Curse Of The Gifted (2000)

I got burned by this too. Problem, unfortunately, goes deeper than just not learning how to do math. You skip learning ability to structurally learn new things at a young age, because you simply "get" how things work. So by the time you hit the wall you not only not know how to do math correctly, but also have no idea how to structurally learn correct way and must do both at the same time. Here most people give up and say they are bad at math.

Yes, it's real. In my case, overconfidence in high school led me to not devote the effort -- to not know how to devote the effort -- to securing acceptance to a prestigious college. It ended up OK -- I graduated a year early at the college I did attend -- so I'm not complaining, but I still notice effects of the "curse" impacting my behavior every day, especially when faced with intimidating work or with looking the fool.

> I showed up to my AP calculus test without a calculator

In my Calculus class we weren't even allowed to use a calculator on the test. Actually, almost all my math classes through college wouldn't let us use calculators during tests.

It's bad in more ways than one. Not only do you eventually hit a wall in the subjects you are naturally gifted in and find yourself without the skills to keep going, you also probably avoided the subjects your weren't naturally gifted in. So for example, maybe you can't keep going in math because you can no longer do it in your head and never learned how to do it on paper, but you also never learned to write well, so moving over to some liberal arts major isn't going to be any walk in the park either. Even if you find something else that you are really good at, you are only keeping the house of cards standing a little longer.

Although this may be just deflecting the blame, I do think that the educational system in the US by and large poorly serves gifted children. The underlying notion seems to be that gifted children are already ahead of the game and so don't deserve any special attention. Another piece of the puzzle is grading-as-certification rather than grading-as-progress report or some other scheme. Straight As can mask a lot of problems.

I did the same thing and would get 0 credit for assignments or tests because I didn't "show my work". It made the 15 year old me furious and I basically swore math off after that.

For me it was never exactly learning-how-to-learn, but struggling with the anxiety of difficulty once I got past the level where everything was trivially easy.

It's not something I've entirely conquered either, frustration leading to shut-down still happens from time to time.

We home schooled our kids prior to high school and one of the more interesting challenges was this 'doing the steps' part. My eldest was very much like you, look at the problem, tell you the answer. Which was 99% of the time correct, and 1% of the time wrong. She was really annoyed that we focused on that 1% but eventually we got to the point where by writing down all the steps you could then see where in your thinking you had been mislead. The trick was differentiating between "doing math" versus "learning math." (and the nice thing about math at this level is that if you get all the steps right you cannot help but get the right answer). Once we got past the big fight about "always showing your work" not being a 'for all time, forever' edict but instead for a 'these problems while you are learning' edict, it became possible to do math in this ponderous way, but only when learning and only when training our minds on the steps and alerting ourselves to the places we were likely to make mistakes.

I can relate to that.

College-level calculus burned me so much, I didn't had the algebra background necessary to grok it, much of it is memorizing heuristics and "tricks", and college professors (specially in my public uni) didn't had much patience either. I even did well in other math-related classes, but calculus was a chimera. Unfortunately, I fell so much behind the curriculum that I had to drop out of college to start working full-time.

Lately I've been picking up other math-related online classes, and I finally realized that I had never had real exposure to mathematics, and that high-school curriculum is something else. So, there's that too... we are mostly scammed into thinking we've learned something during high-school, and then life happens and you actually figure out you don't know shit. Hopefully I'm a curious person, so I'm always learning something by myself, mostly to broaden my knowledge in other topics, but to not let the gears grind too.

I'm with you. I made it to hardware architecture in undergrad without ever pulling out a book to study. Then I had a rude awakening and ended up on academic probation and failed a few classes while I figured out how to study. Luckily I was friends with a couple of girls who were driven (finished school with 4.0s after finishing HS with 4.0s, etc...) who basically taught me how to study. They also showed me the effort required to really learn something.

I think in the end, the slap in the face came at the right time and made me more capable later. No matter how smart a person is, there are things they do not know and have to go learn. Learning how to learn it skill, and like all skills it takes practice.

Almost exact same here, except I failed college calculus - twice. It's always been a sore point for me that people who are obviously not as 'smart' as I am somehow all managed to pass it - I couldn't even understand it. Can I lay a little blame on bad professors? perhaps. others complained about the profs too, but ... they still managed to grok enough to pass.

I only managed to satisfy degree requirements by taking 'logic' (a philosophy class) instead of calculus. I was warned off trying this route by a few people though, as it was "hard". I'd been hobby programming for... 10 years at that point - there's little about 'logic' that could possibly be 'hard' in a logic 101 class, so I passed by doing something I was naturally good at. I simply couldn't afford (financially) taking calculus another 2-3 times to keep trying to pass.

