A tale of two teenagers (2023)
aporiamagazine.com
aporiamagazine.com
Gifted students have different needs, and the school environment does not force them to develop the skills they need to succeed as an adult.
Twice exceptional students tend to use a lot of energy just trying to exist, which also prevents skill development. They look like smart students who "don't apply themselves", even if they are putting on their best effort.
Got beaten every day until I learned to fight back. At what point was I supposed to have the time and energy to learn? There were no role models. My parents are horrible. Just skipped school as much as I could to play with tech/computers. Still unproven if all my experience amounts to anything. A genius quietly suffering in poverty and loneliness, fallen off every bandwagon, used and abused, desperately trying to achieve literally anything.
The worst part is the chronic thinking that I could've/should've/would've done something amazing, if a single shit had been given at any point along the way. Such a waste of human potential. Even if it wasn't my fault as a child, it's my responsibility to fix as a developmentally disabled adult. To this day nobody gives a shit. So I work out, do what little work I can, cry myself to sleep, and pray for God to use me as an instrument for good.
The next 10 years will make or break me.
Options... use gears at touch points to match speed, or have a robust outer layer to eliminate impact of friction, or Try to control speed to match the system
A combination of these options, may work. Challenge is to identfy the required option and apply what works for a given situation, which is another activity needing quite some brain cycles.
Just an observation...
Hope your upcoming life is pleasant.
It's pretty neat to find someone smarter than me (and actually be aware of the fact).
If it helps: I think we're all a bit broken.. But whilst the first 23 years of my life were pretty rough, I'm thriving in my late 30s.
My unsolicited advice would be to find something that makes your feel good about who you are and throw yourself into it. Life and your resilience/ability to take on challenges will get so much better with a few wins under your belt.
I also can't overestimate how valuable a supportive partner is. Step 1: make sure you're worth it. Better to be kind than clever as Bezos famously said.
That's remarkable given the current world population of 8 billion.
Given a normal IQ distribution centred about 100 and a standard deviation of 10 that puts you in the upper half of the six sigma range ... along with (approx) only 7 other people on the planet.
Tech in particular tends to attract high IQ individuals, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are hundreds or thousands of HN users with similar IQs or higher.
Fixation on how your present circumstances might be better if not for the wrong done by others to the extent that you describe it as a severe and chronic issue is neither inescapable nor particularly factual.
So your stance is that I imagined the whole thing? You're not making any sense here. It's absolutely, undisputably factual that when a child lacks basic necessities for development, they don't develop properly and will suffer as a consequence.
As a consciously conscious being, I have awareness of that suffering. That's not a "fixation", it's an actual chronic issue that makes life 100x harder than it needs to be, and awareness of the issue is the antidote to preventing something similar from happening to others, especially by my doing.
You are attempting to null my experience, I don't know why, but you're failing at it because you cannot null the cold, hard, objective, measurable facts simply by saying "nuh uh".
Yes, the life you could've had but didn't exists only in your imagination.
>You're not making any sense here. It's absolutely, undisputably factual that when a child lacks basic necessities for development, they don't develop properly and will suffer as a consequence.
No, it isn't. Some children do alright in shit circumstances, while some fail to in great circumstances. And some people suffer despite the trappings of success while others are content with what others may describe as failure.
>As a consciously conscious being, I have awareness of that suffering. That's not a "fixation", it's an actual chronic issue that makes life 100x harder than it needs to be,
Do you think any suffering in childhood inevitably leads to a lifetime of inescapable suffering? If not, just how much early suffering does it take? If a child who suffered slightly less can get over it, why not the one who suffered slightly more?
But nobody is going to make you change. You will either wake up one day and be so tired of your own bullshit that you will start to change. Or you won't. It's really all up to you.
These grandiose achievements as you put them consist of basic necessities for survival. The fact you use words like "grandiose" reveals a deeply dismissive attitude towards the suffering of others. I'm guessing, because you've completely dismissed your own suffering, along with the benefits of accurate accounting. Maybe that was the only way for you to move forward. I'm capable of having awareness and accounting and still moving forward.
You seem to be so afraid of past truth you're literally exclaiming "it doesn't matter" while intensely commenting on mine and sharing your own. So clearly it does matter to some repressed part of you.
> no matter how much I felt the pain from the trauma I suffered, that trauma never went away.
Soo... stop feeling the pain and just do accurate accounting. Why are you making this so complicated?
> And finally I'm putting it behind me.
No offense, the way you talk doesn't sound like that's actually happening.
There's a ridiculously destructive belief if I've ever heard one. Your PHD is an accurate accounting of your research. Your bank account is an accurate accounting of your earnings. I hope your wonderful girlfriend is accurate in her accounting of your relationship, because the alternative is she's cheating on you. See where this is going?
Dismissing accurate accounting of anything, including history, is a recipe for disaster.
Accurate accounting is the #1 skill that has drastically improved my quality of life.
> But nobody is going to make you change. You will either wake up one day and be so tired of your own bullshit that you will start to change.
You seem to be under the false belief that I'm somehow stuck unable to change. Don't know where this is coming from, but it smells of projection. You're dismissing accurate counting of history so hard it's almost like you're afraid to face the truth.
I'm not afraid of an accurate accounting of the truth, on the contrary. We call that wisdom.
As far as reaching your potential goes, just be kind to yourself
I can tell you that your feeling of wasted potential isn't just a consequence of how you were treated. Most people in this situation have it. Even when they are wildly successful by any other standard. Like PhDs from ivies are normal, the number of people walking down the hallway who are billionaires is astoundingly high, etc.
You would be shocked at the self harm, depression, and suicide rate that at this level. All because of this idea of "oh, I could have won a Nobel" (I'm certain that if they had they would find a way to be sad about wasted potential anyway).
