

"Scary as a President. Haven't we had enough of the so-called smartest guys in the room (Carter and B0)"

Haven't we had more than enough of the not-smartest guys in the room?

Robert Cook said...

He seems like a very sweet, sociable child. One hopes he can find friends his age whom he can relate to on a non-intellectual level.

Robert Cook said...

"So while GW Bush was likely stupider, an even bigger idiot than Carter or Obama...at least he didn't do as much harm as those two guys did to us."

Obama's running ahead of Bush by a nose in the harm he's done to us...but Carter?! Bush was a far worse, more destructive President than Carter.

MarkD said...

God save us from the children who want to run our lives.

Robert Cook said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rusty said...

fleetusa said...
Scary as a President. Haven't we had enough of the so-called smartest guys in the room (Carter and B0)


No. Scary as in she taught herself Algebra when she was seven or eight. She was tutoring college students in calculus when she was a freshman in high school.

Robert Cook said...

"In Obama's case, it also seems to have made him intellectually lazy and incurious."

I hold no like for Obama, but what makes you think him intellectually "incurious?" (At least as compared with his immediate predecessor?) His problem is not that he's not smart, it's that he has no integrity or fixed convictions. As with most politicians, his only loyalty is to his own ambition.

"The bigger danger though is the typical socialist (sic) conceit, that they, and the brilliant people they surround themselves with, are smart enough to plan the economy better than the free market can."

The "free market" can't "plan the economy." In fact, there is no "free market." It's a myth, an invention of those who would not have their activities constrained by law. (These past few years we're seeing what even nominal constraint--that is o say, "in name only," has wrought: a global financial disaster, as the rapacious capitalists have laid waste all around them.)

All economies everywhere, always, are planned and managed by governments, as they should be.

Saint Croix said...

As President, he'd "make the United States more healthy for us and more efficient."

Now I want to vote for his opponent.

edutcher said...

I can see where he's coming from. Sometimes, especially if you are really into a particular subject, learning more is the greatest thing going, but that he can converse with college students shows, perhaps, an emotional maturity beyond his years.

OTOH, it can't be fun not to be able to relate to kids his own age.

fleetusa said...

Scary as a President. Haven't we had enough of the so-called smartest guys in the room (Carter and B0)

Bucketmouth probably was (protege of Rickover, after all), but he had an ego problem.

No real evidence of intellect from Choom; he's vain and well-fronted, but that's not the same.

Shanna said...

What is your cite for Clinton's scores? He went to Gtown from Arkansas, with no money or connections, and then to Oxford. I don't think Clinton is stupid.

He's never been able to stay out of trouble, and I don't mean zipper malfunctions, exclusively, so how stupid he is up for discussion.

And, IIRC, he got to Oxford partly because of Fulbright - he never made Rhodes Scholar.

Cedarford said...

Hayden - I have never heard Clinton had poor SATs scores. I had a brother-in-law meet Clinton with a number of executives, mostly Republicans - and the general consensus was after a two-hour session on energy and trade - was that Clinton was ferociously bright.
At Georgetown, he was an adept student on scholarship. He worked as an intern on the Hill and was known for never using notes and having a near photographic memory. Rhodes Scholar. Yale Law..where he was known as the student that never had to study, just "got it" the 1st time he read something or had a case discussed in class..knew citations somehow on just one pass and could quote them later.
He pretty much took the last year of Yale Law School off to work McGovern's campaign...came back to get magna cum laude on final exams results, pass the Bar, begin work as a tenure track law prof in Arkansas.

Bill Clinton is no mental Obama equivalent.

Nixon was impressed with him after meeting Clinton when he became governor, tracked his career closely, thought he was the brightest and most natural politician Nixon had encountered in his years of politics - if undisciplined and in need of more maturation. But clearly going places, perhaps the Presidency as early as ten years off in 1996, Nixon thought.

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

I've come to believe that Obama's fundamental problem is actually very simple to state: the inability to learn from mistakes.

It's a basic, near invaluable skill. And an almost always fatal flaw when lacking.

edutcher said...

Cedarford said...

Hayden - I have never heard Clinton had poor SATs scores. I had a brother-in-law meet Clinton with a number of executives, mostly Republicans - and the general consensus was after a two-hour session on energy and trade - was that Clinton was ferociously bright.

Like Zero, Willie is a raving sociopath, so there may be something in that which enables them to impress people as being very bright.

Both certainly know how to snow the gullible.

Vile Pliskin said...

As President, he'd "make the United States more healthy for us and more efficient."


So as President, he'd be Woodrow Wilson?

