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Comment by bcrosby95 | Hacker News Reader

You know what is absurd? How about the idea that you should segment children at a young age, before they are anywhere close to fully developed mentally, emotionally, or physically, and publicly label some as "gifted" and some as "normal". What could possibly go wrong?

Dumbest fucking idea ever.

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The only part of that which is dumb is the ill-advised label, which can easily be changed. Everything else makes sense. Borderline intellectually disabled people and Terence Tao-level prodigies should not be in the same class. That is the dumbest fucking idea ever.

I mean, we already segment children at similar ages based on physical/athletic capability. It's very clear to sports coaches that not every child is capable of developing into an internationally competitive athlete. Why doesn't the same apply to the thinking parts of our meat exactly?

Hell, with some sports and arts if you haven't already been doing it at least a year by age 7 and live (or move to) somewhere with one of a handful of teachers/coaches who are top-tier at teaching young beginners, and have parents able and willing to pay for lessons from them while you're still very young, you're never going to be truly great no matter how hard you try if you try to break into it starting at, say, age 14. It's my understanding that tennis and playing violin are both more-or-less like this, for instance. Gymnastics and some kinds of dance, too, I think. Like, if your kid's 10 and they aren't already damn serious about some of these things, you can just cross those possibilities off their list for the future.

Probably any sport or art in which people tend to peak very young (early 20s), or that have opportunities available for young participants that will effectively lock them out of further high-level advancement if they miss them (because you're expected to have done those if you're "serious"), are like that.

There are kids age 7 that are brighter than grown ups age 47. And those kids can get bored when they are forced to practice the alphabet when they write short stories already, and such things.

Imagine someone forcing you to sit at a desk and practice spelling of basic English words?

And they can lose faith in school. And also it can be harder for them to find friends, when their thoughts and interests are a lot more grown up than their classmates.

It can be frustrating and lonely for them.

It's a simple recognition of an observable and predictive reality - that some people are much more intellectually capable than others. Do you disagree that this is a fact?

Recognizing reality and adapting to it is the opposite of dumb.

The label could change but it wouldn't make much difference except for politically.

Those people are one in a million. The vast majority of "gifted" programs will never encounter a single child like that in the history of their school.

There's a bell-curve isn't there? It's pretty hard to ignore the differences between people 4 standard deviations apart in IQ (70 vs 130). There are plenty of people in both categories. 1/100 is not that many.

Surprised I need to spell out what should be the obvious to an educated crowd, but intelligence is a spectrum with gradations of smart and gradations of stupid. The 90th percentile learns much faster than the 10th percentile and mixing them into the same class will handicap the 90th percentile, or leave the 10th percentile behind, or both.

Those people are one in a million.

And the cost to society when even one of them falls short of their potential is incalculable.

Most people really don't end up mattering that much. If we can identify the ones that will matter, and do so far enough in advance, it's impossible to argue that we won't be better off for having done so.

If they can't get ahead because a public school didn't give them an extra workbook to mess with, then they don't have anything remotely resembling "incalculable" potential.

I'm not saying we shouldn't treat prodigies differently. I'm saying that 99.99% of these "gifted" kids aren't anything like prodigies and that the money aimed at them is better off spent elsewhere.

I'm saying that 99.99% of these "gifted" kids aren't anything like prodigies and that the money aimed at them is better off spent elsewhere.

An unprovable assertion if there ever was one.

I'm not sure what you mean by "those people", but the actual cutoff where you start having problems with people being extremely bored comes well before you hit one in a million; it's closer to one in a thousand, in my experience.

Which means that the NYC public schools (the subject of this conversation, recall) have ~1000 kids like that right now.

Now their various "gifted" programs do take more kids than that; the bar for such things is often at the 95th percentile, not the 99.9th.

Umm...IQ scores tend to be stable throughout life, and ability early in life is predictive of ability later in school. Kids who are slow in kindergarten, with few exceptions, do not go on to be whizzes in the 5th grade. Also, it's not like gifted programs are only limited to kindergartners.

Not just IQ: "A study from the University of Minnesota, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that conscientiousness — a family of personality traits that combines being disciplined, focused, tenacious, organized and responsible — is the personality trait that best predicts work-related success across the board in life. This includes everything from performing well at work, to managing work-life balance, to being successful in training and learning, and even leading a happier life."

https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/conscientiousness-to...

This is actually one of the central points of the book "Mindstorms" by Seymour Papert, who invented the Logo programming language. He contended that the early sorting of children into good/bad at math is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That children who are told they are good at math seek out math, while those who are told they are bad at math actively avoid it. And you can see this effect decades later. My wife was told she was bad at math at a young age, and despite getting As in algebra and trig, and an A in physics, she still thinks she's bad at math. Even after objectively measuring that she performs within the top 10% of her peers at a particular subject, she still thinks she's bad at it. That's how bad this is for children.

The irony here is that I first learned the Logo language in one of these enrichment programs.

Papert is/was wrong. I was a year ahead in math in school and taught myself machine programming when I was 11. Nobody encouraged me to do this. Quite the opposite. Other kids did everything they could to discourage it and nobody understood what programming was and why it was useful to learn. That didn’t stop me at all.

I'm glad you persevered, but I don't think your experience means he was wrong. It just means it's not a universal truth that applies literally to everyone, which I don't think he ever suggested. He wasn't really talking about people like you and me who are highly motivated to learn this subject. He was more talking about people who had no idea about the field being discouraged before they even had a chance to find that spark.

Fair enough. There is another theory that basically says that you get interested in what you are good at. The feeling of mastery gives you the motivation to get even better. That seems to be a better fit for my experience. But of course YMMV.

I was a year ahead in math as a kid and was bored out of my skull with the slow pace of teaching. Being able to join a class of likeminded kids would have been brilliant.

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