The solution is therapy. Don't wait. Just go do it. Just because you're smart doesn't mean that you don't need that kind of help. It might mean that you need it even more!
I'm not sure all of what went into things working out for me in therapy the past couple of years, but I think at least a part of it was shifting into a more emotions based approach. I'm not sure how open to that I would have been when I was younger. My tendency to approach most things intellectually was a very powerful tool, but it wasn't successful at getting to the underlying feelings I was not really aware of. Having more access to those feelings has been overwhelming at times, but also has enabled a lot of ongoing progress on being more satisfied with my life.
CBT isn't about someone giving you an aha moment into your own feelings or giving you advice you hadn't thought of (although that does happen). It's more about giving you skills to reinterpret those feelings, their sources, and the actions that result from them. So even if you feel like you introspect and understand how you're doing, CBT can be very effective in being more satisfied with life.
Yup. I was reasonably well-treated as a gifted kid (well, still bullied to death, but at least, I had smart + available parents and many opportunities to learn by myself). I still suffer from that.
I do have a few achievements behind my belt. I have a PhD, I have code running on your computer and in low earth orbit. Pretty much every junior developer learns stuff that I (and many, many others) have contributed to create. I raise a kid, I donate blood, money, time to charities. And I can't escape the feeling that I'm wasting my time, that I could/should be doing something greater, and that I'm basically useless as is.
Yes, I probably need some kind of therapy :)
Sometimes I feel like humans have a limiter put on them and someday we could 'fix' it. I occasionally get a glimpse of huge ideas that aren't just built on existing stuff, but then it fades and I'm back to the grind.
I don't self-harm, I'm not suicidal, I'm not even depressed. I'm just so late to the party that the chances of making it shrink ever smaller each year. No therapist can ever turn back time, so no therapist can ever help.
I'm fully interacting with my life today. My life today is not a problem. I'm the master of survival skills for my particular environment - I would've died already otherwise.
The problem is the circumstances that failed to cultivate and extract my potential. The problem was leaving me to fend for myself. The problem was godlessness, immorality, violence, and stupidity.
No therapist can fix that. Ergo, therapy is a waste of time.
> If you are struggling to handle problems yet believe you already know and are doing everything then I would suggest you find some humility.
Can you explain this? Knowing and doing everything is a struggle almost by definition. This struggle I welcome with glee because it's a struggle I choose to endure for the betterment of my quality of life, and through health and productivity, hopefully a benefit to all one day.
But I will say that as someone who spends all day with people that have have his kind of intelligence, therapy is for you. Recontexualizing your life, past and present, as well as your future path is pretty much bread and butter CBT.
Too many smart people have the disease of "I know better, therapy can't help" which is why for example elite institutions have the highest suicide rates. You're falling into that trap, but it's a catch 22, once you're in it, you won't be able to logically argue your way out. Just take the leap and go to therapy.
If you truly believed that therapy is for me, you'd be glad to give me the long argument. You already know I won't buy it because you know it isn't.
Your attempted ad hominem falls flatter on its face than a pancake mask at a hydraulic press factory. I've not only partied a lot in my youth and was very liked, I was deep in the scene, friends with the crews that organized the parties, the DJs, camera and audio techs, backstage, etc.
Where is this coming from? I know it's not coming from me because my explicit narrative is precisely that my life lacks these "grandiose" things as you put them, for the obvious reasons I laid out.
Since it's not coming from me, sounds like projection coming from you.
So how am I wrong, or are you satisfied merely virtue-signaling?
Like what? Define amazing. Become the founder of some extractive start up? Write some bs science and gain a nobel prize? Be the best chess player?
My view is that you always have to put yourself together. Intellect is simply a factor, but so is honesty and the state of your heart. You can be very smart and you can still be stupid. You sound a bit resentful, but do you ever consider that your experience grants you the opportunity to lead life away from the well-travelled track to success, and do something personally and actually meaningful?
Like what, fail in an entertaining manner?
Imagine telling a malnourished child that their experience grants them the opportunity to lead life away from the well-tasted fruit to satiation, and do something personally and actually meaningful, while starving to death.
That's how stupid that sounds. "Have you tried eating dirt?"
My definition of amazing at this point is not being useless then dying alone and unloved.
I know you dismissed it out of hand. You clearly have no faith that someone (specifically, a well-trained therapist) might have something valuable to contribute.
However, while your powers of observation might border on superhuman, they are still very much just yours. A therapist can help you build an emotional toolset you will not otherwise provide yourself, and which will make you a more complete person, not least of all in the area of building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships.
Think of it like this: you can read music theory and memorize the entire western classical canon by heart and still be a terrible piano player, never improving if you don’t show up to practice at the keys with a talented teacher.
One simply cannot reason ones way around the emotional core that drives us as humans.
CBT will help you change your behavior and how things feel, but, imho, psychodynamic psychotherapy can go much deeper and truly improve your emotional IQ.
Found the flaw in your argument. I am not driven by emotions. If therapy is all about that then all the more reason to not waste time with it.
My (accurate accounting of) history with building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships is fine. Why do you assume I need help with that?
In these comments I see a lot of imagining problems I supposedly have right now, when all I did was share the problems I used to suffer from, in the context of a discussion about the systemic, environmental deficiencies in how society is structured causing massive waste of human potential.
Therapy takes time and money. I don't use emotions to make decisions on how to invest my time and money. You're arguing in favor of investing my time and money into a questionably effective solution to an imagined problem.
Ignore the jumped-up, self proclaimed authorities, the things they have taught you, the servile mentality and mental structure you are in.
Oneself is the only thing important in one's life. Every individual is infinitely valuable. It's simple too - just forget everything you know, and do right, by following truth and love. It costs nothing.
