Child Prodigy Declared Loser
- Aidan J
- Jun 5, 2018
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 27, 2018
Many people on social media cite this man's wish to judge intelligence without an Intelligence Quotient. That doesn't stop him from being a loser, according to media outlets.
While looking through my social media feed over a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, I read about an interesting guy. He was named a child prodigy, yet the quote is him admitting his ineptitude in a variety of fields. “I don’t have musical talent, nor am I excelling in sports.” Wow, he can’t play an instrument. Loser. He also said, “Society should not judge anyone with unilateral standards.” That’s a good point I guess.
This former child prodigy (former because he’s not a child anymore) held the Guinness World Record for highest IQ of 210 back in the 1960s. His name is Kim Ung-yong. Apparently, at age 5, he starred on a Japanese television channel where he solved differential calculus. Absolutely insane. So, as a child prodigy does, he began to work for NASA when he was 8 years old and continued for another ten years.
He hated it. He felt like a “monkey in a zoo,” where people gawked at him for being so smart. Eventually, he settled down at a Chungbuk Development Corporation, not a megacorporation like Google or Tencent, in a business planning department. He’s remembered as a failed genius.
“I don’t have musical talent, nor am I excelling in sports.” Wow, he can’t play an instrument. Loser. He also said, “Society should not judge anyone with unilateral standards.” That’s a good point I guess.
Sometimes, we forget that smart people are people too. They don’t want to be the next Einstein; they just want to casually show up at your son’s birthday party and tease him about his ineptitude at differential equations. Ung-yong went back to South Korea, went to college with peers, and went to Chungbuk Development Corporation, a perfectly average civil engineering firm.
Sure, maybe his expertise would have been able to create Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars defense system projected to cost between 120 billion and 2.5 trillion dollars to develop, but he instead decided to be happy.
This should almost be humorous.
At least imagine that you’re the guys’s boss, and he submits his letter of resignation after ten years of work so that he could go back to his mom. That’s baffling, because we want to live the superstar genius’s life. Our capitalist culture embeds the puritanical idea of the best possible life due to our productive abilities. This instance shocks us to our culture’s core values.
So, we come to the question. Which life is better? The average joe’s or the super genius’s?
Both. I mean, neither. A combination? Moderation. The average life, because there’s so much less pressure! The super genius’s, because he can better handle the challenges of life!
Now, this is philosophy. This is too broad of a question to answer meaningfully without having spent ludicrous amounts of time illuminating and judging underlying assumptions. As such, I’m going to give a linear, simple answer. (Nowhere did I say “good”)
You, of course, should have your own answer to this question. However, I’m going to present a weird argument to show a simple non-answer: the better life is the life that happened.
I’m repurposing Anselm’s Ontological Argument. In the Proslogion, Anselm tried to prove the necessity of the existence of the Christian superlative God. Basically, that by the concept of God, that God is real. One of his arguments is,
Existing as a real being and a concept is the maximal state of existence.
Anyone can think of a being that is the best of everything, the greatest possible being.
If it only exists as one of these things, the being is not the greatest conceivable being.
Since we know that this supreme being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality in order to be consistent with the being in the mind.
We call this being with all superlatives God.
Often, the premise “existing in reality and the mind is the maximal state of existence” is understood to mean “being real is better than being made-up.” Now, if we apply this to our question about the hypothetical, “which life is better?” we know that our life as we live is better than the possible lives we could have lived in alternate universes.
It does not matter if you’re pregnant with twins conceived by George W. Bush when he visited you alone on your uninhabited desert island where you crash landed after your family died in the plane crash. It’s what you’re experiencing, so it’s better. It’s not a smart idea to ruminate over what is your optimal path in life. We make making choices difficult for ourselves because we continue to ask, “what is the best life?” All it really is, is flipping a coin, and deciding if you like the outcome or not.
Oh, that’s a great idea! If you ever need to decide between two trivial things, flip a coin and decide! Heads is going out for sushi, tails is ordering pizza. Ugh, heads, but I don’t want to go to sushi! Get the pizza.
Obviously, some choices are forced upon us, and some people’s lives really do suck. If someone’s life does not suck, I hope they continue to ask that question, because it is only through self-judgement that we care to change in the first place. Yet, for some people, they obsess over the question, and prevent themselves from moving forward with their life, or enjoying themselves. They just exist in a sort of anxiety-limbo of an existence. And that’s not living.
Follow the link for where I found all the biographical information on Kim Ung-yong.
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2010/10/10/life-in-the-high-iq-lane/
#thought #Anselm #prodigy #God #life #dilemma #anxiety #zoo #hatred #loser #child #capitalism #boss #worldrecord #IQ #supersmart #NASA #calculation #coin #pizza #sushi #allyoucaneatsushi #itsnotthatgood #presidentbush
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