For gifted children, being intelligent can have dark implications (2015)
calgaryherald.com
calgaryherald.com
Schools are just not healthy environments. Not only for gifted.
I think these come from different sorts of intelligence. You can be intelligent in regards to knowing the right answer but be stupid in regards to knowing that you shouldn't be a know-it-all. Or you could lack the ability to evaluate the advice of adults and thus fully believe what they say at face value (which when combined with the peer-pressure is evil message can lead to optimizing social interactions in some of the worst ways possible).
Those who are gifted socially and in other ways are likely to have far less trouble. I think the gifted who have problems are those gifted in some way, but who are below average in terms of social skills, because the ways they are gifted leads to adults missing that the ways they are challenged.
But IQ correlates with widest range of performance measurements of various activities. There is a strong variability but IMHO it's just because you perform best in things that interest you. So even very intelligent person won't perform better than average person in activity s/he's vastly less interested in than average person.
My hypothesis is that being socially maladjusted is no more prevalent in gifted kids than it is in average kids. You could disprove it by showing that for example that bullied kids IQ profile is shifted toward higher values. I'm not aware of such studies but I think it won't be the case.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the problem with gifted kids, or those of higher intelligence in general, is indeed not that they're more likely to have certain problems, but rather their rational awareness of the problem, combined with a stronger reliance on that rational side of their brain. This can make problems worse for them.
I've had a number of friends who are not very intelligent. And I started noticing that it's primarily their response to problems that differs from mine and other more highly-educated friends of mine. I notice a general lack of awareness, introspection, and analysis of the problem.
This applies to fitting in socially, but also to many other 'typical' problems we humans tend to have: career paths, breakups, fights, work stress, difficult friendships, and addiction.
For better (and also worse), I notice that the less intelligent a person is, the more likely they are to just feel bad, confused, angry, fearful, and then shrug it off and move on. The upside is that they're less likely to get caught up in over-analyzing and identifying with their problem (which in my experience doesn't solve anything). But the downside is that they might never face and try to fix or learn to handle such a problem.
I used to think that this downside is a very big one, and 'intellectual awareness' is mostly a good thing. But now I'm not so sure anymore. Ignorance can be bliss, and it's really, really difficult to think clearly and objectively about our own problems anyways. Perhaps our 'awareness' is really just a more elaborate and ultimately ineffective way to deal with these problems.
Intelligent people are better, in general, at rational thinking (pattern recognition?). But underneath that we still have all the subconscious, irrational machinery, primitive urges and 'lizard brain' emotions. Perhaps the problem is that smart people overdevelop the rational side, which perhaps is also culturally encouraged, and never learn to just feel bad and move on.
For example, the friends that I would consider clearly less intelligent are more likely to just yell or get mad in a fight. They'll vent about what the other did wrong, how they were treated unfairly, etc. They might ignore this person, or engage in various forms of meanness. And then one day they're okay again, and they act as if nothing happened. They don't need to understand exactly what happened, and they seem on average less likely to carry grudges.
The more intelligent of my friends will engage in long conversations diving into the psychology of the situation: freudian underlying causes, patterns of behavior in this other person, past events and what they mean, future implications, labelling ('Well, I think she's kind of bipolar'), the contextual factors ('Well, he's going through some tough things at work').
On an intellectual level we now understand the situation and even sympathize or empathize with the person who did something bad to us. We feel pretty good about how reasonable we are. Our rational side is happy. But emotionally we're just mad, or scared, or upset and confused. Because we don't give these feelings space (unless we understand them, which is often difficult), we don't learn how to just have those feelings, and we build up complex coping mechanisms that appear to work, but easily lead to all kinds of bigger problems.
It reminds me a lot of the mechanics of addiction. The solutions are relatively simple (not easy though!), but in my experience those who stay stuck in addictions the longest are those who are overly rational about it. They might even have deep understanding of addiction, but paradoxically that knowledge seems to make it easier to remain addicted.
(As an aside, since this is a long-ass comment already, I can strongly recommend David Foster Wallace's biography. Reading it was confronting and enlightening, as it highlighted how a brilliant dude with exceptional knowledge of human behavior and addiction could nonetheless stay addicted and rationalize his behavior in some very dumb ways.)
The real root of the reason school was a living hell for me was the bullying. We all like to tell kids that "the teachers will help you", but they either don't care or feel they can't do anything. Either way, the net effect is they are completely useless. We tell kids, "it builds character!", but that's nonsense. I don't care if it is the secret to my success, I'd rather be average today than to have experienced a tormented childhood. Those were formative years, and those scars run deep.
The worst mistake I ever made was deciding I wouldn't be a part of that Lord of the Flies bullshit. I kept thinking it'd get better as we got older, but it only got much worse. I never stuck up for myself, never learned how to fight, never worked out to become stronger to defend myself. And that's easily my biggest source of regret. Every day my mind recalls terrible memories from those days, and I find myself constantly thinking, "if only I had fought back here or done this there ..."
Bullying mostly targets the gifted, but it would help everyone if we took it seriously, instead of just saying, "well I went through it and lived; so the next generation can too!"
Also, it's bordering on a different topic, but bullying very much extends to the home as well. Abusive parents, siblings, etc. Some kids have literally no escape from it for 18+ years.
The few times I was bullied was always the first few weeks after I arrived, and they quickly found out I would fight back pretty aggressively. Was that a "being poor" thing? Was it my notorious "punched a kid in the face for cutting in front of me in line when I was five" temper? Was it simply because I wasn't an "easy" mark?
I can't rightfully say, but one of those things definitely reduced my propensity for being the target of bullies.
The physical pain wasn't even the worst of it. What hurts the most 20 years later is the fact that I stood there and did nothing. I'd have rather had memories of losing fights than having never fought at all.
And honestly, getting kicked around by a full-grown adult at home was worse than anything another sixth grader could have dished out. I really don't know what I was so afraid of back then.
It was only when I got completely fed up with it / gained the courage to well and truly fuck up the people that were bullying me... that they mostly stopped. I'd been learning martial arts for some years by then, which definitely helped.
Kids with lower IQ have tougher life.
Wait what? You have nothing to support that claim.
https://www.mencap.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/2009...
I believe bullies target what is different. Intelligence or lack of it will make you a target in equal measure. Got a birthmark on your face? Boom, you're a target.
My kids don't go to a school that accepts bullying. I don't think bullying was seen all that different when I was at school.
Fully agree. I think the problem is how people react to different differences. Kid who has clear physical disability getting bullied is seen immediately as a problem and dealt with.* Special education children getting bullied aren't quite as well responded to (lots of justification by adults that the children are treating them differently because society treats them differently), but any overt bullying is still squished. But being bullied for being different in just social skills but not other means... many adults will look at the bullying as a natural reaction to the victim being socially awkward instead of as bullying. And there is a bit of truth in that, because the difference between ostracizing someone who is socially awkward because you just don't want to be around them and ostracizing someone who is socially awkward as a way to bully them is not that clear cut. At the end of the day, the kid ends up ostracized either way.
