What makes you think Aaron was a prodigy? Please cite specific facts or details; be careful because the press makes claims about his achievements which aren't completely accurate. He seemed intelligent perhaps a bit more than the typical person, but profoundly unwise in many ways (if you want to achieve a goal, do so in a way that achieves the goal, rather than the spectacularly inefficient, risky, and ultimately unproductive things he worked on).
Please cite specific facts or details; be careful because
the press makes claims about his [Aaron Swartz] achievements which aren't
completely accurate
Curiosity stoked. What are some misconceptions about Swartz?
A lot of people interpret "Aaron worked on RSS 1.0" as "Aaron was involved in creating RSS", but in fact, he had almost nothing to do with that. There were many versions of RSS prior to v1.0, and it was already pretty established by the time he got involved. And actually, the standard had already forked before that point, and the one that ended up being called "RSS 1.0" was the less-popular fork that never really went anywhere. You'll notice that biographies of Aaron never really mention what part of RSS he supposedly played a role in creating.
He also tends to get a lot of credit for founding reddit, but that's like saying Steve Case was a founder of Warner Brothers.
And he gets credit for helping stop SOPA, but again, it's usually expressed as a vague statement that doesn't actually cite any kind of specific examples of how he made a contribution. I'm not aware of any politician mentioning Aaron or Demand Progress as being a part of their decisionmaking process, or any of the corporations that held anti-SOPA campaigns mentioning that DP was in any way a leader in that movement.
Yeah and Larry Page's Google engine was a toy demo until Jeff Dean rebuilt it. We can knock the wind out of almost anyone with the cutting insight that they were part of a team and not Godlike ubermensch.
I don't know that, IN THIS ARTICLE, anybody claimed Larry Page was a prodigy. I don't think he was (the concepts behind PageRank were already well known, and writing a crawler, indexer and search engine were also well-established). Also, many people worked on improving the search engine, such as Craig Silverstein.