PS I recognise that I must sound like a fruitcake, but the answers come from within. The revolution will not be televised.
Also known as narcissism.
Also known as arrogance.
From your many statements in this thread, you seem to be articulate and, if your cited accomplishments are truthful, generally successful. But your presumptive posturing, bordering on incurious, and projections on others for perceived failures suggests that you’re likely underestimating just how much you don’t know. “Intelligence” is a nebulous concept that manifests in a variety of ways that can be frequently difficult to pin down. Humility and the capacity for making honest evaluations for one’s own limits is a distinct form of emotional intelligence that you might find can enhance the more conventional notions of intellect that you seem to possess.
Things like higher education and therapy are not necessarily designed to imbue you with wholly novel information and experiences, absent a considerable amount of initiative and work from within. They are frameworks for providing the tools so you can achieve your potential. Nothing is perfect, you might very well find that they sometimes fail in that effort, but you are responsible for putting forth the good faith efforts to engage with these tools if you wish to achieve the success that they can facilitate.
That’s my perspective, anyway, and I wish you all the best on your path.
> Oneself is the only thing important in one's life. Every individual is infinitely valuable.
Is that narcissistic too?
It’s orthodox in education research, widely accepted, widely observed that kids who are REALLY good at one or two things wind up, when you measure them, good at everything.
However perhaps this is an uncomfortable truth, that we may or may not choose to face.
take a sip at what educators are trying to push nowadays (not the [majority of] business paraphernalia from the ed. tech world)... it's usually about teaching kids types of skills not found at the grade; like emotional intelligence, resilience and even meta-analysis of their way of studying!
"Good at one thing" in children generally implies "parents are involved" which generally implies "better than average socioeconomic status" which generally implies "children at least relatively decent at most educational things". This is going to be doubly true for things like art or music (or anything with private coaching) which require a significant monetary outlay in order to be good.
About the only place where this doesn't hold are the extremes where high spectrum people can function spectacularly in math and science and yet be ferociously terrible outside of that.
The most fundamental way in which parents are involved in the life of their children is through their gametes. Unsurprisingly smart kids almost always have smart parents, which is a double advantage.
Let me explain. Doing a "simple" study like this is nigh-impossible within the science establishment we have today. Like you said, let me try. Let's walk through the steps.
A PI would have to get a grant to help not the underserved/underprivileged kids, but rather those who are perceived to have an advantage. They have to work with hundreds of schools (gifted kids are rare). Within that set of hundreds of schools they have to control for cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds and so on. Having succeeded they'll have to get this published (and probably fight some accusations of being elitist in the process). All I am saying is: this PI better already have tenure.
This problem is not just about gifted kids. A commonly heard complaint in the field of psychiatry for example is that we only study the minds with pathologies. We don't at all look at how to improve things for healthy people. Come to think of it, that is true in medicine in general.
You are left with comparisons between school districts and/or states
You are extremely fortunate if the colors you see brightly are commonly seen by others or a part of a self-training loop like math, Montessori games, programming, and language. You have it harder if your favorite subject requires funding to practice, such as chemistry/advanced physics, etc. And you’d better learn how to make millions or billions if you like space stuff or care for gatekeeper-protected disciplines like some niche academia, medicine, regulated stuff, etc.
That said, the world changed recently. GPT4 came out those who have deep interests have a sparring partner they’ve never had before. I doubt it’s anywhere in their priority list, but OpenAI can probably run a fantastic networking mesh for people with niche interests. They’d have to keep the spam /obscenities out, but a group chat for anyone in a topic would be fun and a voice group lounge would be even more amazing. ChatGPT would beat facebook and much other social media for the gifted audience. It’s already the best teacher available (if you discount errors and hallucinations, which are on the decline).
Wow, its answers are of a high level quality!
When people read books on certain topics, they start talking the talk.
E.g. “The fatal flaw, as I understand it, in Kant’s deontological ethical system is his disregard of consequentialism.”
Did the kid come up with that himself, or is he just regurgitating, verbatim, a judgment penned by some author he read somewhere? How much of it does he understand?
Might it not be that Georgios is just playing with philosophy and literature in the way, in Billy Joel's "Piano Man", the "waitress is practicing politics"? I.e. picking up talking the talk to sound intelligent and informed. E.g. memorizing some political opinion overheard from one group of customers of the bar, and repeating that later within earshot of another group.
This is a weak analysis of Kant. If a sixth grader read some Kant and came up with this themselves I would think they were probably of average intelligence.
I chose a random name from that list: Immanuel Kant. We went to the school's small library, and I searched and found the one book by Kant in the library: The Critique of Pure Reason. I quickly scanned through the book to see what I can find out about this Kant fellow, to be greeted with sentences such as:
> For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience?
and
> Whatever may be the content of our cognition, and in whatever manner our cognition may be related to its object, the universal, although only negative conditions of all our judgements is that they do not contradict themselves; otherwise these judgements are in themselves (even without respect to the object) nothing.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm
I remember closing the book, thinking to myself, "I can't write an essay about this guy", and finding it funny that his name was "I. Kant". I don't remember what I actually ended up doing for that essay. The deadline was very short so there was no possibility of reading a whole book, let alone that book (which anyways wasn't a great reference for writing about Kant, the person).
As an adult, I still find Kant's serpentine sentences incredibly difficult to digest. (Though some of the problems may originate from the translation.) Maybe I'm just a rube, but I wouldn't consider a sixth grader to have average intelligence if they read some Kant and come up with that criticism.
Update while writing this post: I'm not well versed in philosophy, so I quickly perused the Wikipedia summaries for Deontology and Consequentialism. The criticism, "The fatal flaw, as I understand it, in Kant’s deontological ethical system is his disregard of consequentialism." is rather shallow, wrapped in juicy terminology from moral philosophy. Though, I still think it's a notable feat for a sixth grader to read and even somewhat comprehend Kant.