*If they recognize it. Many forms of treating someone differently are hard to recognize if you haven't experienced them. A classical example is people asking extra questions to gay people that they would never ask to straight people, even though the questions themselves are mostly benign. Regardless of how harmless the questions themselves are, it is still treating them differently, which has subconscious effects.
Yeah, that was the reasoning behind school uniforms. A misguided belief that simply normalizing clothing would prevent bullying. But instead all that did was make them focus on something else. Your hair, your skin color, your height, your weight, your voice ... anything.
I don't think it'd matter how conformant you got everyone. You have to address the underlying causes and change the mentality, and you also have to increase the severity of punishment for bullying.
> Got a birthmark on your face? Boom, you're a target.
For me it's a scar.
> My kids don't go to a school that accepts bullying.
All of mine completely and utterly ignored it. We learned pretty quickly that going to the adults only made matters worse.
More importantly, I'm sorry that happened to you. Nobody should have to deal with the toxic environment you suffered through.
I've been punched in the face and chest multiple times, spit on, thrown into a creek by three kids, pushed down stairs, you name it. But it was mostly constant emotional abuse. For how much I was called a faggot, you'd swear the WBC kids went to school with me. I can't even imagine how much worse it'd be if I actually were gay. Kids in the '90s were obsessed with anti-homosexuality. I'd usually ditch the cafeteria and eat alone in the stairwells. The worst parts of the day were between-classes. I took to just carrying all of my books with me all day so I could jump from class to class as quickly as possible. Well, that and gym. Gym was always a nightmare.
It was at home where I received by far the worst physical abuse. But, I'm not looking for a pity party for myself here. I'm doing just fine today, and managed to cope with most of it.
And to be fair, I really was a weird kid. The sock thing in the article caught my eye. I would have killed for socks without seams: I was always taking off my shoes and folding the edge of the sock because the seam would drive me nuts. I had all kinds of weird tics, many caused by actual (not trendy) obsessive-compulsive disorder, others by misophonia.
I'd just really like to see people take bullying seriously instead of as a rite of passage. Imagine if you had a coworker call you a faggot and push you down the stairs at work. And so you told HR, and they told the coworker, "hey, don't do that again or we might make you work an extra hour!" and that was it. Yet somehow this is perfectly okay with children, because "kids will be kids."
The correlation with eccentricity is not nearly as strong, in my experience, among children who are one standard deviation above average, as in children who are two. Teachers who are actually talented at teaching gifted children see their efforts spread too thin, with only 1–3 children per class who could really benefit from this teacher over other good teachers.
And the eccentric children don't ever get the insulation from other kids' bullying they need; they often avoid even making friends among themselves because they see that as a way of cementing their low social status. Gifted children can make friends with — for lack of a better word — normal children, but some of them, at least, can only get the social stimulation they need from real intellectual conversation with their peers, which other children are either incapable of or uninterested in.
I don't believe we should isolate gifted children from the rest of the population day in, day out. That would only serve to create an echochamber and leave them woefully unprepared when they inevitably leave the bubble. But I do think they need to be given significant time amongst themselves so that they can develop the friendships and confidence they need to survive in the general population, and the special academic attention which might hopefully stimulate them enough to help them flounder less in regular classes.
The gifted program at my school was genuinely fun and interesting. They spent the year on a theme, say astronomy, and explored that theme through a variety of projects. For example, they designed a game about space travel, they built a model of the solar system, etc.
I was not in it until the 6th grade, the last year before "gifted" meant "do more homework" in my school system. I got in because the previous year I built a fairly impressive lego castle for my entry project and maybe they thought that because they were doing architecture as the theme that I would do well. I really did enjoy it and looked forward to it every week.
But I was not, and am not, an exceptionally hard worker or particularly motivated to excel. I probably have an above average memory and was thus able to do well in school despite my laziness (I graduated high school with a 3.3 GPA). Even if I was "gifted", you wouldn't know it from my work. But given the opportunity to engage in something, I took that chance and looked forward to it.
I'm not sure that this addresses the children in the article, but I feel it's sort of a pity that the weekly "explore your interests" classes are no longer part of the gifted program in my child's school district. Not because she's necessarily gifted, but because I think she'd find it fun.
I've learnt how to adjust when I was in hospitals and sanatorium, changing einvironment a few times is great for that. In middle school everything was OK already (also it was much better school, so there were more kids like me there).
I also think being on the receiving end of ostracism is valuable experience (but not for 8 years, a few months would suffice). It works as a vaccine against tribal thinking.
Really good way of putting it. I'm stealing that.
Yeah, well. About that... It might not be related but I have often been singled out because of strabism and I also developed a strong tendency to swim against the current in tribal settings (applause, talking about the movie we just saw when living the theater, political discussion). It's okay now, I know I have that tendency and watch out for it. Can't say for sure if it's related though.
Anyway. I would never fun of anyone based on their looks. This, I am pretty sure it's related. Although I have known some mean kid with deformities.
Peter Thiel said something about this once, speculating on why "disruptive" (pretty sure that was not the word he used) start-ups are disproportionally run by awkward social outsiders, and his theory is that "normal" kids instinctively seek validation from peers, and for these "disruptive" start-ups, they are saying that it's insane, it can't be done (go work in law/finance/management consulting instead). The awkward kids don't care (as much), and are therefore able to focus on actually doing it.
While some of my classmates were certainly a bit ...eccentric... the vast majority were wonderful, completely normal people and many of them went on to do incredible things.
I've since moved to San Francisco, and I've gotta say, SF and the GATE program seem to have a lot in common: both fill me with the feeling that anything is possible; coupled with the nagging suspicion that everyone else is smarter, harder working, and more successful ... :)
She says the trait is normal. It is found in 15 to 20% of the population. She writes:
"While being easily overstimulated and aware of subtle little things may be what most parents notice first about their Highly Sensitive Child, depth of processing is really the underlying trait."
See her 2014 summary of scientific research on highly sensitive children here: http://hsperson.com/pdf/Authors_note_HSC.pdf
For more information see Dr Aron's website here: http://hsperson.com/
I imagine a lot of other folks who are just as smart as I was but didn't luck out with the same circumstances have been severely let down by the system over the years. Things just aren't setup for people who learn differently, or at a different pace, or have a different form of cognition than the archetypal student that everything is built around. Which ends up ill serving a lot of students across all intelligence levels.
Yet I'm unemployed, 30 year old, and can't manage to get hired or to do work that is given to me. I don't want to tell people I'm just a special snowflake or something of that matter (since many people easily come down on you for it when they can), but I always hated school because I felt it was formatting me, and not stimulating me. I recently went into some school program for web programming, I hated it and failed it, yet I was considered to know things already.
I'm a little tired of people telling me it's a personality problem, to be frank.
