Regarding the Unabomber, where is the radical acceleration? He started Harvard at 16. Big deal. I started at an Ivy undergrad at 16, one of my better friends started at 15 at a different Ivy (receiving a simultaneous BA and MA either before or just as he was turning 20, summa cum laude), and my best friend was salutatorian (at yet another Ivy) at 20. Steve Hsu is a fairly well known blogger (and physics professor) and he graduated CalTech at 19. And none of us has mailed any package bombs. At least not yet…
(A few decades ago, schools were much more willing to let kids skip grades, and no one thought twice about sending a 5 year old turning 6 to first grade, either. Even lousy schools (like the one I attended) typically had IQ test results for their students, so they often had another piece of information to justify accelerating certain kids.)
I could go on… but the takeaway is that there is no evidence I can see of truly radical acceleration for the Unabomber. In any event, equating Kascynski’s education path with his propensity to mail letter bombs is the sort of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that used to be taught in high school. Murray’s experiments might be a more logical “cause,” but people are so inherently complex that who can say if there is any true “cause” that we can understand?
Getting back to the topic, I can’t emphasize enough how inadequate typical schools can be for truly gifted kids. I certainly cannot fault the parents of this young kid in St. Petersburg for choosing this path. Certainly not without knowing more about the situation than is revealed in the typically sensationalist media piece linked. His dad is a Greek Orthodox priest - they are likely not exactly rolling in money - and I bet they are doing the best they can to deal with what ultimately is really just a gift. I wish him the best of luck and I hope he sticks with astrophysics and his quest to find God in the emergent order of the universe.