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A remarkable kid has died in Newcastle, Utah

333 points| xenophon | 3 years ago |deseret.com

189 comments

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lkrubner|3 years ago

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.")

soared|3 years ago

This isn’t really true except for random edge cases. The people leading countries go to school and get law degrees. People leading business got college degrees or worked in business for decades.

You can pull edge cases like Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, but even then he spent a lot of time in his 20s running his business.

Barrin92|3 years ago

the overwhelming majority of leaders are careerists. If anything the one thing they have in common is that they tend to have the ability to progress through institutional positions quickly and tend to have uninterrupted biographies. If anything they're the opposite of bold risk takers, they tend to be methodical climbers.

That's why the overwhelming majority of representatives, both in the business sector as well as governments is lawyers, public servants, academics, engineers, long time party members, and so on. And of course inheritance is the other big factor. The most common form of business is the private family business.

Even in democratic politics inheritance is arguably one of the biggest factors. The Trudeaus and Bush's are your stereotypical leaders

greenthrow|3 years ago

This is not true. What the people who "lead the world" have in common most often is coming from a very privileged background. The idea that they are all iconoclasts or inherently in some way "better" than other people is a myth the wealthy tell themselves.

didibus|3 years ago

I know a lot of people who have traveled the world over, taken a lot of risks as a young adult/late teenager, and are just unremarkable adults now doing unremarkable things.

Maybe you're imagining correlation where there is none?

bombcar|3 years ago

20 years ago Mexico was much different than it is now; 30 years even more so.

chubot|3 years ago

This doesn't seem relevant to the article

His idol was Warren Buffet -- not exactly a reckless risk taker

And he was into regenerative farming. That is very much NOT a "get rich quick" scheme.

It was about building value over the long term.

This comment says more about you than the subject of article (and not in a bad way, just saying it doesn't really apply here)

TMWNN|3 years ago

>(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.")

Another example: From the use of "BRIC"/"BRICS" one might think that those nations would be similar in some way.

I have heard of at least two young Western women who in recent years hitchhiked across China, documenting their experience along the way. One could never, ever imagine doing that in the other BRICS countries (with prewar Russia being the safest of the four, but still pretty risky).

Nations matter. Cultures matter.

TrackerFF|3 years ago

You should check out the MBA programs at leading business schools (Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, etc.) - those classes are a fairly good proxy for the people leading companies and similar 15-30 years down the road.

Probably 60-70% of the classes have the same cookie-cutter Finance/Tech/Consulting backgrounds. Some of the most risk averse and carefully planned professionals you'll find.

iancmceachern|3 years ago

Fortune favors the bold, history is written by the victors. The other stories usually don't get told.

rrwo|3 years ago

Hence the term "Surviorship bias".

unsupp0rted|3 years ago

> 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.”

yaomtc|3 years ago

The lack of clouds was relevant. The next few words you left out:

> promising no rain as it has for nearly a year

The area was experiencing a drought.

> And then, after 14 months without rain, the well that supplied their house went dry. For nine months the Coopers hauled water by the barrel for their household needs.

sschueller|3 years ago

"Kevin drowned in a kayaking accident" is very vague and makes me ask: Could he swim? did he wear a life jacket?

soared|3 years ago

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.

peteforde|3 years ago

What's weird to me is that somebody would have such a hard time accepting verifiable facts about a gifted outlier who happens to be remarkably young but also reads Hacker News on a Sunday night, presumably because they see themselves as someone who is involved in the tech/startup economy.

The whole reason that there's a story here is because it's exceptional. If he hadn't been an outlier, there would be no story. There's no conspiracy to embarass your younger self, here.

I bought my first hard drive, drums and television with profits from contract software development when I was 10. I was on my first (non-profit) board of directors when I was 14, and I got a small business loan - co-signed by my father - when I was 15.

None of this is as rare as you so righteously think. The key detail you may have glossed over is that while his parents are disabled, he was clearly very proactive about recruiting mentors and advisors online. He got really great at doing two things: teaching himself new things as they are needed, and developing a network of people who he could ask for help and advice. It's a winning strategy.

jandrewrogers|3 years ago

You may be underestimating the traditionally rural parts of America, which empower and encourage kids to start adulting at an age that may be surprising to many people. If you are from those regions, seeing a precocious young kid who is mature beyond his years is surprising but not entirely unexpected.