It is if nobody in his family is putting him up to it.
If a sixth grader plays Bach, but his parents don't know who that was, that's impressive. If he had lessons since age three, not so much.
> if they read some Kant and come up with that criticism.
I agree, but if they read something about Kant and cribbed the observation from that other author, or got it from talking about Kant with someone in their family who is into philosophy, then it's not the same.
The kid used philosophical jargon to accuse Kant of favoring a rigid rule-based moral behavior, without the flexiblity of allowing rules to be bent or flouted when they wouldn't lead to a good outcome.
Any parrot can learn to articulate an idea like this using "deontological" and "consequentialism".
It just comes across as pretentious; no wonder teachers found that irritating.
Unless I'm mistaken, this appears to be off by an order of magnitude.
I think what is going on is that when it says "top 1.33% for the test he took" it is referring to some test given to children who are already known or expected to have high IQs, and on that test people with IQs of 145 are 98.67 percentile.
It appears that the author was off by precisely one order of magnitude, having mixed up .13% and 1.3%. It could be chance, but I think it’s probably a simple mathematical error. The author's conclusion (2-3 children over a career) is correct, but the intermediate step is mistaken.
Pedantry—the warm refuge of everyone else in the 99.87%!
I'm not sure where the article got the 1.3% number, it could be either a decimal point error, or this could be a specific test that's primarily given to gifted students and so both numbers could be correct.
So the end result is accurate, it would be 2-3 students with that ability level.
Our state is getting school districts to remove all advanced classes and gifted programs. All in the name of equity. Last year they got rid of all of the advanced math classes in our district because the number of minority students was too low.
Thankfully when I grew up we had enough money for me to go to a private school where they had all of these advanced programs. I would have gone crazy without them.
I'm a hardcore liberal. But... It feels like there's a brand of liberal out there now that has a totally different idea of what equity is and how we should get there to the point where I find I need to sometimes fight on the side of the more conservative parents in our school district. I don't understand how educating smart people became something that my own side hates and fights against.
wtf
> Proposed guidelines in the state would de-emphasize calculus, reject the idea that some children are naturally gifted and build a connection to social justice. Critics say math shouldn’t be political.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/california-math-curric...
Plenty of articles on this on the interwebs. For example:
https://reason.com/2023/10/04/california-state-guidelines-di...
Note that I am not the OP, so I don’t know where they are specifically, or even if they are in CA. That said, K-12 is moving this direction in CA, and I think the administrators will end up getting their way one way or another.
I’m not so sure.
Policies that focus on equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunities are very popular in education circles these days. Certain communities (esp. relatively wealthy ones with relatively high-achieving and/or ambitious parents) may be able to avoid these policies for longer than others, but I’m not sure they will be able to be avoided entirely except by students in private schools.
The math curriculum issue that CA currently has will continue and expand, imho. The DoE did not expect to get as much pushback as they got. Now it’s just a matter (from their perspective) of how they can force the outcome they want (e.g., no middle school algebra and/or high school calculus) with terms that will be or must be accepted by the population (e.g., budget cuts, manpower issues, accreditation issues, etc.).
Note that I’m not trying to be overly alarmist, and I know that this reply may seem overly negative, but I’ve heard this song played before in a different key.
I really don't want that for my kids.
I'm amused that my comment was highly upvoted and now it sits at a zero. I guess it's a reflection of the crowd here too.
I’m happy to chat further with parents that are dealing with this. Contact in profile.
It's definitely not a simple dichotomy. But yes, liberals who want everyone and everything to be mediocre have the loudest voices right now.
Assuming schools have fixed budgets (that they're inconsistent, and based on property taxes is a separate discussion we should have), there's going to be a finite amount of resources to invest in every student. How do you allocate it?
A) Completely evenly regardless of merit
B) Optimizing for the best student and giving them the best chance to exceed and achieve their maximum potential
C) Optimizing for the median student
D) Optimizing for the worst student
E) Other?
A is obviously ridiculous. B is how many societies have flourished and how humanity moves forward, but is also inherently unequal. D) ensures mediocrity.
I think the most progressive minds changing schools today are trying to achieve C.
Are they misguided? It's quite hard to tell. I honestly don't know. Because the problem is answering this question requires answering a different one:
* What are the qualities of a society that is not only the "best" for the most people, but is also able to move humanity forward in a way as to resolve our existential threats (climate change, random asteroids wiping away Earth, GAI, etc.*
Those that believe the answer to THAT is B would say that any other choice is short-sighted and stupid. But I do believe that those that believe C believe in a different way. That C still allows the truly exceptional to make a mark on the world. When the median becomes great, there is no worry about the exceptional being dominated by the mediocre.
Of course the problem is there are idiots there - in every philosophical field. And are some going to cargo cult their way into Harrison Bergeron? Probably. But that's not the overall intent.
Our school district is wealthy. The average income of the parents is extremely high. They spend twice the state average on students because parents willingly donate extra money to the school direct. There is no shortage of money at all.
If they had asked for money hundreds of parents in our district could each have personally endowed the entire cost of those classes forever without even noticing the cost. Never mind the district as a whole. But it's not a money issue. They didn't want the money.
What there is, is a totally different idea of what equity is. That the final result of schooling must at all costs be equal by demographic standards. And if it's not, the problem is the immediate source of inequality.
This is happening in many states. Just look at the math reform in CA. It is insane. Water down the entire math curriculum in school because the outcomes are bad for some groups. This is not related to costs at all.
The solution is of course to spend more and offer far more support so that everyone does well. But that isn't even allowed to be an answer anymore.