In my view, school is not meritocratic, because its aim is to be efficient and teach important basics to the most people, which politically is a good thing. But is it for everyone? No, and people who are intelligent and care about what the learn actually have more chances to fail, simply because learning program are tailored to be taught easily.
I remember meeting a jury for some project at this school program, and they were pretty judgmental towards my behavior or my opinions when they were asking me specific questions about me.
I think Good Will Hunting precisely describes this problem. Society doesn't know how to pull people up according to their capabilities, because not everything is known about psychology, but also because society often tends to perpetuates its error because of social models which are built on belief.
I think there is no real opportunities for people who might have better capabilities than other. Maybe it should be treated as a handicap or special need, but it's true that politically it's hard to explain such thing when there already is a debate about inequality.
No, the primary purpose of schools is to teach children how to be controlled by authority figures. As a side bonus, it watches over children for a large period of time. Controlling parents insist on the state paying for what's essentially day-care, so that's what we get.
I have no clue how to fix things. Best advice I have is to opt out. "Homeschool" your children, don't force them into learning anything in particular, and pay attention to what their actual goddamn needs are.
IQ and that kind of intelligence is only really a predictor of how quickly you are capable of learning. Unfortunately, it means very little regarding motivation, ambition, or any of the other traits generally associated with being successful. It's difficult to derive success entirely from pure intelligence, especially with cognitive biases humans are prone to accumulate through experience as they mature.
Most people would say that's why we have society: to prevent misapplied potential in various areas, and to competently leverage mental resources such that everyone can benefit. But people, being imperfect, fuck it up along the way, so we all have our cross to bear, and society becomes shaped by its malignancies.
Talk to any cultural anthropologist. :)
So, what does he do for a living? Odd jobs. He has held one steady job in the decades I've known him. This is because he has poor social skills (although I've tried to help him learn the ropes of understanding people) and because he finds accepting other people's mediocrity frustrating as he politely tells them their errors - and conversely, they resent his cleverness.
I was lucky enough to work with someone similar to my friend about 10 years ago. As his boss, I sat down with him and basically said "you are very clever but you are also ignorant. You change external interfaces that drive significant changes to the rest of the system. You must stop it for the sake of the project". He exploded and told me to "f* myself" in front of the project team of ~100 to hear. Two hours later, he apologised and thanked me for my honesty and wisdom (translation: courage to tackle the wild brumby). When I saw him a few years ago, he was a different person. He thanked me for my kindness and patience back then, which meant a lot to me.
To wrap it all up: some people truly March to the beat of their own drum. I thrive on these people.
Good luck. I hope you find your groove. No one else will find it for you, unfortunately.
What do you mean ? You mean you manage them ? I agree that it must be quite delicate. In recent years I've started to understand what politics, public opinion and management really are about. I guess that's something I'd tell a math genius to get interested in, which is the art of compromise, negotiation and game theory, which can apply to take care of twenty five-years-old kids.
> To wrap it all up: some people truly March to the beat of their own drum.
Well people who have higher intelligence feel and know they are smarter, and since they are less people who are as smart as them to contradict them, nobody really can question their thoughts.
> Good luck. I hope you find your groove.
Thank you, that's truly heartwarming to hear it.
> No one else will find it for you, unfortunately.
I guess one day psychology and management will evolve and gain traction to improve society, I'm not so desperate about the future.
I hate my job, have no achievments whatosever and I balance on doing bare minimum not to get fired. Changed job 4 times and it's definitely me. That's despite the fact that I was always going to be a programmer since I was 10, and I loved programming. I'm lazy as hell and I'm astonished every day they won't fire me. Any dreams of success in mine choosen callign are long past.
I also had huge problems with social interactions, married first girl that could look past it (she has similar problems). It wasn't a good decision.
My wife has even bigger problems with employement, but she declines to agree it's her fault (she changes job every year and it's always "them"). We are codependent and use each other not to be alone. We hurt each other a lot. I don't think it's love, but then I find love to be hard to define (I mostly feel "I should be feeling this" instead of actually feeling this, not only towards her).
I should really leave her, cause she isn't happy with me (nor am I with her), but she has her life wasted, in some party because of me, and she depends on me at least economicaly at this point. Or maybe it's rationalization because it's more convenient to continue this.
I'm addicted to internet and gaming, and I'm well aware of the fact that I'm wasting my life. I just don't care. No right to complain really, I had it better than most people, and it's entirely my fault I'm wasting it all. And yet I do, because nothing worthwhile seems achievable and vice-versa.
BTW I know I sound arrogant and selfish, that's because I am. I wondered many times if maybe I'm just stupid (that would explain a lot). In the end it doesn't really matter, results matter and I don't have them.
I probably could get depression diagnosed, but I don't want to cure it even if it's true, because it would mean I have to actually do sth. So my best diagnosis is "chronic laziness".
I'm currently trying a behavioral cognitive therapy, so far it's working a little better than whatever else I tried with psychiatrists.
What is making me hold to life, is to try to do some stuff I know how to do: programming, etc at a minimal pace and scale (I have this small video game project I'm trying to do). Even though it won't solve my problems (or at least immediately), I still believe in what I do or can do, and it prevents me from giving up everything.
If you have skills and like to do certain things or if you are attracted to certain things, go do them, it's not a waste of your time, even if the task seems daunting or hard. In a way, you can reason it as being some kind of possible contribution to society, and for me that's how I maintain a minimal amount of self-esteem.
To me, no matter how you think and try to rationalize your worth, the sense of worth seems to be strongly connected with empathy. You may experiment with things like making people happy just for the fun of it when you stumble upon some right opportunity for that. I think this slowly improves my relationships with some people.
And I mean actually happy and actually fun - you see, others have empathy too and they know if you are sacrificing yourself for them. This may be appreciated in the short term, but not always in the long term. Sometimes you may paradoxically make them feel better by slowing down a bit, if they can handle that.
These processes are slow, all you do is maintain vigilance and use opportunities as they come. It would be hard to engineer one quick action which fixes everything, humans are weird and unpredictable.
Don't get too distracted by their "evolutionary science" which is 80% bullcrap, don't get too excited by their "tricks" which are straight way to maneuver yourself into position where you'll be constantly forced to lie and feel like shit for doing so. Just read their story.
Let's say that it opened my mind to what kinds of insanity people do in the name of something they want to be love. I used to be badly afraid of ending in a bad relationship, but since reading this I started to notice more and more of low-level mechanics underlying such relationships and my fear of women is slowly subsiding.
So I spent my high school inside WoW, where nobody can see you, and I went to a good college and worked really hard to get an education, lost some weight there (and developed socially, somewhat), and now I'm a full-time software developer (graduated school last May). I'm realizing that (a) I'm not actually an "introvert," I just never had a chance to develop socially, and (b) the reasons that initially attracted me to software development (specifically, the ability to just "get in the zone" and escape from reality for hours and hours) are now considerably less appealing to me. I'd much rather be in a job that exposes me to some sort of social interaction beyond my manager, although perhaps the grass is always greener...