As a frame of reference, where I grew up, you could legally drive heavy agricultural lorries (think 5/10 ton dump trucks) on the highways at 14. You were personally running industrial agricultural operations, including running heavy equipment by 12 or younger. If you grow up in those societies, you learn the ropes young and are given the opportunity to grow into your capability. In a way, it was kind of cool because kids were allowed to assume real responsibility so young and some kids are capable of running the entire operation. (This is kind of a loophole in US child labor laws but it isn't grinding in factory or something like that. And traditionally the kids that do this make some fine money.)

In this specific case, I expect the Mormon connection was doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. Still, many rural areas encourage this kind of thing from a very young age and I can't say I wasn't a part of that. It is part of how they apprentice you into becoming competent at agriculture.

paulcole|3 years ago

My brother was stealing property (boats, go-karts, ATVs) and selling it to (mostly) legitimate businesses (run by adults) by the time he was 12. By the time he was 15ish he had a landscaping business with residential and commercial customers.

Things are different when it’s real rural.

Sure you can’t get a bank loan without an adult involved, but cash is cash. And if you need something for your business and a kid brings it to you, who’s going to look a gift horse in the mouth?

ookdatnog|3 years ago

Likely there's a kernel of truth here: a kid growing up in desperate poverty and having to be resourceful to survive. But it seems pretty clear that there are people who have a lot riding on his story: looking up "Cole Summers" brings up mostly blogs for me, typically associated with either the home-/unschooling movement or conservatism, presenting his story with the underlying message: "See what happens if you don't let schools/the government brainwash your child and just let them develop naturally. They will become entrepreneurial geniuses and restore American values." That's not to say that this story is a lie, just that the people telling this story have incentive to exaggerate the kid's achievements, and I see no reason to take them at their word.

gretch|3 years ago

I agree. I can believe any 1 or maybe 2 things on the list, but in aggregate, it's complete fantasy. There's just no way this kid has enough time and brain cycles to execute all these ventures with any level of quality. If it's true (big if) it probably meant he spent an afternoon dabbling, and the article decided to treat it as if it were some serious venture.

> 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.

fock|3 years ago

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.

julianeon|3 years ago

They don't call him a genius though, they call him America's most remarkable kid, with emphasis on his business acumen. It seems unfair to say something like "he's not going to revolutionize science" when they never implied he would.

karaterobot|3 years ago

Did you read on a couple sentences and see this part?

> Later, when opportunities came to publish his thoughts, the written word became more important to him and he found mentors to help him polish his communication skills.

Worthy of note is that he'd published a book by the age of 14, so was probably at least at grade level. Sounds like he just didn't learn things homogeneously, but rather focused on some things before other things.

bequanna|3 years ago

So in your view, it sounds like being able to perfectly diagram a sentence is more important than understanding tax law?

teekert|3 years ago

“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.

LegitShady|3 years ago

uber/airbnb: "and the law bit doesn't really count either, if you 'lobby' the right people"

Tossrock|3 years ago

Interestingly, this sounds like a paraphrase of an Elon/SpaceX quote, something like "if you want to win an argument, you better have Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein on your side."

egypturnash|3 years ago

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.

SyzygistSix|3 years ago

With you on the first part, not so much on the second. He seems to enjoy what he does and retain a sense of child-like wonder about the world. If the article is accurate, his curiosity and drive were fueled rather than suppressed.

TrispusAttucks|3 years ago

I disagree with this sentiment.

You wish to take away the very condition which made him uniquely special. He seems like he was enjoying his childhood. Adversity breeds character and this kid had more than character than some entire classrooms.

DoreenMichele|3 years ago

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.

jxramos|3 years ago

I’ve been curious about homeschoolers and their perceptions and interactions with age ranges. I’ve heard criticisms about weird social distortions that manifest from the whole age stratification we find in schools through the grade system. Basically the values and preferences of a given age take on exaggerations among a bunch of peers that don’t get tempered by the opinions and thoughts from older peers and others outside the age cohort. Sounds feasible but real experience of the homeschoolers would be great to hear about.

blobbers|3 years ago

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.

jessaustin|3 years ago

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

etempleton|3 years ago

Swimming is perhaps one of the most important skills anyone can learn regardless of where you live. At some point in your life you will probably fall into water too deep to stand. Don’t let yourself be at the mercy of someone saving you or sheer dumb luck.