So, since then, the US has had to overcorrect to try to heal centuries of wounds, and as a result is more direct about actively promoting equity based on racial lines in a way that seems horrifying to the rest of the world (nay even racist itself).
This era seems to be ending - for better or for worse - with affirmative action being struck down, with standardized tests now being considered the MORE equitable solution rather than an explicitly racist one. We are heading towards an alternative path.
I agree with you the CA math reform is insane, as is cancelling things like AP and Gifted classes. However, I again maintain that I think the intention is that those that benefit from those classes will be able to thrive with or without them, while the funding for them can help lift the FLOOR for those disadvantaged - those without parents with high income who can afford tutors, or spend extra time with their kids.
I again acknowledge that the full picture of this change will not be visible for some time. But I think it's an interesting premise.
I was in many gifted classes growing up. I skipped several grades. I started university as a teenager. This was all a mixed bag. I was intellectually over-stimulated and stunted socially. I had to recover through my late teen years and early 20's. Most of the gifted kids I know from my era have mixed feelings about our experiences. We appreciated the support at the time but look back and wish the schools tried harder to protect us from bullying "normies" rather than just isolating us to separate classes. It was a cop-out marketed as for our own best interests. Some of us have thrived. Others crumbled.
When I think of my own son (currently a toddler), and whether he would have those opportunities if he happens to be advanced for his age, I believe that the responsibility for ensuring he gets the support he needs is mine and mine alone. What i will do with the funds I have to give him extra attention is find clubs, find tutors, and not expect that the school should be the one providing him those opportunities. In school, I hope he gets to learn how to be a member of society better and sooner than I did.
I think exactly the opposite will happen. The disadvantaged kids will now have a low ceiling, not a high floor!
Doesn't matter if you manage to break through despite your socioeconomic conditions, we cannot help you advance further in any way now because we've cancelled those classes. Before, they had the opportunity to thrive. Now, unless their parents have money, they don't.
> I again acknowledge that the full picture of this change will not be visible for some time. But I think it's an interesting premise.
I think it doesn't hold up at all.
> I was in many gifted classes growing up. I skipped several grades. I started university as a teenager. This was all a mixed bag. I was intellectually over-stimulated and stunted socially. I had to recover through my late teen years and early 20's. Most of the gifted kids I know from my era have mixed feelings about our experiences. We appreciated the support at the time but look back and wish the schools tried harder to protect us from bullying "normies" rather than just isolating us to separate classes. It was a cop-out marketed as for our own best interests. Some of us have thrived. Others crumbled.
I did the same. And for what it's worth, I loved every minute of it. By going to schools where being smart was valued, we had no "bullying normies". They got kicked out of school.
> When I think of my own son (currently a toddler), and whether he would have those opportunities if he happens to be advanced for his age, I believe that the responsibility for ensuring he gets the support he needs is mine and mine alone. What i will do with the funds I have to give him extra attention is find clubs, find tutors, and not expect that the school should be the one providing him those opportunities. In school, I hope he gets to learn how to be a member of society better and sooner than I did.
Oh sure, I'm not saying I won't spend the money for my own kids. And I would be doing all of those things even if the school provided more advanced classes. But as a matter of policy, all this is doing is driving anyone who can afford it out of the public system.
We're going to end up with a public schooling system that's for poor people and provides a base education that for most people puts a cap on what they can achieve in life. And a private system for everyone else.
The reason this doesn’t happen, in my experience, is teacher unions (and, to some extent, the political leanings of administrators). Every year, my kids’ school asks us about our kids and what would be good for them to have in terms of a teacher for the next year. This makes parents think they will be placed in a class with a teacher who would be well-suited for them.
But this isn’t what happens at all! The classes are put together using a balancing approach, to make all the classes “equal” in terms of easy students, trouble students, etc. Only then are the classes assigned to teachers, without regard to what the individual students need. The randomization and balancing is done so that no teacher gets all the best behaved or worst behaved kids. The system is all about the teachers, not the students.
For this reason, our school won’t allow gifted classes to exist, since that would give certain teachers “easier” kids than others. Of course, they also don’t want to have an advanced class with Asian and white kids, but few black and Hispanic kids, from both a political and optics perspective.
But the point is, they could easily do this at no additional cost if they wanted to. And it would allow all students to learn more effectively, since their teacher would be more tightly focused on kids at a certain level.
Generations of historically poor and disadvantaged people have been lifted worldwide. Literacy rates, secondary education, and post-secondary rates across the human population are dramatically higher than they have been in the days of our parents.
That has created it's own problems - student loan debt, overeducation, wasted degrees, and so on. But I don't understand how you can claim there is no evidence to this effect. The evidence is all around us.
Though I’ve heard that sentiment before, it seems unlikely, and when I looked very hard for a source, I never found anything remotely satisfactory. Barring something, anything from Vonnegut indicating otherwise, it seems reasonable to accept that he meant the story to be taken at face value.
In any case, we're heading for the Torment Nexus in this one.
> Several teachers told me, “I don’t know how you do it!” By which they meant tolerating Georgios’ odd behaviour. The truth though is that I didn’t always do it. Much of the time, Georgios' clinginess was as irritating to me as it was to them.
As it happens, just before I read this article I had an exchange with GPT-4 about combinatorial mathematics [1]. I wanted to see how feasible it would be to learn about the subject by interacting with it. While I haven’t double-checked everything it told me, I was struck once again by its infinite patience with my questions. It is an amazing resource for students of all kinds—not just gifted ones.
Addendum: Some conversations I had with it about philosophy—the area of interest of the student in the linked article—are at [2]. Again, GPT-4 showed no irritation whatsoever with my questions.
[1] https://gally.net/temp/20240107combinatorialmathematics/inde...
