British boy who taught himself to read aged two joins Mensa | Hacker News Reader

British boy who taught himself to read aged two joins Mensa

theguardian.com

21 pointssandebert20 comments

Gauss had a very early start in reading and maths. It isn't inherently harmful.

That said. Myopia in children is concerning. He needs to be given sufficient time outdoors, focussing on things more distant to infinity.

Aside from that, Mensa is just a club, but so is Skull and Bones, as Geraldo found out. Clubs can be good or bad, it depends. Other british child prodigies are on record that their parents fully implemented Philip Larkin's "this be the verse" [0] and recommend a more normal childhood within the limits prodigy-hood permits.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-ver...

Early reading correlates strongly to academic success, but the correlation is well below 1.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319246387_Early_Rea...

The boy is clearly smart, it has to be seen whether he will be the most prolific mathematician the world has ever known (like Gauss).

Yes, he might just be the milky bar kid. Coolest pair of specs in the west.

> Mensa is just a club

Among geniuses, Mensa is for the morons, relatively speaking. It also has the highest annual fees.[1] It's all a machine, partner. Live free, don't join.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-IQ_society

No member of Mensa I have known has remained a friend for long. They all seem obsessed with numerical rank order of precedence and smirk.

I have never sought membership. I want nothing to do with them.

As Feynman would put it, it's a club where people sit around and try to decide who else is worthy of belonging to the club.

Plenty of people (billions?) live with myopia.

A lot of it is caused by lack of sunlight exposure. A number of Asian countries have epidemic rates of myopia:

https://healthland.time.com/2012/05/07/why-up-to-90-of-asian...

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/05/asia/myopia-east-asia/ind...

The solution is to get children more sunlight hours for proper eye development.

Elegant poem, thank you!

It isn't just that the 2 year old can read. He taught himself to read! In Mandarin!

Using a tablet. That part is not actually that unusual. There's lots of educational apps available. And educational videos on Youtube. My oldest son taught himself English as a second language by putting Minecraft on English. Minecraft has excellent language support, and once you know the game well, you already know what everything is in your own language, so setting it to another language is an easy way to learn some words.

He can count in Mandarin. That's quite a bit different than reading in Mandarin.

My dad always claims he taught himself to read at age 3, living on some old farm in the middle of nowhere.

For whatever reason, I didn't start talking until I was 3, though.

There is a thing called hyperlexia where young children will teach themselves to read. My dad had it and I did too.

It's not a big deal even if it is rare, and it doesn't seem to correlate to life success or intelligence. My dad was good with numbers and above average intelligence, I'm good with numbers and gifted intelligence, but big whoop, no one cares.

This is awesome. How common is it for children to teach themselves to read? I taught myself at age 3 and was reading large novels by age 4, but I have yet to meet anyone else who shares my experience. Sometimes I wonder what opportunities could have been made available for me if anyone had made my future their priority while I was a child. I hope this kid kicks some serious ass.

Is this a case study in why early screen time could be a positive? I assumed that the corrupt garbage for children on youtube and television were enough to forbid screens for the early years in child development. Teddy, however, used a tablet and some unknown apps/videos to learn how to read.

The real problems with video are that it 1) doesn't require any meaningful use of selective attention, being constantly hyper-engaging with every relevant stimuli presented on a platter, and 2) it doesn't teach them any bidirectional interaction with their environment, during a critical period of brain development meant for exactly that.

That's a great answer that I'll use from now on.

Is there any chance this could be considered proof of reincarnation?

Hmm...how do we know he is not a Transformer?

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