Also, if you can’t swim, don’t be embarrassed! A lot of people can’t and honestly no one is judging you because you can’t swim. Go to your local pool and see if they offer adult classes and if not see if there is someone willing to teach you.

blacksqr|3 years ago

Not only couldn't swim, wasn't wearing a life jacket.

simonebrunozzi|3 years ago

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.

morelisp|3 years ago

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?

contingencies|3 years ago

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

bequanna|3 years ago

Did you read the article? His parents were immensely supportive.

I can’t imagine any other situation where a parent would essentially dedicate their life to support their child’s development.

chiefalchemist|3 years ago

I imagine he'd be cookie like all the other cookies; as in cut by a cookie cutter that limits the majority of all the other minds cranked out of the formal K - 12 mill.

xwdv|3 years ago

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.

moffkalast|3 years ago

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

fzeroracer|3 years ago

The people celebrating this story seem weird to me because this looks more like a nightmare. It's having your entire childhood traded away in order to function in a system that's responsible for making your entire family poor.

I know some people look at it as the whole 'self-made capitalist can do anything' sort of ideal but to me I see the failures of multiple systems.

epolanski|3 years ago

He has nothing to do with Von Neumann, a sophisticated intelllectual and the last polymath who was all about vanity and avoiding physical work.

hsuduebc2|3 years ago

Damn this is horrible.

Markoff|3 years ago

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.

SyzygistSix|3 years ago

No, it is very typically stupid. Exactly the kind of thing young men and boys do often, which is engaging in risky behavior without thinking. Most of the time the result is stupid fun. Unfortunately some are unlucky.

synergy20|3 years ago

A truly sad story.

bagels|3 years ago

Article did mention?

"But on a hot day last June, at nearby Newcastle Reservoir, Kevin drowned in a kayaking accident at a friend’s birthday party."

Article is worth reading. I think the title is pretty accurate, assuming the details are true.

aerovistae|3 years ago

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.

rendall|3 years ago

It's hard to hear about any 14 year old boy dying, particularly one with such promise. To salve our feelings, to make sense of it, it might feel important to grasp some detail that makes it not so tragic. Resist doing that. It was a tragic accident.

chubot|3 years ago

Eh this is a weird take -- if you are poor and everyone you know is poor, I don't think life jackets are the #1 thing you worry about, or even the #100 thing.

In rural communities, people are dying of many things, like not having medical care, drug addiction, murder, suicide, etc.

Obviously fate made this outing seem like a bad idea in hindsight, but I'd also say that leaving a 14 year kid to support a family of 4 is a bad idea in foresight.

i.e. if this is your takeaway, (respectfully) consider a different perspective

jxramos|3 years ago

This reminds me I need to teach my kids how to swim. I realized it recently having been around a bunch of rivers and lakes recently that they don’t have that skill and I forgot all about that while we were enjoying the water.

klyrs|3 years ago

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.

quantified|3 years ago

Like the "small schools" movement, it turns out that all systems are fundamentally affected by the quality of their participants. There are some colleges that feel more like "un-schools", and go-getters who attend these can go really far, while ordinary students flounder and founder.

For the truly remarkable (and the subject here seems to fit that), sticking them in any factory-like school setting is a waste. Un-schooling the majority of children would be an interesting social experiment that I'd rather see in a different country first.

The brightest candles burn out the fastest, wasn't that they saying, roughly?

xani_|3 years ago

Poor kid, the family are basically gimping his start in life by a decade... it's outright abuse

fock|3 years ago

> that means fundamentalist indoctrination, no math, no history, near illiteracy,

it looks like it was the same here. He essentially practiced the life of a middle age peasant. I guess many had their farm going by the age of 12 ... and probably didn't have some weird capitalistic, and nationalist inspiration porn ideologist in the background (because writing a pseudonymous book and then dying to young sounds like that... also the wondrous mentors...)

see for example: https://greatbasingreen.com/about-us-2/ (who is we? - would anyone write like that about themselves with those achievements ) https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Tell-Cant-Ambitious-Homeschooler...