https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enoug...
That's when you think you're smart enough to be there, but you're really not.
I don't know how much this happens, but in areas such as education I think it could happen, as the criteria for most tertiary, and some secondary, educators isn't competency in teaching, but competency in a subject. And teaching effectively, especially to a large class, is quite hard.
I could be one of those. But the thing is: a) one can rarely tell. And b) one way to look at imposter syndrome isn't that everyone is actually great while feeling terrible; it's that most people are quietly struggling in a lot of ways, which they see in themselves, but which are hidden from others. We could mostly be (and likely are) mediocre.
So I can be struggling for real, and be a real "impostor", and be doing fine relative to the average population of my peers, all at once. I see many ways I'm struggling with things my peers seem to breeze through, but I might not see the ways I'm succeeding where they're quietly struggling themselves, and vice versa.
May you find your proper niche!
https://www.deviantart.com/eldahast/art/Foolproof-way-155527...
I did actually Submit that when I wrote it. Getting to the front page is kinda a crapshoot, of course.
It was a huge climbdown for me when I went to college. In high school, I was in the top 25 of my class of almost 1000 and I never broke a sweat. I never developed study habits because I didn't need them. One semester my junior year, my friend and I just spent one week in early November doing the entire semester's work, some late, some early. The rest of the time I could spend doing dumb shit and also hacking away on my computers.
I did so well I got into a college where I was annoyingly average. By the time I developed some semblance of study habits and realistic sense of my abilities, it was too late to get my GPA much above 3 (this was before grade inflation was much of a thing). In graduate school I finally got my shit together and learned to just work, but I wasn't in as elite of an environment anymore thanks to my performance in undergrad.
I had wanted my whole life to be away from the normies in high school and once I got there, I didn't love it. It was humiliating. But that was good for me. Realizing you're 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 instead of 1 in a million is probably much more realistic. And also annoyingly, this is exactly what testing when I was like 7 years old told me, but the illusion of being in an exurban high school made me think otherwise.
Now I read we are shaped more and more and more by our experiences at around age 18. That's the music you hang on to and even, I read this week, the politicians we hang on to. I love to think I'm different, but I really am part of Generation Clinton. I really am not 1 in a million or 1 in 100,000 even.
I think a lot of the kinds of people drawn to tech had similar experiences in their formative years. You see a lot of posts here with ideas about reforming education, but schools need to get everyone through, not just the 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 100 types. In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences.
So my interpretation of what you're writing is that people just get used to being the smartest guy in the room. Some may like being around others like that, but if they're honest I bet most people don't. They should!
The lamest possible source turned me around on this. I was listening to Howard Stern (not my parents, not my friends, not my teachers) rant about how when he did his movie he found the movie people interested in building stars up, but his background in radio was all about burning people down and recycling them. I decided I liked building people up more. The karma didn't take long to pay me back.
When you're anonymous on the Internet, nobody knows if you're full of shit or really pack the gear, so we see a lot of bullshit words to add the kind of credibility you might see from a resume.
> In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences.
Programs for regular and exceptionally gifted students do exist in the US, but this varies state-to-state and district-to-district.
The best "reform" I've thought of to address almost everything you've mentioned is to teach kids, early on, about failure. That it isn't the end of the world, what they can do to try to identify it happening, and how they can recover from it. Though like anything else this has to be done in moderation, as people who keep failing eventually give up entirely.
Also, I wasn't screwed over. I live a charmed existence that I am thankful for every day. (=
eta: 100% agree we need to teach kids about failure. I understand the concerns about too much, but right now I don't think they are exposed to enough.
There are some magnet schools for highly gifted or aptitudinally talented students, including an online one: https://www.davidsongifted.org/the-davidson-academy/
But yeah, the situation for regularly gifted students is often as you say. And any school program that truly held them to higher standards would also end up penalizing them with lower grades that would make them look non-competitive to highly selective universities.
> but right now I don't think they are exposed to enough.
Except those in the bottom 25%. They are human too, and deserve a good, well-tailored education.
Anecdotes are plentiful.
My dad was against my going there; I wouldn't be able to talk to ordinary people if I was only ever around those "gifted" kids.
I suppose there's something to that; I cited this article:
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite...
by a guy who didn't know what to say to the plumber standing in his kitchen, whereas I'd much rather be around people like that than the Reverse Imposters.
Naively it might seem that this could lead to bullying, but from what I read it tends to work really well. The older students aren't threatened by the prodigy.
I don't recommend it. I recommend letting kids accelerate, but right now the consensus seems to be accelerate most people who need it at 9th grade, not 7th, and definitely not before. As with most of these things the consensus goes back and forth, but that squares with my lived experience.
The recommendation you cite conflicts with Miraca Gross's recommendation for exceptionally gifted students, but they will be a minority of those who can grade skip.
The kid is always going to be off from their age group, which is not regular people
The modern age-cohort school system is the historic exception. Prior to it single-room schools were common. And prior to those apprenticeships in which some of the apprentices or journeymen were older and younger were common.
Heck, in my neighborhood kids were older and younger. I remember getting advice from an older neighborhood kid when beginning elementary school (the part I remember is that lunch boxes weren't cool, and to use a paper bag instead).
You're right in that being the single odd-ball is unusual. But I think it would be better to just make partial and full grade skips more common than to make them rarer.
You see it all over HN too, for instance, people coming up with a "new" idea, writing a blog post about it, and self-promoting as if they've contributed something novel.
Also the effect isn't that people misjudge their knowledge, it's that they misjudge their place within a distribution. Suppose I give an exam to 30 people, and the results are normally distributed around a score of 70 with a low of 40 and a high of 97. The bottom of the distribution may accurately predict that they scored about 40 on the exam, but if you ask them how they performed relative to their peers, they will believe that they are about average and guess that a sizable portion of the class performed worse than them. Alternatively, if you ask the top performer who scored a 97, they will say that they think they scored about 97, but they will think maybe a few other people scored higher and maybe that the average was in the high 80s. The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that people are actually pretty good at accessing their own knowledge without being a good judge of how knowledgeable others are.
Put differently, isn’t this saying it’s a misattribution of confidence? In the context of the original claim about investing, that seems very relevant.
Look through any etymological dictionary and you'll see this phenomenon. What does a computer have to do with "to strike" in PIE? Something! But it's not the literal meaning.
That's _not_ Dunning-Kruger
It's why people say "and I" as an object and don't know what question begging is or whatever. It just doesn't matter in the long run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dunning%E2%80%93K...
It started as a syndrome. I don't think it would survive Wikipedia's modern standards if it hadn't generated its own support by existing in a different era.
I like it. Better than "reification."
Fantastic to learn from in terms of seeing lots of varying opinions with different arguments
It seems obvious to me that Substack assesses your quality as a writer by checking on click-throughs from various sources and I would wager good money that they pay out differently depending on the behavior of the users who follow those links, either algorithmically in realtime or whenever it comes time to renegotiate terms. It's not even 2+2 here, Bob.
PS: morality is more than just "would someone else do it". Don't make me start quoting cliches typically reserved for 5 year olds.
Maybe you should try writing something people like to read. Come back and tell us how it went.
Tell you what: all publicity is good publicity. Why don't you mention my book titles next time?