It's still a sore point even now... 20+ years later, and a source of secret (perhaps not so secret now that I post this!) shame. :(

I'd never even had to try at anything (except music, perhaps) until well in to high school, at which point I'd mostly just given up. I scored in the top 2% of the ACT test (back when it was scored differently, in the 80s), and I'm not actually 100% sure I finished all the questions - I know I didn't study for it, nor was I particularly well rested. Yeah, as someone else wrote, schools are simply not oriented towards helping 'gifted' students, assuming that they're already 'ahead' of others, and seem to be left on their own - I know I was.

It happened to me during second semester Calculus. In first semester, the professor found out that I didn't do the assigned homework (worth no points) and said that I would "die" in next semester. Sure enough, it happened. What I learned over the years since that time is that some things just take practice or effort. The difference in Calc 2 was that the problems became non-intuitive and virtually everyone is forced to learn some identity or transformation to solve a problem (usually involving trig functions). Basically second-order formula plug and chug, but "effort" required to be able to do it right with time constraint.

I still didn't espouse the value of hard work until I've gotten out of college. I tried to cruise by like I always did, though it increasingly became untenable. What made me really understand working hard was actually through sports. There, I had no illusion of being superior, and it's established that you get better through practice. You get to see yourself getting better each time, and put yourself to the test. True iteration.

I never hit a wall with mathematics. My approach was to write down what I have to and do everything else in my head.

I hit a wall within the first five minutes of programming. I know I will mistakes and I make up for that by making small, clear code commits and trying to make my code easy to read.

I'm a much better programmer than I am a physicist. I am also much happier working as a programmer than I was studying physics.

"I am miles away from Eric..."

ESR "grandpa" was at the Wharton Computer Center when I was there. [1]

http://www.catb.org/~esr/resume.html

At Wharton, at the time, this was definitely true:

"When you were in college, did you ever meet bright kids who graduated top of their class in high-school and then floundered freshman year in college because they had never learned how to study? It's a common trap. A friend of mine calls it "the curse of the gifted""

I was lucky that I had to work hard in high school. I definitely noticed a bunch of kids that were actually depressed when they were surrounded by others equally gifted and got their first "b" grade. No adversity experience.

[1] APL was big back then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29

I was lucky enough to get hit by this early. I always cruised through math with very little effort, doing any required homework in the 5 minute break before class, etc, and getting near 100%. In grade 9, I didn't fail hard or anything, but I did struggle with the final exam, and ended up with a B in the course. Fortunately that was enough of a wake-up for me, and at that point it was still early enough to correct course without a massive upheaval. I'm thankful I didn't continue to cruise until hitting a real wall in university.

I would highly recommend going back and learning maths properly.

In my case, I actually gave up on maths in year 7 because I wanted to hang out with friends more than study. I consistently failed in high school despite being pretty promising in primary school ... but that's just 'cause I "wasn't trying", right?

Well, maybe so, but maths is a skill. You can't ignore it for 4 years and then pick it up in the same way you can with English or Japanese or Sociology.

So when it came to year 11 and 12, when I actually wanted to do well at maths, I couldn't, so I borderline failed high school maths.

A foible of the (Australian) state in which I went to year 11/12 meant that, despite not using maths towards my university entrance score, I was still allowed to use it as a pre-requisite to get into a university course.

I didn't go to uni straight away because I didn't really know what I wanted to do. At age 21 and on a whim, on the last day that you could mail your applications in, I picked Mechatronic Engineering from the handbook and sent in my application. Why? Because I thought it sounded cool (I used to love Robotech :) but I had no idea that Engineering was so maths heavy (that's how ignorant I was of the field).

First year I failed everything. The only thing I did well in was programming, so I took 2 years off and got a job as a programmer. In the last 6 months before I started uni again, I went through my Calculus text book from the beginning, going over my first year uni notes and assignments at the same time. Answering all the problems in the book, etc.

As it turns out, the things that were most nobbling my ability to do calculus was lack of understanding of algebra, trigonometry, geometry ... things like logs and graphs and functions, factorisation, all that stuff. Once I'd learned that, I discovered the rest wasn't so bad.

I re-did my first year subjects in summer school that year and passed (even got some Credits which is 65+!) and then managed to get a low distinction in one of my second year courses.

You never saw a guy so happy with his 75 in Vector Calculus :) all the engineering geeks were crying in their pillows because they got a 98 instead of a 100 but I was punching some serious air.

Getting past this personal myth that I was "just bad at maths" is one of the most important things I've ever done. It really taught me that, with persistent execution and incremental improvement, you can learn and do anything (within reason: ie. I probably can't learn to levitate although I'd love to be proven wrong :)

Reiterating austennailred, despite being miles way from ESR or Linus, the "curse of the gifted" is 100% real, but I think it can actually be beneficial in the long run for a certain type of "gifted".

There is one on hand the "gifted" who runs on his own fumes with no other form of external effort. Much like @austennailred notes about his efforts in high school mathematics, this type of "gifted" often suffers from something similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect in the long run --> in other words, a sense of superiority can potentially drive you into believing you are better than you actually are.