Anyway, to relate back to OP, I really, really wish someone had pulled me out of my public school and let me develop with a group of other "misfits." I eventually fell into that social group anyway, in high school (mostly artists, turns out), but the damage was done. I had a "challenge math" class in elementary school that was fun (and all the other kids I remember from that class either went to ivy leagues or ended up in software or both), but beyond accelerating our math education and offering AP courses, there was no support for giftedness in my school system.
Stubborn power freaks tend to be excessively self conscious when they know how others are going to react once they "finally" make some big mistake.
I also recommend http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/overexcitability-and-...
To borrow from G.K. Chesterton, we love school enough to want to see it changed, but do not hate it enough to change it (yet).
The Hacker News participant who kindly shared the article that opens this thread is a user whose user name I recognize from the many good articles he submits for discussion here. That said, permit me to not entirely agree with the opinion expressed by the Canadian teacher profiled in the article that "our most brilliant children are among our most vulnerable." That is actually not what the research shows. I agree with the several comments posted before this comment that say that age-segregated, lockstep curriculum school[4] is a particularly toxic environment for gifted learners, and not a good environment for any learner. But I learned, after majoring in Chinese language in university and living in east Asia after graduation, that there are varying cultural perspectives on how a smart person fits into human society. Growing up in the United States, in junior high I read a story by Philip K. Dick, which I have tried to find again but have not yet found in his collected writings, in which he expressed the opinion that the higher one's IQ is above the population median, the fewer true friends one can have, an opinion expressed in a top comment in this thread. I fully agreed with that opinion when I was a child, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I isolated myself from "average" people in my school and neighborhood environment. But when I lived in east Asia, I learned that Confucius said, 三人行，必有我師焉 ("wherever three persons are walking, my teacher is surely among them"). The east Asian Confucian philosophers were very clear than human beings vary in how smart they are, but they also deeply believed that any human being can learn from any other human being. The job of a smart person is to use brainpower to understand other people and make society better. As soon as I adopted those east Asian perspectives, I found it much easier to make friends. Now I proactively tell my four children and the gifted young people I teach in my supplemental mathematics program that they can find rapport with anyone, if they are willing to listen. And I spread this same message internationally among parent email lists and social media groups for parents of gifted children.
To sum up, the article makes strong claims that high IQ is strongly associate with social maladjustment and psychological disturbance. That is not an invariant property of high IQ, and I know many exceptions. All research on the topic confirms that many high-IQ people do fine in social interaction with other human beings, and some who do not start out that way can learn better social adjustment. School has a lot of toxic features for most learners,[5] but gifted children need not fear being social misfits for life.
[1] http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Termans-Kids-Groundbreaking-Study-Gift...
https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...
[4] http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
I suppose the inverse would be the parent who constantly tells their child how clever he is, and actively discourages him from mixing with other children. Unfortunately this does happen.
Ah, "severely gifted" -- what a meme. What a commentary on the times in which we live. I can imagine psychologists surveying this new frontier with barely concealed joy, in particular now that the DSM is being abandoned.
People need to understand that, in modern times, to avoid one or another mental illness diagnosis, you can't be too smart or too dumb, you can't be hyperkinetic or hypokinetic, you can't be extraordinary in any way. You have to be the very definition of dull and unimaginative. You have to be a psychologist.
The nature of human development just means that we all inherit some level of personality "defect". But psychologists don't view them all as candidates for a diagnosis of mental illness.
Or regarding the specific quote, in the context of going to a normal school, "severely gifted" might be the right word for describing these children. If these children are given something meaningful to do in school instead, then the moniker would not be apt.
Even if this were true (which it isn't) the psychiatrist can always argue that the fact that someone else doesn't like the symptoms negatively affects the patient and therefore he is ill.
Circular reasoning like this is common practice.
Maybe I was being too general, but the diagnosis criteria I remember from when I've looked at such (including ADHD, Autism spectra disorders, and Depression) have included such qualifiers, IIRC.
Checking ASD, the following is one of the criteria:
The deficits result in functional limitations in effective communication,
social participation, social relationships, academic achievement,
or occupational performance, individually or in combination.
Of course the diagnosing psychiatrist could always fudge the facts, but arguing whether or not psychiatrists accurately apply diagnosis criteria is a different matter to arguing that "to avoid one or another mental illness diagnosis, [...] you can't be extraordinary in any way".
But there is no fudging. Someone not liking something about you that you are totally OK about does negatively impact you if that person is say your spouse.
There is no fudging. This is the usual modus operandi.
But that happens to be true and easily verified. If you're bright, you're assured of the Asperger's diagnosis unless you insist on avoiding the company of psychologists, increasingly difficult in modern times. If you're gay, it was the same thing -- until the public demanded that psychologists stop handing out mental illness diagnoses to gay people.
The history of psychology is punctuated with examples in which obviously appropriate behavior was falsely labeled as evidence of disease, including the infamous example of "drapetomania" -- slaves who ran away from their masters were obviously mentally broken and in need of professional help to reunite them with their owners.
Psychologists don't wait for people to appear and ask for help -- they issue press releases announcing the discovery of yet another imaginary ailment from which many are claimed to be suffering in silence. Example:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-wealth/201207/el...
This is a false claim. The only requirement is that a psychologist deem you mentally ill. For example, in the eyes of psychology, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Thomas Jefferson all are/were mentally ill -- that is, until the imagined malady they were supposed to be suffering from was abandoned because of public outrage.
In the same way and with the same effects, homosexuality was a lucrative mental illness until the public forced psychology to accept that it is not an illness and abandon it.
These are two among dozens of examples in which psychology invents illnesses, then offers bogus cures, all for a fee.
> Or regarding the specific quote, in the context of going to a normal school, "severely gifted" might be the right word for describing these children.
That's absurd. It stigmatizes a gift, an example of nature's occasional generosity. To an adult, the absurdity of this kind of writing and thinking is obvious. But to gifted children, most too inexperienced to understand psychology's real role in society, it constitutes yet another burden in their formative years -- years spent in therapy listening to an intellectually handicapped person exhorting them to try to be more "normal."
> If these children are given something meaningful to do in school instead, then the moniker would not be apt.
I agree with your point, but it's never apt -- it stigmatizes the gifted without recompense. You seem to be missing the point that (a) public schools are notorious for failing the gifted, and (b) this kind of talk only shifts the burden onto the children and away from where it belongs -- on our broken educational system, and on psychology.
For example, Russian word for "nerd" is literally "botanist" ("ботаник").
Not really, you just have to learn to avoid them at an early age and to not answer any of their questions except through an attorney.
An advanced directive would be more useful than having a lawyer there. A discussion with your nearest relative about what you want and what you want them to say would be more useful.
A behavioral health diagnosis, just like any health diagnosis, just recognizes that you have some thing that is negatively impacting you.
Just as the diagnosis of an ingrown toenail doesn't mean you need special treatment, neither does a mental health diagnosis.
