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Comment by pfarnsworth | Hacker News Reader

My son has a tested IQ of 160, which is 4 standard deviations away from average intelligence. He's certainly gifted, but when you interact with him, you just know he's definitely not a genius by any means (maybe he just had a good day when he tested).

I contrast him to a few geniuses that I've met, who just seem to see the world at a different level. They are stunning in how intelligent they are, but more importantly how completely immersed in a particular topic they are. One such genius was a friend who was a programming guru. He was entirely self-taught and came up with things that were like magic to me. We would talk about ideas and the next day he worked one of the ideas all night and literally made software magic. Sadly, he committed suicide a few years ago, due to a lot of the internal demons he had in him. I'm really hoping to avoid a situation like this with my son, making sure he's emotionally balanced is my number one concern and focus.

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Like your son, I’ve also been tested to have an IQ of 160. Like you, I certainly don’t feel like I’m a genius in any particular facet of life.

I’ve known a few people that I’m absolutely sure were geniuses (or near it), the big difference between them and myself (that I could tell at least) is that they picked one thing or area and just kept getting better and smarter in that specialty. I get so _bored_ with just one thing. I’m highly creative, as I feel they are, but I just like building things.

Software, wood working, cars, motorcycles, robotics. I’m nearly as handy with a wrench and a welder as I am with a keyboard and a compiler. I feel like everything I look at I break into sub-components and constantly run optimizations in my head. It’s twisted and I’m constantly annoyed by people’s general lack of attention to my perceived detail. My wife is a huge fan of my ability to tell her shoes doing things wrong as well.

Maybe the people I regard as way beyond my capacity have the same quantity of innate intelligence, they’ve just applied it all to one area whereas I’ve spread mine around like finger painting on a wall. I just couldn’t do it. I can get interested in literally anything, there’s just too much cool stuff to learn.

"Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains."

Thank you for your insight. It will definitely be interesting to see how my son grows up. Having a wide range of interests like yourself makes for a fascinating life and perspective on things, I’m sure!

Same same, I'm similar in that I tested very high and have been unwilling to apply it to a single area, so I've always been a bit of a jack of all trades (phd in chemical engineering, genomics researcher, published poet, theater costume director, grant-funded artist, etc). What has played well to my strengths is finding an interdisciplinary field (in my case data science) that requires synthesizing knowledge from many different areas and working with a variety of domain experts. I'm also much more interested in practical application than in basic research, so I'll probably never make a great scientific discovery, but I'm confident I'm making a meaningful impact on the world.

I am not an expert but have taught a few kids in that IQ range and kept in touch with them. The oldest has recently graduated from college.

They can all learn school subjects with such ease that most schools fail to challenge them. A potential pitfall is the lack of practice for patience and perseverance in order to achieve. They just achieved many accolades with only a bit of effort. The ones that kept being challenged by intellectually interesting environment tend to do better.

Also, communications with average students could become quite boring for them. The interests and intellectual gaps tend to grow larger as they grow older. This may hinder their social development somewhat.

So I believe and also read that it might be better to put them in gifted classes (usually for 130+ IQ kids, which can still be too easy for your child) and possibly even skip a couple of grades [1] to allow them to socialize with intellectual peers.

Having interactions with average people is certainly useful but also socialization with their intellectual peers.

[1] With comments below and some more thought, it might be better to take gifted classes and skip at most just one grade, and if the classes are still too easy, focus his mental energy on extracurricular challenging and meaningful projects

Example of a worthwhile project I recently read about: A 14-year-old girl is building AI/software to help Alzheimer's patients recognize their loved ones:

https://www.fastcompany.com/40519094/a-14-year-old-made-an-a...

FWIW, I skipped a couple grades but that didn't help me socialize with intellectual peers, it just hindered me from socializing with regular peers. The kind of socialization you're talking about didn't happen until college.

Looking back now, what I'd do with such a kid is acknowledge what they're good at, then get them working on things they're not so good at. Nobody's good at everything, and the experience of getting frustrated and getting through it is valuable.

I would not recommend skipping too many grades. It's easy for a kid to feel alienated when he's 2-3 years younger than everyone else. It's much better for the kid to be in gifted class where he can bound with kids who are around the same age range while being intellectual peers.

Another thing that helps is to send the kid a semester in a different country in a host family with a kid his age where he learns the language by going to classes with the kid there. It's a good challenge for the kid and helps him not to be so bored with the ease of everything.

One of the things that I'm most grateful to my parents about is that they refused to skip me ahead any grades in school. That was on the table, and they turned it down. It wouldn't have done me any favors socially, and would have been a disaster for my athletic career. And if there's a place for learning hard work and perseverance, particularly for the intellectually gifted, sport is the place for it. IQ might make the cerebral aspects of the game easier, but it's no substitute for getting in the gym and working, taking the thousands of shots, practicing the footwork and other techniques until they are baked into muscle memory, and learning to push yourself further when you think your tank is empty.

Essentially my parents just worked out an arrangement with my teachers to let me do my work as quickly as I was able, and then not give me any shit about reading afterwards. The only issue was a particularly dense teacher that was perplexed why I showed no improvement on the standardized achievement tests... I'd maxed out the reading comprehension level on the test the previous year, so there was nowhere up to go...

I know a lot of people with IQs that are 4 standard deviations above the mean, and there's a lot of variety there. They're on a "different level" in a lot of different ways. It's not always obvious they're brilliant, and besides, some of them feel safer keeping it hidden. Their otherness often shows up in quiet ways that usually go unnoticed. Math prodigies (and programming gurus) are easy to spot, but other forms can be quite subtle. So your son may surprise you yet. (A father's opinion is crucial, so I hope your assessment of him doesn't come across as disappointment. You don't want him to be telling himself he's not really a genius, because he might start believing it. Tell him to let his freak flag fly!)

I make sure to always highlight that working hard is better than being smart, and taking risks and failing is a great opportunity to learn. I tell him every day that I love him no matter what he does and I support him no matter what he decides to do. I really just want him to grow up to be a well adjusted kid that makes good life choices. I don’t what career path he chooses, etc.

I wish I knew a lot of people 4 SD above the mean - as far as I know I don't know any. I do know a lot of people who think they are 4 SD above the mean.

IQ doesn't necessarily correlate with productive intelligence.

The British educational system used to have a concept called "mental agility", and that seems closest to what IQ really measures - a mechanical, essentially directionless, ability to manipulate existing abstractions.

That's not the same as the creative ability to generate useful new abstractions by finding core invariants and then extending them in unexpected ways. We don't have tests for that because we barely understand it as a skill.

Genius seems to combine high IQ with that kind of high creativity. Individuals with either are gifted, but you need both for those next-level breakthroughs.

In your subconsciousness you think that a genius has to be imbalanced somewhere in life. a dear cost to be paid, even. I wonder if that is really the case?

This is a documented fact actually. Many gifted children have asynchronous development and it’s usually the emotional side that suffers.

You sound like a wonderful parent!

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