This, I believe, can happen when people attempt to pursue things which do not particularly satisfy their innate curiosity or their genuine interests. Sure you can be great at math naturally, but your view of how good you are limited by the population size of those you compare yourself against can leave you damagingly unprepared when you realize that you actually aren't as great as you thought you were.

What makes the "curse of the gifted" the "blessing of the gifted" on the other hand, is when that moment where you realize your own fallibility seems to provide a moment of illumination rather than a sense of dejection.

For me, my first attempts at genuine college level discrete mathematics versus having used basic counting, permutations, probability, number theory principles in the past showed that computer science or at least the mathematics of computer science can be difficult. I had a similar issue in chemistry as well. The difference was even though I was always a strong math and science student, approaching college level chemistry made me just feel inferior and made me drop it. On the other hand, when faced with adversity in mathematics/CS I tended to take the difficulty as a challenge. Rather than drop it, realizing that perhaps there were others who could be better at mathematics, CS in this new environment drove me to pushing myself to a place of intense focus I had had before.

Now this is where I think passion crosses with the concept of the "curse of the gifted" to make it more of a blessing than a curse. When you love something and you know what it feels like to be best, realizing your own shortcomings can sometimes cause you to miss that feeling. Now in order to get back to a place where you "feel gifted" you have to be in love with the work to get there over "the idea of being gifted" and this I think can happen to those who are put in a position where the feeling of "being gifted" is compromised.

Anyway, just my view, first "longer" post I've written on HN but I thought austennailred had a great point and just wanted to comment.

Great piece by both Eric and Linus and crazy to think how 14 years later, we have Git.

Hear you on that, I had no discipline in high school compared to my contemporaries. Then I went to college and had my first CS classes. I couldn't handle the load, couldn't get the discipline to study between the distractions of college life and stubborn refusal to learn how to study. I ended up getting really into martial arts and that discipline transferred over. When I went back to school. Thank God for that, because I'd be in a very different place without it.

When he was about 20, Yehudi Menuhin, one of the best concert violinists of the 20th century, concluded that suddenly he didn't know how to play violin.

Why? Because before his teachers, back to his age 7 or so, had carefully walked him through the music note by note and bar by bar and, likely then, the artistic expression. But, still he was darned gifted. So, a few years later, relearning violin, he was fine again for the rest of his life.

Being able to do arithmetic, algebra, and other mathematical operations in your head is fine. E.g., during WWII, John von Neumann, one of the best mathematicians of the 20th or any century, sometimes went to people working on war projects to see if he could help them out. At one stop, a guy was unsure about how to find a solution, so von Neumann suggested, "Let's try a local solution via infinite series and look at a few terms. So, von Neumann did the arithmetic in his head [he could take two eight digit numbers and multiply them together in his head]. When von Neumann left, the guy was near tears. Why? Because he had been up all night using a mechanical desk calculator to get just some of that arithmetic right!

I found in doing research in math (I've published such stuff), once get into the problem well then do most of the thinking for the actual research just between the ears and writing very little. Can even do some of the algebraic derivations just between the ears. The actual research, at least the way I do it, is heavily 'conceptual' where writing isn't very efficient anyway.

From what you wrote, I see nothing wrong with your abilities. If you are not handy with paper and pencil, then it is not too much to expect you to become handy with just some usage. So, try, and soon you will 'get it'. It sounds like your problem with calculus was mostly just a problem with paper and pencil -- so, 'get it' with paper and pencil. Unless are, say, another von Neumann, can't expect to do significant derivations in calculus, say, integration by parts or multiple integrals, without writing down the expressions step by step.

But, of course, for calculus, long ago some software efforts for integration worked out what expressions could be integrated in closed form and what ones could not and wrote software to do the integrations for all the ones that could. The results are in at least one of the old computer algebra packages! So, with that software, "Look, Ma, no pencil or paper!".

About your suspected faults, don't be the least discouraged about them! Some are just your imagination. Some can be easily enough corrected. Essentially all the rest can be circumvented.

In particular, it appears that you are concerned about some skills that were supposed to take you from a few days to at most a few months to get good enough with way back long before you shaved! Doing catch up on that material now should be a few days' walk in the park. E.g., in K-12, I didn't learn English grammar and punctuation very well. In college I was in math and physics where this gap was not very important, and otherwise I just wrote only sentences where I did understand the grammar and punctuation. Now I've long had a 12th grade English grammar book right at hand and look up details when I'm in doubt; long ago I got nearly everything I missed in K-12.

Back to working without writing, in plane geometry I refused to do the homework the way the teacher wanted, write out in full detail proofs of just three problems. Instead I worked all the non-trivial problems and then also the more challenging ones in the back of the book, often writing nothing, sometimes writing in the margin of the book, sometimes on scraps of paper, and only for a few of the most difficult problems in the book, actually writing out a complete proof. Worked fine! When the teacher wanted to see my homework, I showed her nothing, and she was torqued. When I came in second in the class on the state test, she was 'confused' since she thought that I didn't do any of the homework! Heck, I solved every non trivial problem in the book and, thus, likely did the most homework of anyone in the class. Also, I slept in class -- I learned from the book in a quiet room, not when she was making noise in front of the class! Being able to learn math just from a book proved crucial, the main way I got my Ph.D.!

