Society is set up in favor of people with brains that more closely approximate the “average” brain, at the expense of those of us with brains that are fucking weird; that’s basically the idea of neurodiversity. A thing I think is potentially important is that “brain that’s fucking weird” doesn’t just include people whose brains are broken or different-but-still-good; it also includes “brains that work better in some important way.”
For instance, think about kids who have, for whatever reason, more academic aptitude than other kids.* The “gifted kids” (ugh, I hate that word) and particularly the kids who always wound up at the top of gifted class.**
There’s a stereotype of the smart kid not having a lot of friends, and in my case and the case of a lot of people I know, that’s true. If you’re good at academics, it’s probably at least in part because you love academics (or at least part of it). You also, once you get at a certain level, have absolutely no one to share your love of academics with. When I was in third grade, I was reading Plato’s the Republic; my peers were playing Pokemon. I’m not saying that I was better (both occupations are entirely useless except for entertainment purposes), but it makes it terribly difficult to make friends if you want to talk philosopher-kings and they want to talk Pikachu. At the same time, while all my peers were out socializing I was… alone. Reading Plato. Because Plato was more interesting than whatever the people in my class were getting up to.
This means I was alone a lot, obviously. Because I was alone I never really learned a lot of really basic social skills you’re supposed to learn when you’re young. (I theorize that this is behind not just former gifted kids with poor social skills but also the geek social fallacies, most of which are about Not Excluding People Like We Were Excluded.) I felt like I was the only person in the world who loved the things I loved, which is a terribly lonely thing to feel. And, well, when kids see someone who’s weird, who doesn’t have a lot of friends, and who has rather poor social skills, they tend to bully them.
Adults don’t help either. There’s a natural tendency when someone is good at academics to praise them for being good at academics, which means that a lot of gifted kids (including me) wound up defining ourselves as The Smart One. This interacts really badly with social exclusion, because it’s really easy to conclude that the reason everyone keeps excluding you is because you’re better than them. That way lies arrogance and a rather unpleasant personality.
At the same time, if you define yourself as Smart, there is going to come a time when you’re Not Smart. When you meet people who are smarter than you, or you have to suddenly start working at a class. This can induce low self-esteem, depression, and general emotional crisis, because if you’re The Smart One what happens if you aren’t smart anymore? (Bad things. Especially if you’d already decided that you’re better than people because you’re smarter than them and suddenly they’re smarter than you.)
Classes, up to a certain point, are really easy for people with a lot of academic aptitude. You learned it the first time the teacher went through it, but she has to spend the whole hour reviewing it because no one else is as quick as you– for that matter, you might have learned it last year when you taught it to yourself. This means that a lot of people get bored and disengage from classes, which can (oddly) lead to very poor grades and the classic “but you test so well!” syndrome.
If classes are easy, it’s really easy to coast through on native ability, which means you don’t learn how to study or work hard. When suddenly you have to work in class, you haven’t developed the study habits that you need. You’re used to getting to play around on Tumblr or work on your own projects, and now suddenly you have to reread the textbook and make flashcards? And, of course, you suddenly feel stupid because Smart People don’t need to study.
Anyone else have thoughts/experiences about being one of the quote-unquote gifted kids?
Possibly related: The problems with being smart, which offers a different perspective on some of the stuff I’m talking about here.
*Obvious Disclaimer: it is way better to have a ton of academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with a lot of academic aptitude than it is to have no academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with not very much academic aptitude. In the latter, you get a sucky situation and society makes it worse; in the former, you get something awesome, and there might be shit related to it, but at least you still get academic aptitude. However, we can talk about problems that are not The Worst Problem (TM). It is allowed.
**Other Obvious Disclaimer: this is a generalization that won’t apply to everyone– in fact, most of it doesn’t apply to me. And it’s based on my observation of myself and other former gifted kids, so it is not scientific in any way.
Thing of Things 
My life right here, at least when it came to the humanities. I had above a perfect score in my 12th grade AP English class and straight up didn’t do my French homework for a year while still acing the tests. Science, on the other hand, involved memorization: when I could figure out the underlying rules I kicked some spectacular ass, but anything that I had to sit down and study I was terrible at. I love art but can’t pursue a future in it because that would mean buckling down and practicing, and practicing means that I’m not good enough already, which hurts.