Rusty said...

The "free market" can't "plan the economy."

It plans economies every day. Because you aren't paying attention doesn't mean it doesn't exist.



In fact, there is no "free market." It's a myth, an invention of those who would not have their activities constrained by law.



Free markets are a law. They follow rules as stringent and immutable as those of physics.



Bob. You're kind of stupid. But I think maybe you can be taught. You just ahve to unlearn your predjudices. There is very little math involved.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Although it seems that there's no end to the healthy appreciation for talent that exists on this blog, it's odd to see you celebrate a nine-year old's brilliance, given the poor regard in which factual knowledge is held on Althouse.

jungatheart said...

What's great about the computer age is that kids in stultifying environments like the inner city and the boonies can get get access to sites like Kahn Academy and prestigious universities.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

I'm sure he means a healthy free-market economy and efficient small government.

So he's a theoretician, then.

The reason child prodigies don't tend to have the level of earth-shattering success one would predict for them later in life might have to do with a disconnect between a mind made for mastering theory and a mind that understands the importance of taking one's time to gather accurate empirical knowledge.

Saint Croix said...

The key is knowing what you don't know, and how vast that is. Our best Presidents are not just smart, but are very, very humble about the limits of their intelligence.

For instance, the leader who believes this...

All economies everywhere, always, are planned and managed by governments, as they should be.

...can have an IQ of 200, and he'd still be a blight on our society. You're not God and you can't play God. Millions of people of ordinary intelligence are far smarter in the aggregate than a bunch of Ivy Leaguers in a room. That's why democracy and capitalism work and socialism is always done by unelected fuckwits who usually end up killing innocent people.

Lucifer was an angel with a big fucking ego.

Pride is the danger, not stupidity.

Robert Cook said...

Free markets are a law. They follow rules as stringent and immutable as those of physics."

Hahaha! Yeah, if you consider the law of the jungle, of dog eat dog, eat or be eaten, to be "rules as stringent and immutable as those of physics."

The "free market", so-called, is a menace to human society, and we need to strictly police the market for our own safety. We're living right now in the devastation caused by "free market" savages unleashed.

Saint Croix said...

Here's a quote from a very smart guy in a very bad government.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

All laws are regulations, and we should be sympathetic to hitmen and bodyguards for the financial tolls that laws against murder take upon them.

Regulation. Abominable!

Larry J said...

It's disappointing that the kid is considering going into politics. Personally, I'd consider myself a failure if I had to turn to a life of crime to make a living.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Said that you've made it impossible to care about your fellow man without resorting to crime, Larry.

Roger Zimmerman said...

Shorter Cook: I hate when other people are having fun and being successful trading with each other voluntarily. I need to threaten them with imprisonment so that they behave as I want.

Unknown said...

Robert Cook said:

"The "free market", so-called, is a menace to human society, and we need to strictly police the market for our own safety. We're living right now in the devastation caused by "free market" savages unleashed."

Those savages are actually the biggest government tit suckers ever. They played the feds to their advantage and allowed the feds to shield them from competition and then depended on the feds (us) to bail them out as thanks. In a free market, those bastards might not be in jail, but they would sure as hell be broke right now.

To big to fail is bullshit. We should have let those bastards go belly up. Yes, there would have been a very rocky few months while capital readjusted, but the survivor's balance sheets would look a hell of a lot better today. Instead, they are floating trillions in bad debt, and we are guaranteeing the idiocy. The long term pain coming very soon will be much worse than the short term disruption caused by letting the market work.

And the little kid is brilliant and charming and lucky to have loving supportive parents, unlike Obama who is a dumbshit.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

I'm a little disturbed that his parents got him and his sister into MENSA at the age of four. If you want to join MENSA (and I really don't get why anyone would), do it as an adult.

Larry J said...



O Ritmo Segundo said...
Said that you've made it impossible to care about your fellow man without resorting to crime, Larry.


Politics is a life of crime. They talk bullshit about "public service" but in reality, they're serving their cronies and most of all themselves. Politics may be a necessary evil but it is evil none the less. The great horrors of the 20th century such as the Holocaust, Stalin's purges and gulags, Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's "Year Zero" and countless others resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people, all in the name of politics.

Unknown said...

To infinity and beyond...have a wonderful ride, little one.

traditionalguy said...

Hi Ritmo! Good to hear your comments in the Althouse Roadhouse again.

This Mensa boy shows a high ideal for helping others by using his clear thinking. Do you believe that people will let him do that, or will they attack him as a threat for trying to change their narrow perceptions?

He had better develop a thick skin to go with his good heart.