Lesson: You don't always have to do it their way!

It's also an example of why it's poor practice to teach the gifted along side of lower performing students -- they realize they can get by easily without working hard and it becomes a habit.

Ideally, the gifted should have their own programs where they are forced to compete with other exceptional students the entire time they're in school, rather than follow a program meant to pander to the lowest common denominator students in society.

Also, I'm with you bro, fell into the same trap. It sucks.

ugh, the way you did it, I thought that was the way most people did it. Usually you see the answer and only "show working". Though the mechanical approach can facilitate more complex problems.

I think we're the same person. Up until grade 12, I could show up late, stoned, or not at all, skip all the homework, and end up at the top of the class due to tests. I was on-track/ pre-accepted into engineering until calculus came, and my natural "getting" math completely tapered off. When the problems became abstract enough that I couldn't understand what they were asking for (or more importantly, why) I dropped out of my first course.

Switched to a more creative field, and circled back towards engineering-type jobs 10 years later. Happy (enough) with where I am now, but can't help but think things would have been better if laziness, hubris and structure of the school system didn't keep me from learning how to learn earlier.

> "x + 1 = 6" I didn't have to subtract 1 from each side, I just thought about it logically and knew the answer.

I don't see the difference. In my mind, thinking about it logically is recognizing that one side has an excess and removing it from the other side. That's subtracting.

To you is it like looking at 5 * 4 and knowing it's 20 rather than thinking about 2 * 5 is 10 and two of those is 20?

I was the kind of rule-following kid who went through the algebra steps because you were supposed to rather than out of necessity. (Or so I like to think: I'm not good at math in my head because I always wrote it out or maybe I relied on paper since I couldn't do it in my head.) I recall rebelling against memorizing multiplication tables in grade ~4 because I thought my time was better spent leaning new stuff (or maybe understanding how to multiply faster -- wouldn't that be ironic!).

It's always interesting to hear how someone else's brain works. Thank you.

Yes, I came here looking for that. The lack of any specifics about the kernel issue at hand and the general attempt to project Age and Wisdom made me immediately suspicious.

Haha, that post from yesterday is great. I have trouble disagreeing with Linus even when I know he's being a jerk.

How did your first link give context? It seems to be the same content as the OP.

i had to scroll down this far to find people who actually read the link. everybody above just wants to tell us how much of a curse their high intelligence is.

Although noone replied directly Matthias Andree wrote:

"(I have read Eric's folloup to Linus' mail I'm replying to, but not following that one up in AOL style. I second Eric mentioning the "curse of the gifted" from own experience. You start something without design, it succeeds for your talent, experience, whatever, it evolves and grows and eventually disembogues into a rewrite from scratch, that time with a design before the implementation.)"

My guess is that most of them thought Erics Mail too off topic to continue in that direction on the kernel list. I'd like to know what they thought of Erics arguments though. Exspecially Linus opinion at the time would have been interesting ...

Source: https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/23/103

"[ESR's] style makes for popularly read posts but [Linus'] seems much more effective"

That seems to be a recurring theme. While ESR was writing opinionated tomes, LT wrote a successful OS kernel and a widely used source control system.

There is no contradiction between discipline/hard work and abrasive style.

I would never want to work with a person like that. If one of my coworkers wrote an email that abrasive and outright mean, I would request to be transferred to a different project.

I don't understand why people allow themselves to be spoken to like that! Incredicle...

It would be an honor to work with someone as articulate as Linus (Eric too). I'm constantly surprised they were (and are) able to do so much with email as opposed to the typical lets have a meeting approach.

This is so true.

I hated my life for years because I knew if I could have just been more disciplined, then I would have been free from all the horrible, mind numbing, soul crushing stuff I had to do at my corporate job.

It took me years to finally leap into self-employment.

That was excellent. One big part was that the kids agreed on the rules together, before they started using them.

That seems like a positively annoying and pointless thing (see the line where they eventually just start referencing them by number; it's become just another 'thing to do').

Not the value of teaching math through axioms and deriving everything you do from them! That's very useful and proper preparation for higher math.

But just because I can express everything in propositional logic with just NAND, I don't do that. Just as I would prove the mean-value theorem once and then simply invoke it when appropriate, I define conjunction, disjunction, negation etc. once and move on with the world. This is the lecture you are trying to teach, after all: you can deconstruct the universe into very simple blocks.

What's the Eggers book? It doesn't seem to be referenced in the linked blog post, and I can't seem to find anything with a Google or Amazon search on "Discrete Mathematics Eggers".

BitKeeper, not bitbucket

...but it totally wasn't because of what Eric Raymond said, right?