The end result is that I’m brilliant at a few select pursuits (I chose not to pursue a Ph.D. in Bioethics because it’s too easy for me) but useless in technical fields. At least I’ve shed most of my high school arrogance.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I had the opposite experience with language classes: there’s no way to derive the word for “green” from the words for the other colors, so I had to suck it up and brute force memorize all the new foreign language words. Grammar was easy, but vocabulary was a real stumbling block. (I still got As, though.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
This, and the same in other fields – I can do surgery on nearly any vertebrate based entirely on first principles, but I hate having to memorize all the drugs.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Somewhat off-topic: One thing thst’s helped me is to, with Romance and Germanic languages, learn basic sound changes from Latin or Proto-Germanic before learning vocabulary. If you know that English “th” usually corresponds to German “d” it’s a lot easier to remember that roof (thatch) is Dach, your (thine) is dein(e) and bath is Bad. It doesn’t allow you to derive vocabulary from first principles, but it does make guessing the meanings of unfamiliar words and remembering words you have learned a good deal easier, especially of you’re a very abstract thinker.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I don’t think that’s exactly true – the “average” will be heavily weighted towards the kind of people who have a say in the way society is set up: those with a lot of friends, those that care about enforcing and perpetuating social norms, those that gossip or criticize others a lot, those that are good at convincing others to see their way, those that write manifestos … and a lot of those traits probably correlate with IQ.
So I would expect the “optimal IQ” to be a bit higher than average (and of course, “sociability” factors play a big role, but that’s a surprise to no-one…).
LikeLiked by 3 people
I’m not sure whether/how the traits you describe correlate with IQ, but I think that schools are more and more geared towards people with those traits due to changes that they have been pushing (e.g., math class not being for “math nerds” anymore).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, this was one of the posts that rang the most true with me when it was originally posted and it still does. I was a gifted kid and now, twenty or more years later, I am an underperforming adult. I never learned to work hard when I was in impressionable age. This kicked back in the university where I got to the point where academic success required doing actual work. I eventually dropped out. And because I didn’t either learn how to deal with other people, my social life hasn’t been very satisfying.
I might have succeeded better if I had chosen my discipline more wisely. I chose something that interested me but was intriguingly hard for me right from the start. If I had chosen math or physics I might have coasted through MSc and somehow gained the ability to work hard in the process. Maybe.
Are there any resources available for former gifted kids?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Explicitly, no, to my knowledge. But there are places where former-gifted-kids are highly likely to congregate, and there I think you can find support if you want it. We are here to talk to, at the very least.
What are you up to now, if I may ask? How long has it been since college?
LikeLiked by 1 person
This hits home for me. I picked an academic field I loved and coasted through most of my undergrad courses. I didn’t do especially well, but I did spectacularly for someone who spent all his time in extracurricular activities. Getting into grad school was easy too – the exams test you for you ability to apply a few core ideas to new problems, not for your ability to memorize a lot of facts. I even got a minor scholarship.
But all this time I never learned to sit in one place and focus on a hard to under stand idea until I understood it. I failed my first semester and took it pretty hard. I was depressed for months Being good at economics was part of my identity, so I suffered what was pretty close to an identity crisis, wondering if I was cut out for this field or not.
Happy ending: I pulled my socks up, studied like crazy, got my GPA back up to 4.0 and am now in a doctoral program. Hurrah!
A lot of people deride the education system in my country as producing people who are good at rote-learning and nothing else. I now think these people are full of it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
my thoughts on the article you linked, which obviously i can’t comment on there: it seemed a little dismissive, and it seemed to be putting words into pervocracy et al.’s mouths.
like, obviously a thin person shouldn’t say “fuck all fat people for feeling bad b/c once someone told me i need a burger.” but it’s totally acceptable for a thin person to say something like, “i always felt like no one would be attracted to me b/c of my flat breasts”–a trait that’s societally devalued even though it’s usually linked to a trait that’s societally valued. and i kinda think rachael (that’s the name on the article) is conflating statement 2 with statement 1.