Nonsense. Try getting a top security clearance if you have a mental illness diagnosis. Try getting certain kinds of insurance, or preferential treatment in many professions, or any number of other examples in modern society -- a mental illness diagnosis is a burden for a lifetime. The fact that the "illness" may have resulted from a fantasy like recovered memory therapy or be based on a make-believe ailment like Asperger's or homosexuality, doesn't matter -- same burden, same stigma.
There's plenty of people with severe mental illness who have security clearances.
Yes, but only if they lie or waffle in their applications, because mental illness is specifically discussed as a reason to deny clearance.
http://www.military.com/veteran-jobs/security-clearance-jobs...
That does not conflict with anything I said. A mental health diagnosis does not generally mean that a person is dangerous, unemployable, or disabled.
A negative reaction of others to a diagnosis, based on fear and ignorance, is a big problem that we need to address. But those erroneous reactions don't change the intrinsic meaning of a diagnosis.
Democracy is kinda like 1 human and 10 chimpanzees living together, with the chimpanzees insisting that everybody are equal, and threatening violent sanctions whenever anybody behaves otherwise.
I think it is better for gifted/talented people than any alternative anyone has proposed would be if an attempt were made to implement it with real people in the real world.
> Democracy is kinda like 1 human and 10 chimpanzees living together, with the chimpanzees insisting that everybody are equal, and threatening violent sanctions whenever anybody behaves otherwise.
I'm a "gifted/talented" person by most standards (by IQ test scores, PSAT/SAT/LSAT all at the highest reported point in the distribution -- 99 or 99.9 percentile, depending on what the particular test reported at the time -- etc.)
And, frankly, I find it quite likely that anyone who thinks that the relationship between humans and chimpanzees is even a remotely appropriate analogy for the relationship between gifted and talented people at the ~91% percentile and the rest of society is someone who is inclined to behave in a way such that forceful sanctions are appropriate and necessary.
There is a reason why smart people flee from dictatorships to democracies.
So we have a bunch of intellectually unbalanced kids whose deformity happens to be a mystical trait that modern society irrationally worships. Kids who have no control over the thing they are rewarded for learn to balance out their intellectual difference with new psychological defects.
You can see how this gets stupid really fast.
Like that comic character in the movie, I realized early on that gifted classes were not there to insulate me from the other kids, but rather to insulate them from me.
Do your gifted kids a favor and keep them out of special programs that isolate them from peers, and teach your kids to take their rightful place leading them.
My wife and son are Aspergers. I put a lot of effort into teaching social skills to my son (via myself and through courses) and by proxy, my wife has benefitted too. We also put my son into a regular and high performing school, despite his gifted ability (WISC tested).
I've had several friends tell me that I saved my son, which I think means that focussing on socialisation and behaviour was of more benefit to him than solely driving his academic performance.
He went from a troubled boy to reasonably accepted in a few years. While it's feigned behaviour (eg. He mimics being like others), it helps him socially. I've seen other Aspergers kids be broken by their peers because they don't try to (or can't) conform.
I spoke with his teacher last week and said "I expect the same respect and treatment for my son where possible" and highlighted a bad example where my son was singled out in front of the class "you can't treat an Aspergers like that".
Hear, hear.
The school system decline is also a political "hot potato" because of the connection to increasing immigration. Since free immigration is considered a holy sacrament by many Swedes, it is a political no-no to connect school problems to immigration (just wait and see if I get any comments to this statement on here)
For the ten worst performing schools in Sweden, where students have the lowest grades in 2015, these are the stats:
Rågsveds skola, Stockholm (90 percent immigrants) Ryaskolan, Göteborg (93 percent immigrants) Vättleskolan, Göteborg (84 percent immigrants) Västra Engelbrektsskolan, Örebro (82 percent immigrants) Hjällboskolan, Göteborg (99 percent immigrants) Kronan, Trollhättan (98 percent immigrants) Sandeklevsskolan, Göteborg (98 percent immigrants) Apelgårdsskolan, Malmö (99 percent immigrants) Nivrenaskolan, Sundsvall (22 percent immigrants) Rinkebyskolan, Stockholm (98 percent immigrants)
It would appear that the Swedish school system is not able to properly educate immigrants.
And as you say, Sweden is "moving to a more and more class-segregated country." It very clear from the above list.
The 32-year old minister of education, Mr Fridolin, recently went on record saying the government will NOT implement further restrictions on immigration. He also said he would fix the school system in 100 days.
Source of statistics: http://www.svt.se/nyheter/regionalt/vast/skolsituationen-aku...
Asbestos suit ready. Flame on.
How the hell should lower class immigrants get out of that class when those are the only people around them?
It was that bad. Husbyskolan was exceptionally bad when I went there ~2000. My class was the last class with actual Swedes in it.
I agree with everything you brought up. My parents thought Hjällbo was so bad that they left for Husby around 1997.
Too be fair, immigrants didn't cause this. Curled generation and old Swedish communists together managed to cook this up. My parents are immigrants and didn't repeat the school mistakes with my brother. He's doing med school soon.
> Asbestos suit ready. Flame on.
Please don't. I don't just mean talking blithely about flamewars, but conducting them at all.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11087694 and marked it off-topic.
But whatever, you are the boss :)
Not dismissing the article itself, but it's definitely a pattern on HN.
That is not normal is our inability to fix it and apparent lack of trying.
Edit: She did though, damn things were itchy. Doesn't seem to be a problem since I grew up though. Funny that.
I still wince at the few times I'd ripped a hole in a new shirt...
Still unbearable but a lot more cautious after I ripped a cheap shirt in half a few months ago hahaha.
EDIT: To note, I wasn't considered gifted. Undiagnosed ADHD. Teachers complained I couldn't finish writing the date and was lazy...
I think tags on kids clothes are just comparatively gigantic. I always thought most kids just dealt with it to avoid getting in trouble.
The damage is fixed, and Homer becomes much more intelligent than most of the other inhabitants of Springfield and it makes his life miserable, leading him to lament "is there no place for the man with the 105 IQ?" and purposefully restore the damage to return his IQ to normal Springfield levels.
- Simpsons
It's also a pattern on HN because it really is a rather new concept. In Sweden, the law that dictates that every child should have a education that match their ability came into reality 2010 (2010:800, 3§). Before that, the goal was to target the lowest common denominator that would create a passing grade for everyone. This meant that school material targeting IQ around 75 was also put in the hands of children with around IQ 125, and unsurprisingly, this caused problems with under-stimulation and children that go through school without any training in studying.
I'm not sure how accurate this is. All the exceptionally talented kids/young people I knew growing up were nice and well-liked, well-adjusted people. All the weird kids I knew were just weird, not really especially talented.
I'd like to see the numbers behind those anecdotes. There was recently an article here that discussed why extremely academically gifted children rarely become grown-up geniuses and people who move their fields forward. They stated that it's not because they are troubled, most of them are socially well-adjusted, but I can't find that article now for the lie of me.
