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Comment by superuser2 | Hacker News Reader

Highly selective colleges are the mother ship. When the handful of isolated gifted students are plucked out of their widely dispersed high schools and collected in one institution, one dorm, it's incredible. People feel home for the first time.

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That was not my experience. I found that as I worked my way into elite institutions people were just playing more sophisticated, elaborate forms of the monkey-see-monkey-do game they were playing everywhere else.

It was mine.

To be fair, I think there is a tier of elite institutions which primarily attract the prestige/wealth crowd (Ivy League, etc), and a tier just below them in rankings which attract the nerds who want to do hard intellectual work.

This is entirely my experience. A lot of people at highly selective colleges are hyper focused on one area of study to the exclusion of others, for example a lot of my friends who are brilliant engineers hate the arts. I think intelligence is broader than IQ, because I think there's something to be said for the intelligence that allows you to recognize the value of many different intellectual pursuits at the same time. You can learn so much more if you get along with intellectuals of all kinds.

Some people take their specialization too far, in my opinion.

I suspect the cognitive effects of depression may serve this purpose well. An endeavor (specialization) is a good way to battle depression. My inclination is to agree with you. Then I realize this "intelligence" you've described is essentially an adaption to the sluggish nature of dissonant reasoning. The more axes involved in mediating dissonance the more the set of thoughts becomes partially ordered vs fully ordered. This partial ordering demands active mediation. This is the domain for which this intelligence is just another specialization. I realize it's good but it isn't wholly superior to avoiding it outright. For instance, in noticing this I'm only more ambivalent and ultimately... depressed. I can see how I would be able to execute faster if I defaulted to the other heuristic.

I've met swathes of extremely accomplished people who clearly give very little thought to things existential (their studies or other passions are often a distraction from such thinking).

Highly accomplished people also often engage in "just world fallacy" thinking and consider their success as rightfully deserved due to their inherent virtue. This again is used to avoid thinking about things like the randomness, injustice, and suffering involved in existence.

So I don't think inserting yourself into a bubble of overachievers is a solution by any means.

> People feel home for the first time.

I tend to believe that people that have relational issues continue to have them even when changing environment. Moreover, elite institutions can be competitive and it can be hard to deal with too.

I went to Oxford and even though everyone else there seemed pretty smart too I still didn't really make friends or develop meaningful relationships. It took me many years of basically just being isolated from others before I learned about the concept of "attachment styles" and started working on "Earned Secure Attachment" which basically means you build your own sense of attachment as an adult to correct the problematic aspects of your attachment style from childhood. It's unfortunate that kids who don't really "fit in" and end up being fairly isolated socially even though they are intelligent don't have a way of finding out how to solve that problem and that people just go around encouraging kids to be more socially active and suchlike. Even if you are socially active, you are probably not going to be able to form successful adult relationships without help if you already fall into the category that the OP is referencing.

This is so true. I was on one of the mother ships. The bests of our class won a coupe of gold and silver medals on the Internationale Mathematik Olympiad.

After leaving school I "realized" that the universe is filled with happy morons and I have always wished to be one of them. But some day I realized that this wish makes me a moron because it's like to wish the sky were green. So actually a became one of them.

my home called to me pre-college at 10 years old in a nationally administered gifted program. i only realised a few years later that everyone there was just like me and totally different from everyone else at the same time.

university, even the most selective ones, are just ever so slightly different to not be the home I belonged to for 7 years.

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