Hacker News Reader

Comment by zizzles | Hacker News Reader

"Gifted children" is just a special buzzword to make parents feel good about their high-functioning-autism offspring. That's how it worked here in Canada.

My first encounter with such "gifted" students was in elementary school, they had a class right next to ours. At the time, I never knew about the concept of "gifted students" but what I remember clearly is this: They were constantly bullied for their appearance and mannerisms (ie. very bad dress sense, lack of hygiene, awkward personalities, poor motor skills) fast forward to today, none of these past gifted-students are doing anything special or noteworthy in academia and or the workforce (from my research)

This is just my experience, but perhaps I'm being too harsh.

View on HN

I'm not sure how your program worked, but my experience in the States was very different. Gifted was determined based on a high general or specific intelligence score. In elementary school, the gifted kids were given special acceleration in math and reading, and were commonly accelerated a grade or two in specific classes or every class.

And general intelligence is heavily correlated to success. http://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligenc...

I don't know if your program was different, but your anecdote isn't very convincing. Did you compare the percentage of noteworthy outcomes for students inside and outside the program? What do you consider noteworthy? Has your opinion of them from elementary school colored your views?

In my experience, intelligence is correlated with bad dress sense, lack of hygiene, awkward personalities and poor motor skills. I know a lot of professional mathematicians, and they all would have been bullied for these things things (like I was) if they went to my high school, though many of them went to private high schools.

Before anyone downvotes me because presuming the existence of a group of people that is more intelligent than others is elitist or arrogant, I would point out that it is no more so that presuming the existence of a group of people with less social skills or motor skills.

This is not actually true. Intelligence correlates with social skills https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2015-strenze.pdf. It's just that math departments select for people who want a job where they have high degree of control over their environment and work on things they chose and want to spend lots of time on, and this makes it a good choice for high IQ people with autistic traits.

I don't really see support for that in the article, but most of the details are in the individual studies. The study does say

Kanazawa notes that intelligence correlates positively with evolutionarily novel activities, but the correlation with ancient activities is zero or even negative. That is also evident in Table 25.1 , which mostly lists novel school- or job-related forms of success that have the expected positive correlation with intelligence, but one of the most ancient forms of success, number of children, has a negative correlation (−0.11).

I would guess that you are reading "social success" as "social skills" while in the article's terminology they mean by "social success" things like career success, education level etc.

As for mathematics, it's true that this is a very special case, and people select into mathematics based on both ability and personality. All I can say for certain is that I can identify a distinct group of people who are both intelligent and have autism spectrum traits, and they seem to occur more often than if these traits were uncorrelated.

Not autistic and was in gifted classes throughout elementary and middle school. Also played sports and did not have poor motor skills. As for bad dress sense, well, if you were worried about dress sense in elementary school I feel bad for your childhood.

I grew up in Toronto and was in the gifted program from grades four through twelve. Admission was based on an IQ test administered by a psychologist in third grade. You had to score in the 99th percentile and you were in.

It had nothing to do with how 'autistic' you were. We had more strange people than the other classes but there were plenty of normal people too. Nobody famous, but lots of lawyers, doctors, and engineers now. Nobody's dead, locked up, unemployed, pregnant, or working retail so we seem to have done much better than average.

I'm confused by your inclusion of pregnancy in that list.

They likely meant pregnant before the end of high school, as pregnancy in adulthood is actually an indication of success!

I'm only 25. It's practically unheard of for people to get pregnant this young on purpose (at least in Toronto).

Is that true across different ethnic, religious, and economic groups? I don't think it would be in the U.S.!

There's a worldwide trend that richer (in absolute terms), more educated, and more urban people tend to have fewer children and have them later, but that trend isn't affecting everybody at the same rate.

(Probably a distraction from the observation you were making, though -- including pregnancy in your list makes sense to me.)

I've seen some highly intelligent kids with no lack of hygiene and average motor skills. They weren't suffering a disease that needed them to be filtered out of mainstream society. Actually, I'd be happy if society gave them just a little more peace (I did make fun of some... teens being teens).

I'm Canadian and in grade 2, we took some kind of test that gave me the gifted label. Woo. I suspect it was just a simple IQ test of some sort. They eventually skipped me a grade as a result.

Not even remotely autistic though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com