I'm assuming there was at least some scm in place before, but my few google searches haven't turned up what it was. Do you know?

*edit: Didn't look hard enough, according to this: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-A-Short-History-o... it was just files and patches from 1991-2002. Seems crazy from a modern perspective...

>Just remember the multiple WebKit debacles or the BSDs

I don't know anything about webkits, but how are "the BSDs" relevant?

except for the part where he mentions that they all gossip behind Linus' back.

ESR is a dick. I really don't know why others don't see it here. He's always been a bit of a long-winded blowhard, even when he's right.

People worked without source control because CVS was not real version control. It was a bad joke, and Linus was right. Without integrity guarantees, a source control system is just a pain in the ass you'd rather not have to deal with. Tarballs, patches, and email worked fine back when the community was small and tight-knit.

"I was writing code when this email thread was in diapers!"

yeah seriously this might have been the suggestion that led to bitkeeper that led to git.

Which Linus invented and coded up essentially to solve some of the problems brought up here

Which (git) today arguably has done more for programming groups than all the new languages and frameworks of the past fourteen years combined.

So, it is interesting. But mostly interesting because of how massive Git spawned from it.

Already pointed out by someone else further up in the thread but Linus is still sticking to his guns 14 years later: https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/2/10/575

In the world of music instrument performance, it is well-known that one's skill is the product of their talent and practice. And since talent is more or less given, practice can be applied to overtake someone else's ability. Up until some limit of practicality :) And there are zillions of examples of practice, or "woodshedding" leading players to overtake those with inherited skill who don't practice.

Really, it's all about momentum. Not practicing = no effort = no moving momentum = no growth = no movement. (

"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Calvin Coolidge 30th president of US (1872 - 1933)

I believe in this case that the driver existed as one piece or module and each hardware version was handled as a different case in branch logic in an attempt to keep the code consolidated and modular (code sharing). As the hardware matured and new versions came to be it gets harder to reuse existing code and that's the context of this thread.

Linus wants to split the driver and create a new module to house that handles only that specific flavor of hardware instead of adding new edge-cases to the existing code.

At least, that's how I read it. I wasn't working on the Kernel back in 2000 so I can't say.

Check the links in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7220508

Specifically: https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/22/52

Except assuming that if you did a bad job at something, it's because you were lazy.

The message I got growing up was that "you're so smart, but so lazy". This was principally because of my terrible fine motor coordination combined with my intellect.

So I'd try to do some sort of "posterboard" or "project" and it'd look like a slapped together mess no matter how hard I tried. My handwriting was often illegible to me, even when I tried to write very slow.

ADHD was also an issue, but the fact that every project I poured so much effort into was derided as lazy... yet I could ace every test... told me that effort wasn't, well, worth putting in.

Here's a great (and by now almost classic) article on that subject: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

I'm reminded of the author of BDS C compiler. He didn't know how other compilers worked using multiple passes, so he wrote one that ran in a single pass. The result was smaller (important in the 80's) and faster than other compilers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDS_C

You are missing the point.

The introvert's dilemma.

Because while I exactly agree (and while that's always cool with Paul B!), I think ESR factored into git indirectly in a way. Provided part of the impetus to want to rewrite things.

Think about it: maybe the most important thing in that email is that ESR lightly compared Linus to Ken Thompson and maybe that kept him thinking along the lines of rewrite everything. All the dialogue factors in, I think ultimately..

That's not irony, that's simply someone listening and changing his mind. That is a normal and healthy thing to do.

This is quite true.

The best thing I ever did to preserve and improve my brain was find things, really hard things, about which I was passionate. It's not so much about studying as it is about finding subjects and venues of learning that just kick your ass. If you don't have the experience of getting your intellectual butt kicked, and if you don't have the ability to learn from the experience, you can only grow so much.

The easy stuff shouldn't be avoided; you should just expect yourself to pick it up as necessary. If you are not getting challenged, if you don't encounter people who are way ahead of you in some subjects, then you are doing it wrong. The feedback is key. Getting stopped in your tracks, just when you thought you were running along at a good clip is invaluable.

Not that I ever achieved greatness, and I do sometimes ask myself why, even in my private life, I always pick the really hard to study (and have for decades now). I'm sure masochism is involved, but the good stuff is just hard, and you have to be willing to be someone's idiot some of the time to learn.

Has Linus ever really failed? It's pretty amazing how young he was to have developed the Linux kernel, in comparison to other open source authors (like creators of Perl/Python/Ruby/etc. who were at least a decade older).

I read his biography "Just For Fun" and it says he basically spent his entire childhood messing with computers. But it doesn't seem like he really failed as an adult. People like Andy Tanenbaum kept telling him he would fail -- i.e. the kernel would reach a point where complexity prevents further change, which is actually an extremely common failure mode for software. But with hindsight they were wrong.

Fortunately, one frequently transitions to management and/or dies before this happens because one's career is finite.

