Super-duper
Topic: Science
These people, especially Michael, are so smart, they're stupid.

The 16 year old kid, who takes math classes 3 times a week at University of California at San Diego, and who has been home schooled since fifth grade by a mother with a PhD in neuroscience and a father that is a software engineer, has won "a premier high school science competition..." and (get this) he's surprised.

He won it for resolving a math problem that's been around since the 19th century called The Dirichlet Problem.* Supposedly, it was a unique approach to the problem, and it has application in the design of airplane wings. I'm sure that it was an amazing triumph for airplane wing design all over the globe.

But that's not what bothers me. I'm all for the advancement of technology, regardless of the source, so long as it was obtained ethically, so don't throw Mengele in my face. If legitimate, safe, and ethical means were used,** then I wouldn't care if the discovery were made because someone's lobotomized monkey accidentally spelled out the formula using Puppy Chow. The point is that there was a breakthrough, and humanity gained some benefit from it.

So all these people pretending it's such an incredible thing that a 16 year old that's had intense scholastic training since he was elevenish is just sensationalism. It's like how publicists said Einstein was bad at basic math*** to make him seem more human. This is like that, only they're using the opposite spin... instead of saying "Wow! Someone so incomprehensibly brilliant can still be so ordinary!" they're saying "Wow! Someone so incomprehensibly ordinary can be so brilliant!"

But he's not ordinary! The very things that gave him the ability to create a unique and brilliant approach are also the things that set him apart from the ordinary! And I think they are presenting it this way so he won't feel alienated by people that are going to hate him for being brilliant.

Look, Michael. You're smarter than me. Big deal. I can get over that if you can. Let's move on so you can get to designing airplane wings for me. Thanks.

And everyone else that feels weird about his work: yeah, he's smarter than we are. Get over it. Move on with your life, and be glad there's people like Mike that can do the things we can't, because they just make it easier on the rest of us. But don't act like it's an intellectual miracle that he responded well to an intensely mind-developing regimen. He was not raised in a typical environment, and he was not given a typical education. His development is a reflection of that. Maybe he's sacrificed something, possibly social skills like any other nerd, in order to gain what he has.

I think that's pretty likely, since he was surprised that he won. Apparently, he thinks everyone else is as smart as he is; hence his surprise.

If he only knew the truth.

---

*I won't pretend to be able to explain it. I had trouble remembering that 19th century meant sometime in the 1800s.
**For the sake of argument, however you feel about testing on laboratory animals, that's how I feel too. Since we're in agreement, let's not debate it.
***He wasn't.

---