LikeLiked by 2 people
also, i think part of the problem is that when people say, “gifted kids have it hard,” people kinda reasonably assume that means “harder than all people who aren’t gifted,” and it’s obviously not true that kids who are considered extra-smart have it harder than kids who are considered extra-dumb. iq-related privilege might not be a linear function, at least not for kids…maybe it’s highest for people who can regularly score around 100-120 and drops off steeply on either side, more steeply on the left than on the right
LikeLike
You were reading Plato in third grade? Awesome! I was also interested in philosophy from a pretty early age (one of my points of pride is having independently derived the Munchhausen trilemma at the age of twelve).
As for my experience as a “gifted child”…I simply wasn’t interested in other children. I spent virtually all my time reading. The handful of friends I had were almost all adults (my teachers, for whatever strange reason, generally felt affectionate towards me). I wasn’t bullied or mocked, though (thank God) –– in fact other children seemed to respect me.
I have never had any trouble making friends with people much less bright than myself. I always just took it for granted that my friends wouldn’t be as intelligent as I was, and wouldn’t share my interests –– until very recently, I never had any desire to share my private world with anyone else.
LikeLiked by 2 people
My situation was very similar. I was reading Mythology and Philosophy in the fourth grade and talking politics in the fifth and sixth. I must have lucked out. I was alone a lot but not because I was bullied, although some people tried. I didn’t react, emotionally, in a way they understood and most of them gave up on it. But, I was still extremely lonely, though.
I was not interested in anything the other kids were doing, either, which totally didn’t help that situation and most adults indulged me. My teachers were very accommodating, even in the Honors courses I took. Once they figured that I grokked something, they gave me things more challenging to do, so I still had to develop good study habits.
One teacher even allowed me to create my own reading curriculum (with a few basic guidelines) in the fifth grade. I wasn’t the smartest in class. There were others who were smarter. Luckily, those individuals didn’t view me as threatening and some of them became my closest and best friends. Like I said, I think fortune smiled on me in some ways, especially when I consider some of the horror stories I heard from other “former smart-kids”. I was an oddity that only wanted to not be bothered and most kids accepted that.
I had to work at social interaction, though. I was alone a lot but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t observant. It took some time to get it. I was in college by the time I think I was proficient enough not to make a fool of myself in conversation and in my thirties when I overcame the need to show people how impatient I was with small talk. I credit public service jobs for that skill.
LikeLike
I’m currently waiting for it to get hard. The wording of answers in biology is beginning to get me, though (This also induces the failure mode of “They want me to jump through their hoops? ‘Tis below me!”).
LikeLike
I never really had some of the phenomena, and I think my field (biology / paleontology) helped. While there’s principles, there’s a lot that just has to be memorized, so I got good at both. It also helped that for so many things, the answer was (and often still is) that *nobody* knows.
LikeLike
Ozy, by “gifted,” do you mean to include only people who officially received the label, or those who would have probably received it if they belonged to the right school district, social stratum, etc., but did not?
LikeLike
You mean smart kid in v. bad school?
LikeLike
The school doesn’t need to be _very_ bad. Even typical public schools tend to be anti-intellectual. Mine, for instance, didn’t have any sort of G/T program, and still doesn’t. (Too “political,” I’m told.) Grade-skipping has also been strongly resisted the past few decades.
Also, it’s usually the case that kids are identified as gifted because their *parents* request testing. This selects out a whole bunch of people whose parents lack the knowledge or inclination to do so.
LikeLike
Re-reading the OP, I see that Ozy says they hate the gifted label. And, sure, insofar as all labels suck, this one does too. But, I sort of think of it as the crappy t-shirt you get as a consolation prize for having done X. Sure, that’s all you got, but some of us didn’t even get that.
LikeLike
I’d nominate “Why Nerds are Unpopular” http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html as another slightly different take on the same concept post.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I didn’t stay gifted very long. I think the last year for me was sixth grade? the “gifted” treatment started in second I think. My school didn’t have much on the gifted bonus stuff, mostly it just meant when 4/5th of my class was reading their grade level me and about 3-4 other kids were given a chapter book to read with the TA instead. In sixth grade there was a field trip for specifically gifted girls (project WISE?) and that was about it. In seventh grade the scaled classes were introduced and I was put in the middle one and no longer considered gifted.