The Swedish system basically begins with the proposition that all students should put out X effort. Gifted children get more advanced work, or more quantity of work till they are putting out X effort.
This isn't designed to make them better adjusted, or less 'weird'. It's just there to equip gifted students with more skills relative to the mean.
At the time I had 8 classes. 6 of them were required: math, english, history, etc., and 2 were free electives: sports, music, technical (computers and woodshop). As a 11yo these were the few freedoms we were allowed in school and the work didn't feel like work. I enjoyed making music. I enjoyed making stupid, wooden gifts for my family and friends. So the counsellor says we're dropping your 2 electives so you can have take our gifted classes. And that is when I hoped right out of it.
Now that is the gifted (also called ESL) program in none exceptional schools. It's usually just an extra class. There are schools of excellence, governor's school, magnet school, etc. Which focus on different curriculum. These will have an emphasis around math, language, arts, sports. You apply by filing an application or submitting a portfolio. Some, you have to be nominated by your teachers.
That was back in the 1980s and 1990s; not sure how things have changed.
I have to say... I thought our school system did a good job with gifted students. We had some classes with other gifted kids and a lot of classes with the school's general population. We weren't treated as elite freaks or anything, were never told we were "better", and all in all I think they did it right.
When I was growing up anyone who was nominated by their teachers would simply skip grades or get shifted into an honours program if it was available for their level.
Just as I was graduating high school however, all the gifted programs were phased out as being unnecessary (or unfair depending on whom you talked to). There was much hay made about the tight school budget needing to go to support students who were being left behind by the new national testing standards.
Now, though, ten years later, they have magnet schools for the talented which are by nomination only.
Having been one of those 'gifted children' and gone to gifted schools where I wasn't challenged, I think this is a good idea.
I basically never had to put any effort in until my last year of high school and completely breezed through my education. Once I hit university and couldn't get away with that anymore, I was totally unequipped to handle continuing my education or holding a job that matched my capabilities. I hit a wall of failure pretty hard.
It probably took me another 7 years after that to get my life together where I had the habits to try and achieve things through consistent effort.
And yeah, all of the depression, anxiety and substances abuse that you would expect happened too.
I'm not a very good employee. I have on several occasions had one of my bosses tell me not to do more than the minimum effort. Don't improvise. The company doesn't get paid more for excellence. Just do as you're told. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and that guy wants "Rock and Roll Part 2" by Gary Glitter (aka the Hey Song) for the 50th time in a row rather than whatever crap it is that you would prefer to play.
I feel like I could accomplish very difficult tasks, but I also feel that the effort would not only go unrewarded, but that other people would actively resent me for doing them.
If society loved genius, it would pay more for it. I'm not even a genius. I'm either slightly smarter than the median, or just egotistical enough to think that I am. But now I'm just a mediocre, run-of-the-mill software professional on paper, because that's what companies around here are willing to pay for, and so I eased off my throttle far enough to pretend to be that for them. Being on HN helps a lot when I'm just filling a seat.
Naturally, this hasn't exactly produced a healthy relationship between me and the rest of society.
I think that maybe schools don't want to produce geniuses, because they are very disruptive, and hard to please, and it's harder to keep them in line with a load of BS. There may actually be a tiny kernel of truth in the conspiracy theory that public schooling intentionally dumbs down the smartest students or endlessly occupies them with useless busy work, even as it trains up the others to be more useful as workers.
I can't necessarily do things the best way every time, but we have enough difficult problems to solve and its always appreciated when we make the marketing team's job easier. I love that my work either directly translates into more cash coming in or saves us a bunch of cash.
I'm a mediocre developer and okay with that I guess. I know that my potential is way higher, but I also feel like there's some greater calling out there in my life that is not my job/career.
It takes the edge off that feeling you're experiencing -- I definitely felt the exact same way in previous jobs.
Love the Ren & Stimpy reference in your name btw.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opinion/sunday/how-to-rais...
edit: or it could be, not sure any more...
I didn't see the article in question, but I'd put money on this being an excerpt from Adam Grant's "Originals" as it was released in the past couple of weeks and this is a point made in the opening chapter.
However, unlike the kids in the article, he doesn't enjoy Shakespeare or fawn over Incan currency. Talking to him is amazing. His thought processes are very mature, even compared to many adults. His language (when not telling fart jokes) is eloquent. He has no choice with his peers: dumb it down or be a freak.
Several of my friends fit into this profile too. None of them fit the mould painted in this article. Although, that doesn't surprise me. I found this article disappointing on several levels (eg. generalisation about gender is 'she').
There were a few points in the article that resonated with me: behavioural problems in my son (which we later categorised as Aspergers compounded with boredom) and misdiagnosis by teachers. My son was put in a special class for struggling students until I produced a WISC report showing he was gifted or near gifted. When he wrote a beautiful children's book at 5, they thought it was a forgery and ignored it until I had the WISC report to confirm his ability. The report changed a lot with his teachers.
The article talks about segregation as a positive. I'm not convinced this is a positive as these children are likely going to need to integrate in broader society. I purposely put my kids at a standard but high performing school rather than choosing a special school for this reason. The results have been mixed. There is bullying by peer girls and boys and at least one 'friend' said "my mother can't see me play with you or I'll get in big trouble" (also known as Aspergers are lepers to some parents - if this is true, she is an awful person).
If I have one suggestion for parents of a gifted child, it would be to accept that your child will have areas where they are smarter than you and to nurture their talent through their interests. I've recently observed at length two mothers with near gifted or gifted sons whom they mercilessly bully (I have no idea why a parent would do this to their child). Both mothers have a daughter too - and the daughter (in both instances) can't be praised enough. Two of my closest and gifted friends (50+) recalled similar bullying from their mothers (and were unsupported by weak fathers). Thankfully, my wife is not like that with our son.
So, yes, I see odd behaviour from gifted children as normal due to an incompatibility at an intellectual level. Gifted is noticeably different from clever. When you talk to a 5 year old that shows complex reasoning like an adult most of the time, they are most probably gifted. Someone that knows some surprising facts is probably clever rather than gifted.
Because most people of above-average intelligence go through life on the normal path, they just do it faster or better.
Life is certainly going to be more difficult, more dangerous, and probably less fulfilling for someone with an IQ of 85 than it will be for someone with an IQ of 110 or 135.
I agree about dangerous and difficult[1]. But why "less fulfilling"? That's a risky comment to make because we've seen, as one extreme example, doctors place people with learning disability[2] on Do Not Resuscitate orders without the knowledge or permission of the patient or their relatives.
[1] Living in Fear, a report about bullying, from the charity MENCAP who campaign for people with LD. https://www.mencap.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/2009...
[2] UK usage of LD.
More intelligent people may be less likely to learn how to work hard as a child. They learn that life is easy, and you can succeed without trying. When they get to something hard enough to require trying, they think they aren't smart enough to do it.