Tim said...

"All economies everywhere, always, are planned and managed by governments, as they should be."

To the degree to which this is true - which isn't very - there is one indisputable fact: the more planning, the worse the outcomes.

lemondog said...

Video made me smile.

Have an irritating relative who frequently and deprecatingly begins negative statements with “Oh this country......” blah,blah, blah...maintaining this country no longer has the innovative edge, failing to understand and appreciate that this country was built on dreams by immigrants with much innovation coming from 1st and 2nd generation Americans in an American system that allows ideas to flourish.

PatCA said...

To infinity and beyond...have a wonderful ride, little one.

I hardily 2nd that sentiment

bagoh20 said...

The problem with being really smart is that it doesn't seem to protect one much from making stupid mistakes, but people think it does. That's the danger.

I wonder how important such prodigies were to very early human development, as in the stone age, when a little bit could go a long way. Did one guy invent the wheel? How about language, or writing? Did just a few people come up with the key advancements? The thing about early technology and invention is that you could do big things on your own. Now you need a lot of infrastructure.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

His parents need to teach him a very vital skill for the extremely smart so that he can get along with other people.

Shut up!!! You don't have to be the one who answers every question in class. Quit showing off. We all know you are smart. Let someone else have a chance to say something. People will begin to think that you are an annoying smart alec. SHUT UP once in a while.

Anonymous said...

"It's never boring, talking to any college student..." So there's at least one thing he has yet to learn.

lemondog said...

Has his own Wiki article.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

I wonder how important such prodigies were to very early human development, as in the stone age, when a little bit could go a long way

We were watching some interesting shows about prodigies and savants, extreme autistics who have fantastic math or musical skills and I wondered out loud to my husband.....

"Do you think that there are savants in the animal kingdom? Savant dogs, cats, birds, chimpanzees? How would we know? Would being a savant dog be helpful to the species or a detriment. Are they eliminated by the other dog members of the species as being unfit before they have a chance to show their savant-ness or pass those genes along into the pool?"

Hubby stared at me....then I got another cup of coffee.

Gabriel Hanna said...

Intelligence and wisdom are not the same. In my experience wisdom is found almost exclusively in the right-middle of the bell curve.

Experience and judgement are formed from time spent on Earth doing things and being around people. Without those, intelligence can be used to rationalize, instead of being rational.

It used to puzzle me, on Seinfeld, why anyone ever went along with Kramer's ideas. Eventually I realized it was because Kramer was the smartest one; he was always a couple of steps ahead in the argument and so could talk his friends into things. They were all intelligent, but none of them were wise.

Gabriel Hanna said...

To me, intelligence is like height, or eye color. It's not a virtue, though it is an advantage. It's something you yourself are not responsible for and I am not sure it can be improved by effort.

So picking a smart man for President is, to me, about as sensible as picking a tall man or a blue-eyed man. A President is someone who needs to make decisions and manage people, he does not need to personally use his intelligence to solve problems facing our country any more than he needs to use his strength and courage to personally fight our enemies.

Joe Schmoe said...

Triangle Man, I hope you're right with your first statement. Efficiency can be very, very illiberal.

meep said...

"friends your own age" is overrated

the world is not age-graded, and it's mostly adult-oriented. we homeschool our kids, and in the summer they go to day camp with everybody else. it has been noted that they have no social fear, inasmuch they easily talk with kids of any age as well as adults. as a kid, i much preferred the company of adults and read encyclopedias for fun (and im taking udacity courses for entertainment)...but had no issue with playing with kids of any age.

ive met some very ill-adjusted prodigies (i was no prodigy myself), but i know a lot more well-adjusted people of high intelligence who didnt have a fixation on socializing in a narrow age band. my bayesian priors are that the kid should be fine. ;)

Rusty said...

Robert Cook said...
Free markets are a law. They follow rules as stringent and immutable as those of physics."

Hahaha! Yeah, if you consider the law of the jungle, of dog eat dog, eat or be eaten, to be "rules as stringent and immutable as those of physics."


You have no idea what you're talking about.

The "free market", so-called, is a menace to human society, and we need to strictly police the market for our own safety. We're living right now in the devastation caused by "free market" savages unleashed.



And yet they are practiced every day with little or no supervision. The participants seem happy with the results.


What is a market, Bob?

Mary Beth said...