[2] https://youtube.com/@Tom_Gally_UTokyo?si=qDZzPkPcFAC4Tvfc
There was of course the Alphas and the Betas - and the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons beneath them.
However the very gifted were lifted from this caste system, and placed on the islands, where they might direct the future (or at least that is my somewhat dim recollection/interpretation).
From the perspective of an autistic, ex-teacher who had his IQ measured as "somewhere over 170". I probably have ADHD as well, but a psychiatrist friend says diagnosis fails with people with ridiculously high IQs.
BTW, high IQ = good at solving certain kinds of problem, not a measure of the quality of a person.
a high intelligent logic-oriented-nerd trying to create a big deal isn't much without a high intelligent designer and so on; to the heck this obsession with STEM at the pedagogic world
In the US, it’s not only disrupted by the activists briefly mentioned in the article, but by the mediocre part of the elite that would rather have such a system not exist or be easily gamed/rigged than to have it exist and their child not in it. Given the more classist nature of life in the UK I’m sure this is even moreso a factor there.
Philosophers? I think not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_in_the_Soviet_Union
It's not clear that the Soviet system "served" anyone except the party leaders.
This post is going to sound pedantic and annoying because … that is what Aspergers does to you.
I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision.
From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual. Not so much on the mathematical side. I almost have a disability with mathematics.
I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees. Worked at the top companies in the world with PhDs and others.
However. I feel constantly discriminated against and treated like I am stupider than I am. And when people listen to me talk, they get incredibly threatened.
It has taken me years to understand that being around me and listening to me talk, reason and analyze is THREATENING to people.
I have had situations where, even after a few meetings where I felt I was just “talking about how things are” the other person left HATING me.
The way I express myself is perceived almost like being hit with a physical object. I believe I have Aspergers (have tested very highly for it).
I will tell you - it is INCREDIBLY CAREER LIMITING.
I have given up trying to work in the normal world. It just doesn’t work for me. The pattern always repeats - I join a company, I get targeted and singled out and ganged up on.
If you are like me it is like being incredibly advantaged while being incredibly disadvantaged at the same time.
It’s like being Usain Bolt except your sprinting lane has an obstacle course in it while everyone else gets to run in a normal lane.
The obstacle course is DELIBERATELY put there. It is human nature to instantly identify existential threats: People who are unusually more talented than them and take them out.
I have learned, and am adapting.
Unfortunately, if you want to succeed in this world you have to play a set of games, these are games that I really don’t want to play.
If I have to play them, I am going to try to play outside the system.
I have realized that all the advice which most people follow that works for them does not work for me.
I do things completely differently and have to come up with my own strategies about how to operate.
Here is the other reality: If you are very talented and gifted, NO ONE WILL NOTICE AND TELL YOU.
That sounds completely weird but it is true.
No one in my entire life, aside from a few offhand comments, took me aside and went: “uhhh…you are in a completely other category than these people and do not belong here. Do this instead.”
Instead it is the isolation - I do not understand why no one wants to interact or include me, and it happens very fast. Most people get a whiff and go “I have no idea what to do with this and don’t want to be around it.”
Me: I read "How To Win Friends And Influence People" by Dale Carnegie when I was a teen, and it changed my life.
Other: (laughs) It obviously didn't work because you're terrible at social graces!
Me: Yeah, but you didn't know me before I read that book!
So there is hope, but reading a book won't work miracles. It's a lifelong struggle with me to learn social graces.
A nice side effect of being "on the spectrum" myself is I enjoy working with people like that, including Aspergers, because I understand where their lack of social graces comes from and it doesn't bother me in the least.
The best book I ever read was “stealing the corner office.”
I know people who are naturally intuitive and empathetic. They look at another person and go: “oh she is angry because her cat is sick.”
And I go “how the fuxk did you know that?”
More normal people have a sense sort of like this. I do not have this at all. The behavior and emotions of people are this continuous mystery.
If some VP is super angry, I can’t understand why.
Someone with more normal understand goes: yeah he is under a lot of pressure so that is normal just be more relaxed etc.
Corporations are confusing.
> From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual. Not so much on the mathematical side. I almost have a disability with mathematics.
I feel this. “Rough draft? LOL why? I can write a perfectly-structured paper beginning-to-end without having to re-arrange so much as a paragraph, and I don’t make grammatical errors or spelling mistakes that I don’t catch instantly. What’s the point of all these ‘writing steps’?”
Around age 35 I started occasionally making errors in typed text, and not noticing until re-reading it. Leaving out words. I started substituting homophones! I never, ever did that at all, before! Aging sucks.
[edit] I feel, specifically, the brilliant-at-language and hindered-at-math thing, that is. The rest of this, I’d say you’re a fair bit brighter than me. I just took to language naturally very early and have crazy-good spatial reasoning. I feel dyslexic trying to read math, though. I do OK as long as things are algorithm-focused, which is why I can have a career as a programmer, but when it’s equations and proofs, forget about it.
I had perfect grammar and spelling until ~30. Then it went downhill.
It coincided with dating more illiterate women. So I always attributed this development to letting go of an attention to detail that went unnoticed: What's the point of writing or speaking correctly when nobody around you can tell the difference?
It might be age rather than environment, although I doubt it. I also don't really mind.
My code hasn't become less type-safe.
Word engineer.
It’s less respected and talked about in tech but a very real capability.
However, my ability to tap into the social zeitgeist is pretty close to zero.
The end result is that I get along fantastically with most people because I can anticipate what they want. But I get along terribly with people who want me to fit in with the social rules that they are playing by. What they want is for me to act normal. And I don't know what that is.
It manifests very similar to what you're describing. After a relatively short period of time certain people get very tuned off by me and they become easily frustrated by my actions.