When I was in basic school, before the separation happens, I had a friend that was said to be asozial. Asozial is a common description in Germany for low class people without basic education. His father was alcoholic, they lived in a really run down house and his parents weren't able to help him with the topics covered in basic school. At no point did I have the feeling that he was somehow dumber or less intelligent. What he was struggling with was the situation he was in. Meanwhile I was struggling with add and was only able to get through the first years of school with the help of my mother that made me sit down at the table until all homework was finished. When my parents saw that we struggled only the slightest bit they helped us with school. I didn't get private tutoring, but that seems to be extremely common now. Another thing that's only available to kids of affluent families.
The vibe I'm getting from Sweden (I lived there for a while, learned the language and still follow the news), is that it's moving to a more and more class-segregated country. Sure, everybody can look for the best school for their children, but only parents from higher socioeconomic classes will do that.
"Most people intuitively understand that a person with $25k less income per year than the average population is going to have unique problems and go through life in a slightly different path and order than the average. However, for some reason, this is not easily understood regarding people with $25k over the average."
It's clear that the US educational system simply doesn't know how to handle high intelligence.
And why wouldn't they gravitate towards HN?
> self-proclaimed gifted HNers
Did you see how much tests for giftedness cost in the article? Do you really expect all these people to go out and get tested before feeling like they have permission to comment on an Internet forum about their experience?
I recall in Kurt Vonnegut's _Sirens of Titan_ how people on Earth were handicapped, to counter their strengths. The most intelligent people had to wear earphones that constantly emitted annoying sounds so that it was harder for them to think clearly. That's very much like the way GLaDOS was handicapped in the Portal 2 backstory by attaching Wheatley to her--a personality core that was designed by the best scientists to be the worst possible idiot, to constantly feed her bad ideas.
The US educational system piles gratuitous additional work on the smartest students. Rather than just graduating, how about graduating while taking a bunch of AP or IB classes? The system accommodates them by digging additional official channels, rather than allowing them to become self-directed autodidacts or entrepreneurs.
I know that when I was a kid, I would have totally wasted any additional free time I may have had outside of classes, but it's very possible that some of my classmates in all the various "X" sections might have taken part-time jobs, or started low-capital businesses, or educated themselves on topics the school could never teach.
Your phrase "self-proclaimed gifted" is outright dismissive.
This is a natural human reaction. The reminder of the existence of people smarter than ourselves often results in narcissistic injury, it feels bad, it can hurt.
It's the reason gifted education is such a low and unpopular funding priority.
But all that does is make society poorer.
Humanity's gifted population is one of it's great resources, and we squander it. We don't protect it, and we don't value it, and we don't foster it.
The article talks about twice exceptional kids, these are kids who are gifted but often have a discrepancy or a weakness, a learning disability.
Because they are highly verbal and intelligent, they can use that to cover for their weaknesses, but they do not do well in a school setting at all.
They withdraw or they become the class clown to entertain themselves.
This often compounds over the years, like untreated ADD, and turns into depression, anxiety, substance abuse and so on.
And it's a tragedy because they have so much to offer, but we fail them, and we lose a lot of them.
What is being mocked is the attitude we should care for people? Think about that for a second.
>What that person saying is that a lot of reasonably intelligent people who are nowhere near geniuses like to think of themselves as geniuses as a form of narcissistic self-flattery.
Yet the parent comment didn't have that in it. How can the grandparent be mocking the parent if the grandparent is mocking those who chime in 'me too' while the parent doesn't do that?
And the article was about a minority population of vulnerable, at-risk children, some of whom go on to commit suicide.
And the top HN comment was mocking. Think about that for a second.
There are a lot of people that hate the gifted, just because of the way they were born. They relish the opportunity to take them down a notch.
For that matter, even on posts of mental health issues, people comment and proclaim "me too", do you and GGP think, even there people are just trying to carve out an image out of vanity.
Simple fact is this, GGP's comment angered a lot of people - I too wrote few draft replies earlier and deleted them. But you comment, made me say, what the heck?
Actually, to such low value comments as that of the GGP. May be we should allow reddit like replies. You reap what you sow.
I'm in the 98th percentile and I thought that I was special flower until I started to study math and physics in university level. I met several people who I would consider actually gifted (IQ above 160 and intellectual curiosity to use that IQ). I quickly realized that my problem had never been my intelligence. It was the arrogance and laziness that came with being relatively smart. I could cope with everything and everyone if I tried even a little.
Many of these actually bright guys (and especially girls) had actual problems in their youth. Taking part of International Mathematical Olympiads allowed them to use their noggin and meet others like them. Getting noticed and the ability to take university classes while minor was the lifeline that gave them purpose and mentoring they needed. They really benefited from being noticed when young.
I'm going to say you are a special flower. You're smarter than 98% of people. You are 1 in 50 special.
I think from your own words you would have benefited greatly from gifted education. Thinking about your story here, I think that maybe lowering the IQ bar to something like 125 is exactly what gifted education needs.
Look at what you said:
"I could cope with everything and everyone if I tried even a little."
You were coping, and getting by. You are calling it laziness but maybe it was boredom?
Maybe after being bored and unchallenged you became "lazy" at school. I would bet that you were very interested in your own activities that you were interested in.
If we opened up gifted education to 120+ there would be enough students to have a decent sized class in suburban schools.
Trust me, having an IQ 50% higher than the average of the rest of the population isn't fun. And though IQ is generally all that is needed to be considered 'gifted,'it isn't everything. There have been many studies on this.
I am not self proclaimed, I have the tests to prove it and I get sick of people telling me how smart I am and how they wish they could be like me. I've gotten that line from surgeons and psychologists, people who's job I couldn't do even if I tried. I try to frame it in their mindset to show them that they can do it too. I truly think if they would get out of that mindset, they could be much 'smarter' also. Biology plays a role but it's not everything.
I don't identify with the people in the article. I wasn't particularly weird, eccentric, bullied, or any of the typical things that you hear about. I had friends, girlfriends, etc... About the only typical nerd thing was I was usually the teacher's pet. But I think that's just because I was always wanting to help.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at 14, refused to take the medications and have been dealing with it ever since. Tags, sock seams, etc... didn't bother me. I had the typical ADHD symptoms, but that's about it.
1. YC unicorns.
2. Obscure programming language news.
3. Medium/Natilius posts on self-improvement.
4. NYTimes/WSJ/WashPost articles on obvious trends in business or STEM.
5. SV "celebrity" projects.
1) Programming attract this sort of people in first place, where you see programmers, you will see lots of people like the ones described in the article.
2) It is very problematic, unfixed, and people need help.
At least I do... but at the same time I refrain from asking for help, because usually the result is negative. "Oh, here we go again with the super intelligent guy complaining about how intelligent he is."
Not only for "gifted", but many mental issues are looked down, and are not considered by society a disease like a physical one, a person that is sneezing everywhere, get people to pity that person and help, but a person that is unable to work in society even with heavy meds, need to "grow and mature".