The failure of GW Bush was that he thought he could skip around his mental laziness and haphazard thought processes by being the almost always correct "Deciderer" that didn't need no eggheads hashing over things when he could just go with his gut that Putin and the Wall Street Bankers were good fellahs because he looked 'em in the eye. And he just knew the Iraqis were noble freedom-lovers that wanted to be friends with America and its Special Friend Israel and would be right after an inexpensive cakewalk liberation that would pay for itself in lower oil prices and by Deomocracy defeating Islamic Extremism.

I think his problem is that he's a nice guy. Just as cheats suspect other people of being crooked, nice people think that others are good and well-intentioned too.

FrankN said...

Circa January 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, elected two months earlier but not yet inaugurated, was driven to the Boston area home of recently retired Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was well into his 90s. Upon arrival, FDR found Holmes reading the Iliad in Greek.

"Why", asked FDR, "are you doing that".

"To expand my mind, of course", was Holmes' immediately reply.

You stop learning, you die, or at least that is how it appears to some of us.

Holmes proceeded to regale a spellbound Roosevelt with stories of Holmes' grandmother, who as a little girl was watching out a window of her Boston home, seeing those nasty Redcoats charging up Bunker Hill assaulting the rebellious Colonials.

Bah! Dead white men again!

Charlie Martin said...

Sigh.

I was that kind of prodigy, 50 years ago.

Whoever said it can be lonely is right.

I was a socialist at that age too.

T said...

Robert Cook trashes the "free market" according to caricatures and mythologies progressives have handed down - but that have been dispatched in time by revisionists, many of them Leftists.

Robert, how about catching up with history and especially economic history? Or can't old dogs learn any new tricks?

(Hey, if want to get specific, I can disabuse you of your specific ignorqance. But you show yourself to be at a level Ayn Rand would easily ass whip you. Therefore, even I restrain myself here in deference to our host because it is so off-topic.)

JAL said...

@DBQ - Consider the editing that was done. After all, in one of these mini-movies, the sound bites have to go a long way. Having the other kids answer the prof's questions did not advance the story line.

More a bit heavy handed editing, me thinks.

Unknown said...

Lots of comments here on the order of well look Barak Obama is smarter than GW was but he is a worse president therefore brains in an executive is not an asset.

In the first place even if we accept IQ is the be all measure of intelligence, where do we get the numbers to compare? No IQ numbers of any president seem to be in the public record.

GW had a pretty decent SAT of 1205 which can be somehow magically converted to a pretty smart 125. BO's IQ is is asserted to be high so far as I could tell by assuming his LSAT matched others of his class at Harvard and extrapolating from there.

This is a very logical way to guess if you have to take a guess but it doesnt seem to carry enough weight for a voter to consider it. Again, assuming at some point the president needs to speed read some essays and math problems and come up with an answer.

So of the only two presidents I had the energy to compare neither one had what one could call rigorously proven IQs. Maybe if you want to be president you need to ditch anything incriminating like that.

Rusty said...

T said...
Robert Cook trashes the "free market" according to caricatures and mythologies progressives have handed down - but that have been dispatched in time by revisionists, many of them Leftists.

Robert, how about catching up with history and especially economic history? Or can't old dogs learn any new tricks?

(Hey, if want to get specific, I can disabuse you of your specific ignorqance. But you show yourself to be at a level Ayn Rand would easily ass whip you. Therefore, even I restrain myself here in deference to our host because it is so off-topic.)



He's googling like mad to find a definition of a market.


A market, Bob, is where a buyer and a seller come together to deal. A deal happens, Bob, when both parties get what they want.
Actually I don't think Bob gives a damn what I say. If it's counter to the narrative running in his head it's bullshit.

The Crack Emcee said...

"Make the United States more healthy for us and more efficient."

Another fucking health cop?

I thought you said he was brilliant,...

Schorsch said...

Here's a list of child prodigies.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies#section_2

It doesn't, however, list the adult accomplishments of the children. In my field, biology, I see only kids with some big goals. Scanning the rest of the science list, I see Ted Kaczinski and Jean Piaget, the latter of whom is certainly very accomplished. I also see some mathmaticians and physicists of note, but only a few scattered across the ages. I think we assume prodigies will do great things, but the capacity to achieve something great requires an unknown quality these kids are not likely to have.

Charlie Martin said...

Hahaha! Yeah, if you consider the law of the jungle, of dog eat dog, eat or be eaten, to be "rules as stringent and immutable as those of physics."

Exactly. No you're catching on.

Chris said...

"So while GW Bush was likely stupider, an even bigger idiot than Carter or Obama...at least he didn't do as much harm as those two guys did to us."

Well, GW Bush got better grades than Al Gore and Al invented the interwebz, so...

;-)

Hope this kid follows through on his potential and invents warp drive or some such.