from Hacker News

A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah

by xenophon on 9/18/22, 7:56 PM with 189 comments

• by lkrubner on 9/18/22, 8:30 PM

  This story is especially clear and dramatic (and well documented) but I've often thought this happens in every generation: the people who lead (businesses and nations) when they are in their 40s and 50s are often people who boldly go out and discover the world while they are in their teens and 20s, and so they take on a bit more risk than the average citizen, and this includes physical risk (whether in travel or informal athletics), and so, "at the margins" as an economist would say, a certain percentage of them are dead before they reach the age of 30. So, for every generation, a few of the most brilliant lights are missing by the time the generation reaches its 40s and 50s. The people who do become leaders are, to an extent, the ones who simply got lucky -- many of them have some stories to tell about times they took a risk and were surprised to live. For obvious reasons, we don't hear the stories from the folks who took a risk and did not survive.

  (One of my favorite anecdotes on this subject: One of the best entrepreneurs I know went down to Mexico and hitchhiked all over when she was 18 years old. And every family that picked her up told her that what she was doing was very dangerous and that she was very lucky to be picked up by that family, instead of someone more dangerous. But at the time she was very innocent. 20 years later I ran into her and I was like "You know what you did was crazy?" and she was like "Now that I think about it, I'm amazed that I survived.")

• by unsupp0rted on 9/18/22, 9:00 PM

  > Outside, the sky over Escalante Valley, Utah, is blinding blue and cloudless,

  I don't enjoy articles that preamble about the lack of clouds in the sky.

  Here's the meat:

  > Kevin drowned in a kayaking accident at a friend’s birthday party. At 14, he had just published his autobiography. He was making plans to expand his 350-acre farm to buy up surrounding farms to convert to regenerative agriculture. He was saving money to build a house for his parents and another for his autistic older brother. He was polishing a movie script and a series of children’s books teaching business literacy for kids. He was looking for a celebrity to endorse his line of luxury toiletries made from the milk of his goat herd. He was breeding heritage turkeys. He was writing guest essays for notable bloggers higher up the political food chain. And, in his spare time, he had the task of grading the road to his farm using the John Deere tractor he bought new for himself for his 11th birthday.

  and

  > A friend once remarked, “You guys aren’t even raising him; you’re just kind of the audience watching him raise himself.”

• by soared on 9/18/22, 10:55 PM

  I mean, do we believe any of this? An 8 year old isn’t running a business and selling to restaurants in a different state. No business would purchase from an 8 year, no business would ship goods from an 8 year old, no bank gives a loan to a 9 year old. The list goes on and on. Incredibly sad that a child has died, but this reads as pure fantasy.

• by fock on 9/18/22, 10:01 PM

  So, as a European I read: mormon paper (Deseret...) hails parents who made their child work their farm. Because reading things like:

  > His spelling and grammar lagged behind grade level. He consistently misspelled the word “business,” and stumbled over the pronunciation of simple words.

  doesn't really spell hidden genius of the 21st century but probably describes millions of peasants in Europe during the middle-ages. Family died of the plague, so son got a businessman at age 9. It happened a lot, but they were just some other serf and didn't have ideologists (recall the NYT-author who resigned because "woke") who celebrate going fullspeed back to the middle ages.

• by teekert on 9/18/22, 9:16 PM

  “Don’t ever take ‘can’t’ as the answer unless you’ve verified that it is against the law or against the powers of physics,” Kevin wrote in his memoir.

  What a human. Such a great balance of a healthy brain and the confidence to trust it.

• by egypturnash on 9/19/22, 2:41 AM

  I feel like there is a huge elephant in the room here of how shitty Utah’s support system evidently is. No money to assist his disabled parents and his autistic brother. This whole family was living in desperate, grinding poverty, and that gave this kid a super strong urge to try and get out of it instead of having a childhood.

• by DoreenMichele on 9/19/22, 6:16 AM

  I hate this story and I hate most of the comments here. I homeschooled. I know a lot about homeschooling and giftedness and yadda.

  People who don't know anything about homeschooling and the myriad ways it differs from public school and private school -- it's a little like a bunch of Christians commenting on the life of a Muslim individual, having never studied their religion or culture or a bunch of Europeans in big cities commenting on the life of someone in a rural village in Africa.

  I wrote a wall of text and deleted it. I just don't know where to begin to try to explain and have it not go sideways.

• by blobbers on 9/19/22, 5:43 AM

  This is incredibly frustrating that such a remarkable kid died in such a stupid preventable way. Wear a life jacket. Learn to swim.

  Reading this again and trying to find some way there was something not preventable and not finding it makes me angrier and angrier. Why the hell are you in a boat without a life preserver if you can't swim.

  So angry.

• by jessaustin on 9/18/22, 10:03 PM

  Parents, teach your kids to swim. If you know children whose parents can't do this, insist on doing it for them.

• by simonebrunozzi on 9/19/22, 6:28 AM

  The kid was 14 and, among other accomplishments:

  > He was making plans to expand his 350-acre farm to buy up surrounding farms to convert to regenerative agriculture.

  Kudos to him.

  Every death is unfortunate, but I understand why the death of someone who shows deep care for people around him, for nature, for the world, is especially saddening.

• by morelisp on 9/19/22, 6:25 AM

  Has there been any profile of this kid prior to his death? Surely a human interest story about an 11yo buying a tractor or a 9yo running a rabbit farm somewhere?

• by contingencies on 9/18/22, 10:06 PM

  Cool kid. Imagine what he could have done with supportive teachers if not burdened by poverty.

• by xwdv on 9/19/22, 12:49 AM

  I'm willing to believe he did accomplish all these things, because the things he did aren't really intellectually complex. It is more of a matter of having social intelligence and patience, and perhaps arithmetic knowledge. A sufficiently motivated child with enough intelligence could accomplish them, especially if he had not much else to occupy his time.

• by moffkalast on 9/18/22, 9:17 PM

  Kid sounded like an ultra capitalistic incarnation of Von Neumann. I suppose growing up dirt poor does that to a person.

• by hsuduebc2 on 9/19/22, 10:11 AM

  Damn this is horrible.

• by Markoff on 9/19/22, 7:27 AM

  TLDR America’s most remarkable kid didn't know how to swim at age 14 and drowned while kayaking not wearing life jacket

  I dunno, but I find that remarkably stupid, but I guess US has different standards for what's remarkable.

• by synergy20 on 9/18/22, 9:57 PM

  A truly sad story.

• by aerovistae on 9/19/22, 4:00 AM

  Okay so, I have to say, at first this was a pretty feel-bad story for me.

  I then noticed a tidbit of information in another article about it that somehow made me feel different: Cole Summers didn't know how to swim. He was out on the water in a kayak, with no life jacket, with only an autistic child for company - and didn't know how to swim.

  Somehow it stopped feeling like a tragic accident and more like carelessness and stupidity, and I just didn't feel as bad. I'm sorry it happened, and my heart goes out to his family, but this was avoidable.

  Somehow among all the crazy stuff he learned and accomplished at such a young age, basic common sense seems to have been dodged.

• by klyrs on 9/18/22, 8:37 PM

  This is some real inspiration porn. The kid sounds amazing, and it's tragic that he died so young. I have family that practices unschooling, and in their case, that means fundamentalist indoctrination, no math, no history, near illiteracy, no saleable skills or motivation to get a job or do anything independently. And I just know that they're going to send this to my mom as evidence that they're doing the right thing.