Linux and other such runaway success stories are true Black Swans and Linus's subsequent embrace of source code control IMO demonstrates you can teach new tricks to old dogs.

But is that really what this thread shows? It didn't show that for me.

What I got out of the thread was that Linus had a solid & rational argument justified by actual technical reasons, which was ignored by Eric.

I did not see where Linus was leaning on pure ability.

Gifted kids often do not learn to study and do not learn patience or discipline because it just never comes up for them. They get enough right in school without those things that it is not part of their background. Then, one day, after they are adults, they need good study habits or patience or something like that and don't have it and it bites them in the ass.

(There are ways around that but most parents and teachers don't know how to help a gifted kid with those areas.)

Does that help?

I don't know if I'm "gifted" or not (how does one even determine such things outside of test scores and such?), but I suppose I'll try to rephrase. I don't know how much help I can be, and in-fact austenallred's post may be more illuminating.

What it seems to come down to is that some people are just naturally better at some things than others (for whatever reason). People have often told me that I have a pretty good memory (I disagree, but that's what they say), mostly due to the fact that I've been able to, on occasion, drudge up meaningless trivia with little exposure to it. I don't know why or how I can do it, I just can.

Though I'm sometimes "pretty good" at remembering things, problems would likely arise if I were to, say, try to skate through a course or six on organic chemistry based on this "ability" alone. Because past expectations have led me to believe that I don't need to work hard to commit things to memory, it may be a nasty shock if I one day find out that I'm wrong. If that happens and I haven't made good use of time that others have spent studying, I'm suddenly behind.

I hope that makes sense.

Off-topic because I'm curious: what makes you think that you're dumb?

I never studied up to my second year of college.

I took geometry in my first year of high school and struck a deal with the teacher that if I got an A on every test I wouldn't need to turn in any homework. I never took notes.

I entered college passing several AP tests and jumped right in to advanced math and physics courses.

I started getting cocky and would skip a week of classes at a time.

Eventually I met a course that I couldn't think my way out of, thermodynamics. There was something about it I couldn't wrap my head around. I failed the midterm and decided not to show up for the final. Electricity and magnetism was no picnic either. I got a D in that one.

I had hit rock bottom. I eventually had to leave this college and start over with a fresh outlook to do the work and try to enjoy it.

I still never took notes in class but I did all the coursework. Eventually I earned a BS in computer science.

Imagine you were always good at throwing a javelin. You could throw it further and faster than anybody else in your school. You would watch as other students painfully go through the motions of getting their form down: positioning the javelin at just the right angle, doing that weird prancing motion as they run, and gripping it just so. All the while your natural strength and ability bested their most valiant efforts. However, over the course of months and years of training, their form improved. Their technique got better. And soon, they were constantly besting your every throw.

This is the point at which your natural talent is exhausted and now you too need to learn the technique in order to make any advances. The problem is that your fellow athletes have already put in their 10,000 hours mastering the technique and building their muscle memory to achieve the best possible throw. And you rapidly fall behind, unable to keep up with their slow but relentless progress.

This is actually a poor analogy for knowledge work, but a similar principle applies. Many people get by being able to easily soak in the knowledge and intuit the correct solutions without having to put in much effort at all. Even if they fully understand the theory and practice of how to mechanically arrive at a solution, the habit of not having to invest significant energy in determining a solution stays with them. The problems get harder, beyond what their capacity to intuit affords them. Gaps in their knowledge become magnified and soon their understanding of a subject is shown to be a shallow house of cards. At this point, they could choose to accept that they need to completely change strategies, fill in the gaps, and no longer rely on their intuitition. However, habits die hard and many struggle in vain to wrap their heads around the problems instead of working through them systematically. Unwilling or not realizing that they need to change, they lose motivation and burn out.

Lots of good explanations in this thread, but I'll add my own:

I'd call it the trap of the gifted, rather than the curse. That trap has three prongs:

1) Gifted people get concepts right away, almost effortlessly.

2) Because it's so easy for them, they never have to work at learning. It just happens for them.

3) Being so good at something earns praise from their teachers, parents, friends, etc. This often becomes central to their self-esteem.

This is fine until the day when their giftedness alone simply doesn't cut it. It could be in high school, or college, or graduate school or maybe even at some point in their professional career. But eventually it stops being easy and this is usually a very traumatic event.

Because of the three prongs of the trap, the gifted person finds themselves in a very hard situation. First, they are not used to frustration because previously they got everything right away. Second, they have no persistence because they've never had to work hard. Third, they become anxious and afraid and possibly even become depressed because they are no longer "smart" (at least by their own definition).

Being gifted isn't a curse or a trap in and of itself, but it can lead to a certain kinds of bad habits. Schools and parents tend not to do a very good job correcting these bad habits, which can lead to big problems.

Suppose you play baseball. You have a teammate who is less talented than you are. You are the best hitters on the team. He works hard; you don't. You both play Little League, then High School, then when you encounter American Legion pitchers, he can adapt and you can't - because he'ds developed a structure in which to learn to improve. You have now encountered a massive opportunity cost from not properly evaluating how to use your time.