Even if the whole group is wrong, they all agree with one another and fit in together. Those of us who understand have to choose to either be wrong to fit in or be right and be cast out. Either choice is painful.
Be open about your problems and don't be ashamed. Most people feel the way you do. I never lie to people about my mental issues - not even at work. Guess what? 95% of the people I worked with (all other programmers) were on some kind of meds, too - for depression, social anxiety, ADHD etc.. Feels so much better just being open about it and crack a joke here and there. "Let's just all put down work, go to the beach and cry!" "I'm in. I'll bring beer." "Oh, I wish I could!" [I remember that conversation happening on Slack once]
I don't know! Sitting home alone, pitying yourself and being upset about society never really changes anything. ;)
But when I was a kid, the school begged my parents many times to take me to some kind of doctor, and this only offended my parents, that always refused, the exception is that they once too me to see if I was deaf or not.
After I reached adulthood, and flunked hard at life in general, that I went to seek medical help.
The results were:
1) the first few medics I went, believed I was a junkie wanting fake prescription, I have no idea why (I never used any illegal substance, never had used controlled meds before, and never got drunk, and never smoked).
2) My parents had a few nasty fights with me, claiming that I was normal and only doing what I was doing to hurt them or something.
3) As I went learning about my conditions, and started to be open about it, people instead started to interpret that I wanted pity and attention, or that I was humblebragging, and had invariably negative reactions.
4) Eventually I found a good medic, that prescribed me Ritalin, it is helping a little, but very little.
Among my issues is that I never learned how to work "hard", I only work in bursts, and only when I am interested or close to a deadline, school was extremely easy to me, I don't even know my teacher faces of the last school years because I just slept in the classes (and still aced the tests), I never learned to sit down quiet and study, this is now biting me in the ass (I don't had Calculus classes on university, and now that I need it I am trying to learn by myself, but I keep getting distracted...)
I never learned hwo to pretend that I am working, like people do in their workplaces, even when I was the highest performing person in the workplace I still got fired because I was not "serious" or I wasn't "wearing the company shirt", because while all my co-workers just sat staring at their code 8 hours, I coded all that I had to code in 1 hour and then spent the rest goofing around on youtube and reddit.
When I DO want to code 8 hours, I still end goofing around too easily (example: Xcode crashes... while I wait for it to launch I decide to read e-mail, one e-mail has a link to wikipedia... and here we go wasting 4 hours reading wikipedia).
Plus lots of other issues irrelevant to work performance (like needing stuff cut-off from t-shirts, moving all the time to the point of losing a girlfriend over it, puking when eating certain foods, inability to communicate with "normal" people, because no matter what phrase I construct, it keeps getting way over their heads, and the list goooooes on).
The best I found I can do is rant on internet sometimes.
And keep taking Ritalin properly, and going to the psychologist... still very slow progress, I am 28, live with my parents, have no girlfriend, I am unemployed, and don't own any property (but have debts, my total net worth is negative).
I could go on about my work experience - which was also similar to yours despite I let myself go - but when I start raging it's hard to stop and afterwards I often feel worse than before. ;)
I learnt that I get mostly motivated by projects I come up myself, so I try stick to my own stuff for a while to level up my skills. (I _need_ an outlet for all my creativity...) And try to connect with people who are also building interesting things (and aren't assholes) and from whom you can learn new things. DIY scene is pretty nice place to be in really.
I try not to focus so much on work and career for now, because to be honest - working at that last office left me a bit with a trauma and I came to realize that I only have one life and I don't want to have to waste it with doing something I hate or that makes me feel like s*. So no more offices for me at the moment.
About the meds and therapy - it is a slow process, yes. And I actually had to try seven or so different kinds of meds until I found the right one that helped. It still makes me feel a bit weird and dull (sometimes annoying), but so much better than before...
I'm also 28, unemployed, in debt. But meh, still could be worse.
But yeah... hurr, durr, braggarts, etc.
And if they had actually brought any evidence other than their own self claim, imagine how they would've been treated. No way to win except to shut up and pretend to be normal... one of the most depressing lessons I have learned is that all the social ills of grade school do not disappear when you graduate; they merge into the fabric of daily life.
For what it's worth I've learned the opposite. Outside of a mass-incarceration type environment, people are mostly pretty OK. It took me way too long to work that out after I left school.
In short, it is us vs them mentality all the same, and while it is really nice when you are part of the us, it is horrendous when you realize you are actually part of the them.
Note that this should be an underestimation - HN filters for the tech crowd, and by proxy, for IQ. Anyhow, my point is that you get less of the woodwork effect than my priors for how many relevant people would want to comment about it. My theory is that they've been traumatized into not talking about their experience as a gifted child, along with a side of imposter syndrome. And you're making that problem worse for that demographic. Congratulations.
The reality is that the system is ill serving many gifted individuals, so much so that it's not just causing gifted kids to not reach their potential but it's causing many of them to have diminished outcomes compared to "normal" kids, with some examples of terrible tragedy (suicide, homelessness, drug addiction, etc.)
Personally, I'm against the idea of segregated classrooms. In our 'gifted' program, we did get to do some cool things. We assembled a small robot (this was in the mid 1990's when that was just becoming a 'thing'), used computers, and did other 'gifted' things. But the problem was, we just saw it as a way to get out of doing normal homework (we'd still write tests in the classroom with the 'normal' kids), and eventually still got bored with it because the teachers didn't really have a well defined curriculum to teach. In the end, I not only went back to regular classes, but never did any 'advanced' classes again. And the truth was, those 'gifted' classes never really taught us anything that a bit of time in the computer lab or a science project (both of which were part of the 'regular' curriculum) couldn't.
I also made some poor life decisions (some good ones too, like playing sports, starting hobbies and making poor decisions/having fun), and today I'm quite happily adjusted, married, in University as an older student, albeit with kinda shitty job prospects in Canada.
And about the article, I'd also surmise that many of those 'gifted' kids may have some sort of mental health issues. Sometimes the two go hand-in-hand. And social conditioning is important.
Also, the regular school system in Canada is much better than most people realize. As part of the 'regular' school system, I learned French (immersion from kindergarten), learned basic computer programming (in 9th grade, still in the 1990's!), we did all sorts of cool science projects (which I hope my kids will still be able to do), used power tools in shop class, got plenty of computer lab time (much of which was spent playing multi-player games over the network of Apple IIs whilst ignoring the teacher), played countless sports, got to learn how to ski (which otherwise my family could have never afforded, and today I do a lot of), and band class was forced on everyone which was nice because even the bullies had to bear the embarrassment of being terrible at playing an instrument (actually everyone got quite good in the end). Assuming the public school system hasn't got worse, I definitely plan on sending my children there.
Anyhow, just some random thoughts on the matter - I believe in a strong system for everyone, if someone is a little ahead, maybe they can pick up a hobby, or use that time to learn a sport. The 'regular' system was quite good, the 'gifted' program was a bad afterthought, and making friends with 'normal' kids was definitely good for my mental health and general happiness.