Looking back I don’t think I was ever actually that -smart-. I remember needing tutors for spelling and phonics, I remember my mom had to search out old educational videos to teach me multiplication tables. I was never actually impressive at anything I think other then reading, which was mostly just stuff like being able to finish a harry potter book in one night in like first grade.
But due to the “gifted” label I was expected to be smart. I wasn’t smart. By eighth grade I had started failing classes. I couldn’t really do math and science anymore. I got bonuses in english class for reading books but I still couldn’t get A’s because as stated, writing had never been one of my strongpoints. I think eighth grade was the first time “learning disabled” came up, but it got brushed off because I was “gifted”
I was not gifted. I was learning disabled. I had to drop out of highschool and eventually college. In college trying to live up to the “smart” standards I pushed myself too hard. I can no longer novels quickly, or even at all. I don’t have the focus and memory for it anymore. I had to give up books. Every day I see new books I want to read and hope they’ll make a movie because I know I won’t be able to read them.
But I still have an above-average IQ. So I’m fine. Even though I was actually tested 2 years ago and they found I had symptoms that are consistent with autism and adhd. I can’t have a problem. I was really good at reading in second grade.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, I was another classic example of this; I had one teacher who tried to persuade me to work because I could do better if I did, but it wasn’t enough to convince me when I was top of the class by a considerable margin without trying. I just about managed to get through first year of tripos on native ability, but the 2nd and 3rd year actually needed me to do some work, which I didn’t, so I ended up with a lousy degree.
As it turned out, I came out of it okay, because any degree from Cambridge is generally seen as better than a 2:1 from basically anywhere else, and by my late 20s I’d actually learned the working hard skills that I could have done with picking up at school, but I was lucky, and it could have turned out very differently.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I had pretty much exactly the same experience. I coasted through school and the first year of my degree with As and 1sts, reading for amusement and generally ignoring everything except the exams. Finished out the degree with firsts in the lab modules and a 2:2 overall because I couldn’t pick up in the few months of second and third year all the skills (whatever the hell they might be, I still don’t have them) involved in forcing large amounts of information into my head at once and working hard on a project rather than just letting it happen in the cycles between skydives and whatever books I was reading. The January exams of second year gave me what amounted to a breakdown – a month spent in bed either sleeping or unable to think of much other than that the only thing I had going for me had apparently gone away without warning.
I think for all people there’s a baseline absorption speed for knowledge; if yours happens to be faster than concepts are being introduced in classes there is no requirement to ‘pay attention’ in any directed manner. Learning to learn deliberately, rather than effectively by accident, is something I think should perhaps be offered to the ‘smart kids’ early on. The payoff would be huge; “I’m far more intelligent than baseline and have hundred-hour-level competence in a ridiculous number of skills because I get bored after about three months every time” does not sell nearly as well in a job interview as “I work hard and I’ve practised these two or three things for years so I’m exceptional at them and you can be sure I won’t just up and leave when the job is unstimulating”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is of course unrelated to the point of the blogpost, but Pokemon is designed so that it has a huge amount of depth, but young players don’t need to know about it in order to enjoy the game. You could easily be five years ahead of your peers in mental age and still genuinely have fun playing the same Pokemon game.
LikeLike
There’s a natural tendency when someone is good at academics to praise them for being good at academics, which means that a lot of gifted kids (including me) wound up defining ourselves as The Smart One….
So, I don’t relate well to this post. Part of that may be that I’m only about 2.5-3SD above the mean, whereas it sounds like Ozzie is probably more like 3.5-4SD above the mean if zie was interested in reading Plato in 3rd grade. But I think a bigger part is that I did not have the “big fish in a small pond” period; right from elementary school there were always several of us among the “extremely gifted.”
I did the math, though, and it doesn’t seem that my situation was that unusual. If the IQ curve has an SD of 15, then in a class of 250, there should be ~6.25 people with 130+ IQ. And looking back at my high school class of 250 people, I’d say there were somewhere between 7 and 12 of us. So it was high, but not to the point where you would expect it to affect the environment for “gifted” kids.