And on lkml.org: https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/23/97

> I'm drawn towards groups that promise an intelligent gathering, but I'm frequently disappointed by what I find once I get there.

Maybe you're looking in the wrong place. I don't think groups promising intelligence are a great place to look for intelligence (unless that "promise" is just your supposition, and not their claim).

Either that, or you're looking for the wrong thing. I'm not sure what you're trying to find there, but I find most people purporting to be intellectuals really just want to spew opinions and not be interrupted.

I enjoy the company of people with passion, more than I do that of "smart" people. Passionate people are experts at something, and they have something to teach me.

This comment seems highly fantastical to me.

>I remember I mentioned this to an associate one time. He asked me if I had done this with him. I answered yes. He challenged me to prove it. I went down a list of his cognitive biases, how they fed into his decision making process, and how this created a pattern of where I could even start inventorying what I thought he had in his apartment (I'd never been to his apartment). I missed the color of his couch, but guessed correctly where he bought his furniture, what kind of car he drove and was likely to buy and why, what TV shows he watched, what music he listened to (and had listened to in the past), the clothes he did and didn't have in his closet, what kind of food he liked and where he liked to shop, I picked his neighborhood, choice of home computer, where he wanted to retire and even a handful of books he probably had in his home library. I think it hurt him, or his sense of individuality, to be deconstructed like that. It was the last time I ever did this to another person. On the flip side, he tries to mix his life up, make random vectors in his life now and not be so predictable. But I know also that he does it because of what I did. It's just another behavior to slot into his patterns.

Wow. Just wow.

"I got very lucky and found a wife who's smarter than me, and she keeps me on my toes and from drawing the world down into my brain and further isolating myself with walls of internally consistent, but bad ideas. I've never figured out how to predict her thinking process beyond some high level abstract patterns. I think she does it on purpose, to keep me appreciative of her."

"a wife who's smarter than me"

Would love to know what metric you use to determine that she is smarter than you are. (I have some guesses of course but would rather hear why you think that and then reply with my thoughts.) I don't think it's a simple as "she keeps me on my toes".

> the kinds of problems most people have seem trivially simple to me

This sounds a bit narcissistic. If you think other people's problems are trivial, maybe you're just not being empathic enough to understand their full scope.

If everything looks like it follows simple patterns, maybe you just aren't looking close enough.

When you learn something new, there's often this point where you feel you understand it all. If you're a quick learner, you will reach this point quickly. But things only seem simple because you don't understand them fully yet. You have to continue learning, specialising, looking at the details, and only then will you learn that the subject isn't quite as simple as you thought.

You get bored when you figure out what kind of car someone has, or what color their furniture has. You think you have them all figured out. But if you continue talking to these shallow people, you might see there's something beyond these superficial details.

>Curse of being gifted is very real. I wonder sometimes how many people couldn't break out of it and have ended up in bad jobs, or worse.

I read this and immediately thought "Oh, I must be gifted and suffering from this, because in high school I was good at computers, english, science, basic algebra, and geometry and ended up with a useless degree and a bad job."

I don't know if I really am gifted, but it's easy to latch onto anything that explains my situation and places the blame on something else besides myself. Guess I like the idea of being a gifted victim.

I'm sad and feel sad. :(

> "the kinds of problems most people have seem trivially simple to me"

From this I can tell that you're smart, but not really smart. The really smart never say things like that.

If you want to improve your depression and clarify your thoughts, I recommend practicing awareness meditation for 15 minutes every morning and/or evening. After a few weeks, the results can be dramatic.

so the problems other people have are simple, but the problems you have are not? Almost every normal person feels this way sometimes, though your version is more exaggerated. Other people's problems can be changed with a simple change in perspective, because when you're trying to solve other people's problems, you don't have to acknowledge that person's humanity. You can just swap that person out and replace them with a person who doesn't have that problem, and the problem gets solved. Of course, from the other person's perspective, that's impossible, but well that's their problem.

With your problems, you can't do that any more - you can't deal with the curse of being gifted by simply not being gifted anymore because that wouldn't be you, now, would it? You have to deal with walls of internally consistent, but questionable ideas because that's who you are, you can't simply snap out of it and replace them with good, reality-based ideas.

I don't know know why you have to deal with depression and hopelessness, but regardless of how true it may seem, it's not healthy to construct a narrative in which you alone are a genius dealing with deep questions and others are simpletons with mundane problems. It leads to dehumanization of others, which robs you of the very companionship you seek. Underneath others' simple problems like "weight issues" and "financial issues" lurk deep emotional issues of the kind that you struggle with.

Hey bane.

It can get better. In recent years, the gifted community talks a lot about "social and emotional needs of the gifted." There are conferences and the like which focus on that. Perhaps that would help?

Signed: Another "outcast," (but fairly content...though it's hard to express since, certainly, I have problems I am still trying to fix.)

