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Comment by heinrichhartman | Hacker News Reader

I had a somewhat similar encounter with a 4 year old (!), who blew me away with his ability to solve arithmetic puzzles:

http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2016/06/12/Box-Counting-Ari...

It's a great joy to work with such gifted young minds.

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Such precociousness is often[1] an indicator of abnormalities and handicapped general intelligence. For example, if our son independently began to read too early the initial reaction of my spouse, a Speech-Language Pathologist, would be to freak out rather than to be filled with pride.

Perhaps you know this and used "gifted" in its more euphemistic sense. In any event, I mention this not to correct you but to address the parental anxiety engendered by examples such as you gave.

[1] Depending on the activity and age of onset, they can be so strongly correlated that attentive educational professionals would recommend diagnostic tests to identify any condition (often some category of autism) and permit early intervention to minimize the negative developmental aspects.

The comment above is condescending and misleading.

Being precocious doesn't mean autism, and no professional SLP would "freak out" at an early reader.

Being smart is an "abnormality", and autism is not "handicapped general intelligence".

Warning signs for autism include obsession with letters and numbers without understanding meaning, not being able to reason about math and discuss mathematical topics.

I never said precocious necessarily meant anything. And there's a reason I used the conjunctive "and" in "abnormalities and handicapped general intelligence", though I could have worded it better.

And I never said "early reader", I said "independently ... too early". Both qualifiers were intentional and important; in particular, I very much intended "too" to be non-specific.

And you're wrong about behaviors like hyperlexia, and wrong precisely in a way that proves my point. Hyperlexia also strongly correlates with obsessions with letters and numbers, but they're distinct phenomena. The latter is an even stronger indicator of autism, but many times hyperlexia is what both parents and others will take notice of first. (Which is a very important point--for this and other reasons, a young child that is both hyperlexic and shows obsessive traits, only the former is likely to be discussed in anecdotes about children with surprising abilities.)

My whole point was that for many of the examples and anecdotes you stumble across on the internet and in discussion, especially the more extreme ones, keep in mind that the children may have other, debilitating developmental abnormalities. Of course, it would be better if these stories received little or no interest or if people didn't naturally internalize these anecdotes in a way that leads to anxiety in their personal lives; but that's not how the majority of people naturally behave.

Regarding the alleged condescension, I possess professionally diagnosed traits that make me "gifted" in many senses of that word, including the euphemistic sense. What I find condescending is how people use "gifted" to elide the complex reality, rather than to put in the effort to discuss things in more concrete terms (i.e. with greater specificity and context), which is really the only way to both avoid prejudice and misunderstanding while being honest and respectful.

It isn't misleading or condescending. In fact as a parent of an autist I find your comment to be the condescending one. The person you're responding to didn't say autism was the same as handicapped general intelligence, but that extreme precociousness is often correlated with atypical development in other contexts.

FWIW, to be honest I had autism spectrum disorders in mind, though I certainly don't equate autism with handicapped general intelligence. I intentionally avoided using the term autism (even though some of the best examples I had in mind come from studies on autism spectrum disorders) as it's such a very broad label with different etiologies and different constellations of traits. An autistic child with fragile X syndrome is likely to have many objectively identifiable and severe disabilities, whereas some other child with autism might have few or no disabilities, especially in a more diverse and accommodating society that isn't organized to punish people who don't easily fit into a mold. I wanted to point out that some seemingly desirable trait can actual reflect other, categorically undesirable traits. Such value judgments are especially tricky when label like autism are thrown into the mix, and in any event I wasn't keen to attempt to identify anything in particular as negative.

Back to my original point: there are many more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right. Similarly, abnormal faculties often coincide with abnormal deficiencies--were it otherwise genetic evolution dictates it wouldn't be abnormal. That basic calculus means that when abnormalities emerge, all things being equal and long before we can know anything about how things will play out individually, it's not rational to be envious or given to feelings of inadequacy, which is precisely what we're doing, intentionally or unintentionally, when we're drawn to stories about precocious behavior.

It was eye opening to come to learn how my spouse as well as other people I've spoken with who have studied various aspects of child development have a very different perspective on abnormal and out-of-order milestone development. At the same time, these are the people least likely to construe debilitating abnormalities in the same negative light as wider society. But they understand 1) the cold, hard calculus and 2) that any abnormality, whether widely construed as positive or negative in society, comes with a real, additional cost in time and attention, particularly for attentive parents who wish to ease their child's transition to independence given the harsh realities of the world. Simply recognizing and internalizing differences so as to avoid confusion later on in life is a real burden on everybody involved.

I mean... honestly, understanding functions is not overly difficult. The only reason we don't expect children to understand them is because we don't teach it to them. On the other hand, we teach them bizarrely detailed and extensive algorithms for doing all sorts of computations on the rational numbers, and expect them to be able to do them perfectly.

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