My theory is that they're diligently playing by the social rules and then I come in, break all of the rules right in front of them, and then I get a mostly positive reception because it's what most of the room wanted anyway (just done in kind of a funny way).
I don't really have a solution.
[At least for me things get really interesting whenever I interact with sales people. As far as I can tell like 90% of that profession runs on everyone following the appropriate social scripts. I barely understand them so thus far I've not encountered a sales tactic that actually works on me. Occasionally they get really desperate as their best plays get met with awkward silence or declining their bad deal. The flip side is that they don't understand me either so asking for what I want doesn't seem to work. I just have to hope I'm able to find something that makes do. ]
The last few jobs in a row I entered with a specific, singular objective: “I vow I am not going to get into conflicts with people again.”
I try my hardest, and it doesn’t work.
A big problem is I hyper produce and hyper focus. I am juggling 18 balls and the “get along with people” ball eventually drops and when it does, it’s game over.
I have extreme capabilities for work but it also exhausts and overwhelms me.
I get extremely exhausted from thinking all the time, I am highly obsessive and always running my engine chewing over things mentally.
So I never rest.
And what inevitably happens is that I make social mistakes, and when I do - That’s the start of the end.
If your language skills are as advanced and analytical as you claim, then you should apply that innate skill to the problem of finding ways to communicate without making people feel threatened. For instance, tailor (limit) your vocabulary for your audience and don't correct other people's inconsequential errors. And of course refrain from telling people about how brilliant you are.
If you can't manage the above, then maybe you should recognize that you're not actually as brilliant as you think. This realization could give you a bit more humility and that in turn could help you interact with other people.
This is a big one I feel. My best friend has Asperger’s and does this from time to time. A recent example is I was telling him about a Thule roof rack I got for my car. I pronounced it Thool, and he interrupted me and said “actually you should know it’s pronounced Tooly”.
It didn’t bother me, but we have a pact that I point out gently when he does things like that. It’s an inconsequential error because it doesn’t really matter how it is pronounced. And some people may find it rude or “know it all” to be corrected like that over something like that.
It also takes emotional regulation to refrain from correcting someone's factual errors. While someone with higher intelligence may be better at understanding and analysing emotions theoretically, this doesn't always translate into practical emotional management skills.
I don’t have it.
Also:
I have worked with quantum physicists with multiple degrees from Harvard / Stanford / Yale etc and realized I am in the same room as and same conversations as them.
These are the upper .01% of the talent pool and my intelligence has got me to that level.
You can’t pull that off by being a complete dumb ass. I have done it over and over and over.
Sure, but it can get exhausting over time.
This is very familiar to me. There are things nobody talks much about because they are obvious and everybody knows them already. There are also things that nobody talks about because everyone is lying to themselves about it and actually believe are not true (though some part of their brain unconsciously knows it). If you aren't one for the lies, you can mistake one of the latter for the former, and you will think that you are just stating the obvious, but really you just stepped on a landmine. Has happened to me many times.
I was really excited by it and was rattling off a list of ideas and tactics and strategies for how we could open the account.
His face turned bright red and he started SCREAMING at me.
At that point I was like “oooohk I did the thing again.” And backed off and didn’t interact with him.
After that he was a total asshole to me and started spreading rumors about me.
He felt extremely threatened I gather that he had been running this account for years and I could walk in and imagine a number of new approaches.
If I did it now I wouldn’t be so direct.
I have ideas all the time and most like do not want to have discussions like this because … they don’t have ideas themselves.
Corporate middle management are generally non creative and “brainstorming” just pisses them off.
Ok, I backed off and then watched.
The guy moved that truck around like a ballerina. It was a pleasure watching him handle it, a true pro.
The lesson for me was to not tell someone you just met how to do their job. It's a lesson I've had to learn many times.
I haven't had this experience. In any group dynamic that lasts long enough, there's usually at least a few folks making self-deprecating jokes about their intelligence in comparison, or someone explicitly asking for advice "from the big brain" or something similar.
Humor is usually involved, but I'm assuming that's just a way to make a potentially socially risky observation in a more acceptable manner.
Recruiters / management are sometimes more comfortable making blunt assessments of intelligence / talent than peers. To an extent, that's part of their job, so never having gotten that feedback professionally would seem odd.
My experience is most people in highly competitive environments are peer competitors in some form . The VP above you doesn’t want you to rise and take their job. Your peers don’t want to be surpassed.
Everyone wants to keep you in a certain box.
If you are able to jump completely out of the box ahead of everyone by 10 miles, no one is going to want that.
You will only get negative feedback and told to stop. Or worse.
Beautiful people have certain things easier but others harder. Highly intelligent people are the same way. I think it’s like playing the game on easy mode but has some random side quest every so often.
I’d surely not wish the ending of Flowers for Algernon on myself just in order to avoid the quests.
I only learned about Aspergers way later in life due to YouTube and realized it explained everything about my problems and alienation.
From some of the coaches on YouTube, they talk about how this is a pattern that shows up a lot with Aspergers - At some point people get so fed up with everything about life, relationships, work and schools not working specifically for YOU.
Aspergers individuals have a particularly hard time with jobs, it is very common for them to have employment challenges.
If you mean this in a way where your saying hard truths or telling it like it is, then yeah, its annoying to listen to. Especially without it being asked for.
If you are X, you are not allowed to ask about Y topic etc.
People with Aspergers do not perceive these boundaries and open topics they are not supposed to or are “above their pay grade.”
Status blindness and career limiting.
Easy and logical for more tribalistic folks that live in terror of becoming outcasts, but not remotely reasonable for people who don't/can't live in this restrictive setup.