Not sure if you're still reading this thread bane, but a couple thoughts that might be useful --

1. The "I" ratio on your comment -- how much you're talking about yourself, your needs, your wants, your opinion, and your experience vs. looking at third-party needs, wants, opinions, experiences, and the general outward span of reality -- it's pretty high on the "I" side.

This might or might not be something worth intentionally looking to change. You've obviously got enough reflective ability and raw mental horsepower to self-modify on this characteristic if you want, and it will definitely be a different frame of reference and create a different subjective experience. It might be more enjoyable to you, might produce more happiness, and might lead to something meaningful -- depending on what you want out of life, and your definitions/sentiments around enjoyment, happiness, and meaning.

2. Play harder games.

The first part of this comment -- the "I ratio" -- that's an observation and something to think about, not a recommendation.

This one is.

I'm almost certain your life would be across the board more enjoyable to you and useful broadly if you play harder games. Boredom and acedia are almost universally agreed to be miserable things, and when you're bored/disillusioned and very smart, it's a torturously bad situation.

I was something like that when I was younger -- testing across the boards on tests, interested in things that few other people could talk to me about, etc.

I always wanted really deep and meaningful conversations, connections, ways to use the mix of gifts and curses I was given in a way that felt right to me and seemed to be good destiny-fulfillment (pardon me if that sounds hokey; the English language isn't really cooperating with what I'm trying to say -- I mean subjectively there, not an objective fate/destiny obviously).

Anyways -- you'll find that the people playing harder, larger games tend to be interesting, and the amount of variables, confounding factors, etc, to really give you a workout. More importantly -- you can use your talents for improving your personal well-being and the well-being of humanity-at-large simultaneously.

It's difficult to play hard big games, even getting into them is tricky. But the big hard games offer a chance to really put your mind and capacity to work, and the other people playing the big hard games tend to be really uniquely brilliant and complex and interesting.

Also -- thank you for your honest relating of your subjective experience, and for writing about the reasoning process... which I found really fascinating. I also found it fantastical on a first read, but looked to keep my mind open to it -- and your chain of reasoning seems sound. I think it's a new skill I didn't realize was quite available that would be interesting to train in.

To others besides bane -- don't read into this comment too much! It was a personal note. Bane -- thanks and godspeed, feel free to drop me an email sometime if there's some interesting complex problems on your mind.

Sebastian

The full rev metaphor got me for a few seconds - but then I realized: if the analogy works, then those kids are not challenged enough. An engine can go over-rev very easily when the car is in neutral. And then you add some small obstacles and can go from full-rev to stalling.

The problem as I see it is that the potential exists, but there is no engagement on tackling hard problems.

That was Eric Raymond's signature, not Linus'.

>I wish I saw the response.

You did. Git.

Linus wisely declined to respond to this extremely condescending comment by someone who was out of their depth and didn't clearly understand the issue at hand.

Another problem: Many gifted people are unreliable in very important ways which seriously undermine the value of what they have to offer. (I have personally spent most of my life wrestling with this, compounded by health issues and other issues. I am 48 and only just now getting to a place where I think I can get past that issue.)

I had the "curse of the gifted" throughout high school and am suffering the consequences now (although I'm trying to turn things around). That said, I also had a friend who was an absolute monster. He operated on an entirely higher level of thinking than mine. Slept through class and just had to skim the textbook once to 'get it'. He would finish tests in half the provided time and get perfect marks. I ended up sitting next to him through Chemistry and Physics; we would goof off in class, and then go home and play games much longer than we should have. Then, a test would roll along, and he would get his usual 100 while I would do much, much worse. The way in which he just 'got' things was the source of a lot of malevolence and envy back then, although I've learned from it now.

From reading some of the other message in the thread, I think Linus makes a well-reasoned argument -- so I disagree that "Eric is plainly right".

Clearly I don't know all the context, and so I am not really sure what Eric is responding (in addition to the previous message), but it seems to me that Linus has solid technical reasons for his argument. He's even trying to avoid clever ideas of favor of simple code.

and ..?

I get that the guy is inflammatory, but what is the problem with letting the content stand on its own?

But if you are going to mention that ESR is involved, you may as well mention that Linus is present as well.

I would also like to point out the one of the most clear written libraries is that GPS library that is authored by ESR...

Don't forget to bring your lute with you!

No, I just read it and like many other things ESR said it is well thought out, friendly and helpful.

Please note how ESR again and again ranks Linus (the second coming of Ken) higher than himself (old fart) while still trying to convey som hard won experience.

Dig the libertarian quote at the end too. Pretty sure he checked all the boxes.

Non-paywall version:

http://www.ccsf.edu/Campuses/Downtown/scientific_american.pd...

Someone else mentioned that ESR got no reply, and the thread continued on another path. So, Linus did not reply, it seems. But, he did begin using revision control soon after; though I think that's likely to have happened, anyway.