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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

It's funny a deleted comment asked if geniuses ever achieve anything. My cousin is supposedly a genius (siblings all have doctorates) yet works in a laundromat.

I saw an article where one genius kid years ago was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said a gameshow host.

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Educating a high-IQ child, especially a "profoundly gifted" child (above 145 IQ) is particularly challenging.

They get by with their raw intellect for most of school, and everyone compliments them on how smart they are. But they never learn skills like how to study, how to learn, how to persevere etc.

So once they hit their plateau, which everyone does, they don't know how to get past it and then they give up. A kindergartener that can read like a grade 8 will work off her raw intellect until she gets to grade 8, but then once her abilities max out, she won't have learned how to get past that, and that's where she flames out.

It happens all the time, even to friends of mine in high school. One of my gifted friends did well in high school but unfortunately flamed out in spectacular fashion in freshman year and I haven't heard from her in 30 years, even though we were extremely close and I reached out to her several times over the years.

Interestingly, this is one of the inspirations for Study Swami. I saw a lot of this- and even with less gifted students but who still didn't know how to live up to their "potential."

I'm growing increasingly pessimistic about posts like this which claim to have a nuanced understanding of [child development] but actually rely more on personal feelings, anecdotes, and pseudoscience.

A smart girl who grows up in a school where everyone's getting pregnant at 14 might end up pregnant at 14. A smart kid who grows up in Flint might have to deal with the same lead poisoning as everyone else, with potentially varying symptoms. A smart kid whose parents are depressed in its adolescence might be depressed.

There are many potential causes of burnout and it's extremely unhelpful to assume that we know what's happening to these kids based on "I know a guy who knows a guy". What you're essentially doing is framing a kid's failures as a moral issue of perseverance and study skills when it might be, but it also might not be.

Imagine being naturally competent but having a mental illness that invites the public to inject their own personal biases.

No. My child and my wife scored as Profoundly gifted, going to a gifted school and I myself went through gifted schools as well. I'm very familiar with this.

Nice

How could you not hear from a former close friend in 30 years? Is the implication that she is dead? That’s a timespan equal to almost my whole life.

She ghosted me back in the early 90s after she flamed out of college. We were BFF in high school before BFF was a term, we were prom dates, etc. I stopped seeing her in class, and I reached out to her often in the first few years, but heard from friends that she could handle college. I've reached out a few times over the few couple of decades but her lack of response means she doesn't want to talk to me, so I respect it.

My IQ was only a few points lower than 145, when tested in middle school. I was praised and never pushed hard all the way to the Ivy League, where my ass was handed to me by a couple thousand other kids who had only gotten there through hard work and perserverence.

There are two traits that most predict performance in life: IQ and conscientiousness. "Genius", as most people refer to the word, essentially means high IQ. But IQ has no correlation whatsoever to conscientiousness, so you can be someone with extremely high IQ but extremely low conscientiousness. If you have low conscientiousness you're going to be someone who isn't particularly disciplined, hard-working, organized, reliable, etc. So you can get these situations where there are geniuses who achieve nothing because they lack conscientiousness. Most people who end up achieving a lot tend to be high in both traits.

And of course, conscientiousness isn't fixed. You can improve it through various means. Although if you're extremely low in it in my view you're likely not going to be able to improve such that you can become the most conscientious person out of 100, for instance.

It's worth noting that IQ also isn't fixed, as it can be noticeably affected by wealth, nutrition, family stability, etc, over time.

My brother is a genius and also a violin prodigy. He works as a programmer, but has zero ambition. He does his work, goes home, and plays video games. He has done this for 40 years. He could have been one of the best violinists in history, or made an impact in medical research, or any other number of things.

When we talked about it in the past, his reasoning is: "life is short, I'm going to have all the fun I can before I die."

perhaps this is the conclusion all would reach if they were as smart as your brother

when you are smart and don't have a need to prove others how smart you are - you will end up just enjoying your life in full [by playing video games]

"Playing videogames" isn't enjoying your life "in full", especially if you're smart and could do things that are really meaningful instead.