Have those people actually told you this, or is it a conclusion you came to on your own? I ask because your comment pattern-matches quite strongly for me to "mildly autistic person who doesn't realize they're constantly making failed status plays". Here are a few lines that stood out
---
> I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision. From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual.
"I'm highly gifted and unusual" is much stronger than "I'm a good technical writer."
> It’s like being Usain Bolt except your sprinting lane has an obstacle course in it while everyone else gets to run in a normal lane.
As before, but even worse. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world. He's quite literally one in eight billion. You are not.
> I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees. Worked at the top companies in the world with PhDs and others.
Having worked with PhDs is not impressive in itself. There are thousands of college sophomores who can say the same.
There are workplaces that carry some serious cachet (though bringing them up unprompted will burn most of it), but vague references to "top companies" won't cut it, and makes me think it's less "fellow at Microsoft Research" and more "software engineer at Microsoft". Which is a fine thing to be - but also a perfectly normal thing to be.
---
If your coworkers are getting the same vibe I am, then they're treating you like you're stupider than you really are because you come off as someone who wants to be seen as smarter than they really are. They're annoyed, not threatened.
Did you stop to think that maybe that was his point?
> s before, but even worse. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world. He's quite literally one in eight billion. You are not.
Or that he didn't mean that literally he is the best in the world?
> I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees
This is legitimately impressive and obviously requires intelligence in the top 1% at minimum. Does it really not occur to you that smart people know they are smart just like people who are good at anything else know they are good at it, and not just trying to make themselves sound smarter than they are?
Obviously not, but I think OP does sincerely think he's smart enough that he should stand out as exceptional to most of the people he meets - and I think he's probably wrong. Most educated professionals will know dozens of people as talented as him. The people OP is hanging around will know far more, assuming he's describing them accurately: in a room full of
> quantum physicists with multiple degrees from Harvard / Stanford / Yale
having a 1-in-100 intellect is less than table stakes. There are millions of people that smart in the US alone, and most of them do not share OP's difficulties.
And also my output is 20x higher than theirs.
So I would say I agree with many people in power need to be "the smartest person in the room" and will do their best to derail or ignore you, which limits your success.
But to your comment about isolation and no one wanting to interact with you, TBH that's most probably Asperger's or your personality, not that you are some genius that people are jealous of.
I have absolutely nothing in common with most people and it feels like very little to talk about, and I am extremely impatient with them.
Isolating and ruminating is the alternative I guess.
I hope you succeed in finding a place where others compliment you, and you them and are in a team with a lead who supports you. I've been in, asked let a few such teams and we did amazing things.
I am extremely empathetic and honest. Most middle management at most companies optimizes for non-creative yet industrious which turns highly competitive over pettiness.
I just can’t see myself doing it anymore. Especially after what happened to me at my last role.
I had my naïveté taken advantage of.
If it's any consolation, that happens to everybody.
I generally gravitate towards the most autistic market niches imaginable. Usually areas which combine multiple autistic topics together that attract the weirdest people imaginable.
Don't self diagnose, really please just get a proper assessment by a good neuropsychologist. I had a suspicion that I had ASD, and I found out I had ADHD instead which surprised me. And part of ADHD is ignoring social cues subconsciously. If you end up having ADHD, OCD and anxiety for example, there are medications for that can change your life.
Even if the diagnosis ends up being some sort of ASD, ASD is a diverse condition with many subparts, so understanding how the machine of you works will be helpful. You also get an IQ test so you know what kind of gifted you are and there are books and therapy programs that can help you manage all of the diagnoses. Instead of giving up on the world and going full NEET, understand yourself first.
The third thing was: it turns out that people don't like different. Moved? Got a different accent than the rest of the children. But also? Don't be smart. Fit in. You can act bright, bright enough to help with another kid's homework, but you have to hide the rest of it, as it induces a mixture of envy and fear. Having a grown person in medical school say "You're terrifying" because you casually let slip your immediate apprehension of something which had baffled them means that kind of reaction never leaves. So as much as people mouth litanies like "Being different is okay!" the differences they mean are surface things like the coloration of your eyes or your skin, differences as the Mr. Potato Head model. And so that "helps with homework" turns with age into someone who ends up doing some very dull work, often of inappropriate import. Inappropriate, because you can see further down the line at what would be more important or impactful rather than this task you've been handed, as mindless as another sheet of multiplication problems of decades prior.
One of the equilibrium states is quietness, uttering little of surprise, imitation as protective camouflage. People will still figure out that you're smarter than the average bear, but you get fewer monkey gang-ups and reaping of the tall poppies. Fewer, but not none. Even my oldest friend has muttered "I hate you" three-quarters in jest -- but one-quarter not -- when I casually pick up some skill at which he has been slaving away over years. I've often wondered what the other paths look like and if they are more rewarding in some fashion, but more importantly, if they are any less fantastically lonely, the loneliness of the mutant.
This is where it's easy to get into trouble. You can either accept the task, which leaves you unfulfilled (and eventually burned out), or you can question the usefulness of the task, which superiors often view as insubordination or otherwise threatening.
It seems like working for yourself is the only way out of this, except perhaps working on a particularly well-managed team.
It’s like an open faucet with words and stuff spilling out, and ideas, strategies, facts etc.
Elon Musk has talked about having a similar experience of just raw ideation to a degree that it is unpleasant.
My ideation cannot be shut off.
I walk multiple hours today just thinking obsessively and planning, iterating, ideating.
I can’t sit still, the activity of my brain is unpleasant I am just ruminating all the time.
Doesn’t happen to normal people - I think their brains are usually calmer - more in a neutral mode.
The end result is that when I do get engaged, and get into work, I tend to get extremely burned out. You can’t have this level of super output without burning out.
This is autistic melt downs / burn out I only learned about from YouTube.