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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

>I went to a school where scholastic aptitude was something you hid, if you were smart.

That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way.

To go a bit historical materialist on you, I think that if you took the kids at your old school and made them ten times better at thinking and ten times worse at everything else, their values would re-adjust so that they felt valuable again. People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time - if you're very bad at something you're unlikely to find it an appropriate goal or a comfortable self-measure.

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>That's a very common experience I'm actually surprised to hear that it's ever any other way.

That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool.

>That's a western thing. In the east being smart is cool.

I thought it was an exclusive school thing. The Americans I know who went to exclusive high schools seem to have had very different experiences. I even know several people (who went to a 'special' highschool for 'gifted' children) who claimed that they enjoyed high school more than college.

Nope. I was educated mostly at public (private) school in the UK, and spent a year at a private school in the US.

I was ruthlessly mocked until I learned to dissemble, to not put my hand up to answer a question, to be publicly told off by teachers for not handing in work.

The reason is simple - if you make others feel inferior, by being better at anything in any way than them, they hate and envy you.

>The reason is simple - if you make others feel inferior, by being better at anything in any way than them, they hate and envy you.

If that were true, the sports stars would not have been popular

I think the difference is that everybody believes that they too could be a sports star, in the same way as everybody believes that they too will one day be rich - whereas intellect is a rather fixed quantity - so point taken, I was overly broad.

Physical prowess is probably just as limited as intelligence, although our culture definitely associates strength with the gym and smarts with being born that way (although both traits will be equally useless if not developed by training).

Everyone loves a winner, on some level. But are sports stars generally popular with the public or among their peers, or teammates?

Michael Jordan, was/is endured to the public for his talent and work ethic, but I don’t believe he was adored quite the same by teammates or opponents.

I have no idea. the kids who were good at sports seemed to be pretty popular in high school, though, which is what I thought we were talking about.

I think there's a "social proximity" effect to it.

If you see someone you consider immensely superior to yourself on TV, for example, you're likely to consider yourself either disconnected (and not threatened) by them, or entertain a fantasy of "I could be that someday" (see: most Americans).

Alternatively, if you see someone you consider even slightly superior to yourself who is situated similarly in social hierarchy to you, or who you encounter as a peer or near-peer in your everyday life (e.g. a classmate, friend, or sibling), the threat response is much stronger.

I don't know why this is (maybe "this person maybe could take my food/resources/whatever, notices me, and is materially able to take from me" versus "this person definitely could take my food/resources/whatever but does not know me and is not materially able to take from me" brain-stem thinking?)

I meant 'sports stars' in the context of high school... people who certainly could and traditionally did take food resources away from more scholarly children.

I agree with this.

I went to a private high school. I was not a gifted student in any way. I was actually denied by the school but my parents begged the principal so they give me a chance to study there (I learned these details years later). And it was actually a very enjoyable experience. Being smart was not something you hide. The sporty guys were the most popular like many other places, but there was no bullying because of your geekness.

I did one year of public high school (which I failed) before I went to private school. And the experience was a total different world.

(from Quebec->Canada)

I went to an "elite" private high school. The handful of kids who chose to take a gap year or to gasp not go to college at all were looked upon with such scorn. But no one was more looked down-upon than the kids who only got into "safety schools."

That said -- being in an environment where your intellect was directly correlated to your social standing was pretty nourishing and really encouraged the best in (most) people.

>People balance their values between the need to have a target to work towards and the desire to not feel terrible all the time

Yes. This is something I do consciously... but also poorly. It would not surprise me at all if most people do something like that, consciously or not.

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