I'm pretty sure he knows this deep down inside, but that "have fun, don't give a fuck"-attitude is just a too convenient rationalization for being a lazy coward.

Maybe being one of the best violinists in history wasn't meaningful to him. Or maybe he got tired of the expectations.

Being the best violinist isn't meaningful to me. If he pursued that goal then maybe he would actually reduce his meaningfulness from the perspective of someone else.

> "Playing videogames" isn't enjoying your life "in full", especially if you're smart and could do things that are really meaningful instead.

Why is "playing videogames" considered not meaningful? I have a group of friends that I have played video games with for over 10 years. We have shared a number of life ups and downs together and have met up in person numerous times. I would argue that we all bonded over videogames and it was the door that opened a broader friendship among each of us. Oh yeah, to be a bit a dick, we all make over 200 on average, with one way north of that. Every one of us is well-adjusted and now married.

That's really what you wanted to measure, right? How "successful" one is. Stereotyping isn't helpful. It blinds you to things that exist as they are.

Grow up.

Of all the things you talked about here, the "videogame" part is obviously not the meaningful one. It could've been any other activity that lets you socialize. Sure, some people may socialize through videogames, but the guy in the example likely doesn't. Even if he does, socializing itself isn't enough.

> Grow up.

Part of growing up is recognizing that you don't get to set your own values. You're not biologically capable of ignoring how other specimens judge you and how you measure up against them. Even if you don't believe in these "natural values", your own nature will be telling you that you're too maladapted to be part of the future. It'll make you wither and die, to make room for everyone else. That's not a happy ending.

It sounds to me like you missed a pretty big memo. There is no such thing as meaning in life. Meaning is just a human created construct to achieve certain goals, primarily ones that we ourselves consider important to us. Because every human mind operates independently no global meaning can exist. The upside is that there is no central god like entity that arbitrarily defines meaning and you can do whatever you want (within your own cognitive framework). What you are doing is to simply impose your own selfish values onto other people.

Meaning may well be subjective to some degree, across individuals of the species. However, to say that there is "no such thing as meaning in life" is nihilism. That may well be true at a cosmic scale, but at an individual scale it's just a rationalization that absolves you of any responsibility to live up to your potential.

You'll be a loser that has wasted a life, and everyone recognizes that, even though they'll never dare tell you. You will most likely recognize it yourself at some point, or maybe your cognitive dissonance will protect you, but I wouldn't count on it.

Or perhaps we have a society that does not give these people a meaningful place.

if that were the case, he's smart enough to just say that. but he did not say that

Or perhaps smart enough to know how it could be seen to say so.

Indeed, people often exaggerate the abilities of smart people so much so that their achievements seem unreachable, then when they hear them complain they think 'how ungrateful of them'.

Not necessarily.

I'm kind of surprised that someone who is a genius would be not be bored after 40 years of playing video games. He must have a peculiar personality on top of that.

> When we talked about it in the past, his reasoning is: "life is short, I'm going to have all the fun I can before I die."

Happiness comes from within, and I respect this more than chasing fame or fortune because of the expectations of others.

does he still play the violin for fun? Being able to play at all is rare enough that that alone is worthwhile if it entertains him&his family. Nobody needs to be Nobel prizewinner or anything, and plenty of people become Nobel prizewinners that you'd never have thought anything of when they were < 18.

I wonder if it's like the gene for sickle cell. Two copies of it are bad (sickle cell anemia), but one copy of the gene can protect against malaria. A bit of genius can be incredibly helpful, but too much can make it difficult to relate to other people.

People rarely consider the fact that just because someone is born to be a genius doesn't mean that they'll want to grow up to be an academic.

I was born reasonably smart-ish. Did okay in school, have a good job writing code because I have an aptitude for it. But if I had a big dream, it would be in entertainment.

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