Another interesting thing is that of the top 20 kids in my high school class, about 2/3 were Jewish. But not only that — the kids who went to the Conservative synagogue rather than the Reform synagogue were disproportionately represented among the highest academic performers. I can definitely say that my own parents a)had ethnic pride in academic achievement and b)attributed Jewish success almost entirely to the cultural emphasis on study rather than to genetics. So I never got the “you get good grades because you are intrinsically smart” message. I got the “you get good grades because you understand the value of studying” message, which may make a difference. (Also, my parents are just wrong and conscientiousness as well as brute problem-solving ability is highly heritable.)
OTOH, my best friend in high school (who also went to my synagogue), who was already taking college math classes during his junior and senior year and got 5s on a bunch of science AP exams for classes he never took, had a class rank of 17th instead of the 6th or so it would have been if he had more conscientiousness in subjects that bored him. So this probably describes him pretty well, and he had almost the same environment I did.
LikeLike
There *is* research supporting you, Ozy. (Research that can only be based on multiple case studies etc. because children, but still. Miraca Gross (PDF warning); Linda Silverman; Leta Hollingworth, including–Nomophilos!–clinical observations on “optimal IQ”…etc.)
When I read posts like this it always makes me feel like a weirdo. Like, “I wanted to look up the research on ‘other kids like me’…why didn’t this poster do the same?” Is loking up the research really that weird?
Is the research that hard to find?
(Oh, right, the research is social science, and the social sciences are like worthless d00d. 😉 LessWrongers, I mock you because I love you. :D)
Anyway. From the Miraca Gross article linked above:
It’s clear from these results that the age at which university is developmentally appropriate for these kids is approximately 11-15. Basically, middle school age.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that they have a lot more trouble succeeding at university at “regular university age.” We wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of typical 18-year-olds had trouble focusing on and completing large quantities of 8th grade work! (And would we expect them to have an easy time socializing with 8th graders? :eek:)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I remember being sorted into a program like that, but against my parents’ wishes I blew the interview on purpose because I wanted more of a normal life. I do think to this day that I made the right choice for myself.
LikeLike
I’m not sure what you mean by “a program like that,” because Gross’ subjects weren’t in any “program.” Her “radical accelerands” just skipped grades within the regular classroom.
That’s usually the best of a bad set of options, because you wind up as basically a normal kid with a normal school experience–the only way you’re different is you’re younger.
It doesn’t work if being the same size as the other kids is really important to you (like if you’re really into sports), or if there are extreme differences between your intellectual strengths and weaknesses. Both of those situations are rare, but they do exist, of course.
Anyway, what “program” are you talking about? Do you mean a “no acceleration until the teen years, then suddenly into early college” program?
LikeLike
Yes it was an early college program. I was in seventh grade. I would have finished high school in grades eight and nine, and would have entered college during “tenth grade”.
While I didn’t play competitive sports in high school, the social aspects of hobbies such as sports did weigh into my decision.
LikeLike
You have to wonder how much these results are going to generalize across cultures. I think intellectual outliers are going to feel somewhat out of place anywhere, but in the US there is the additional layer of extreme anti-intellectualism in the culture. I suppose that could cut both ways in terms of the consequences of choosing to jump out ahead of your peers or not.
LikeLike
Actually you’re right. I’m a Woman of Color and grew up in working class neighborhoods. And, although I’m not suffering, there’s still no place I feel I fit in and I’m in my forties now. There was definitely a strong streak of anti-intellectualism where I grew up. I did, on occasion, get called nasty names, and sometimes there were physical threats, although that stopped at a certain age.
I didn’t have any say about my courses, though. The school system offered to skip me ahead when I was in second grade, but my mother wasn’t having that. She told me she was worried because I would be younger than the other students. Later, special programs were created, as there were more than a few students like me, and their parents didn’t want them skipping a grade either.
I didn’t get a say whether or not I would be joining such a program. The decision was made and then my mother talked to me about what was done and that was that. In my regular life, I was one of those outliers you mention,though. Outside of school, I had no friends. I still feel that was strong factor in my depression, although my grades didn’t suffer from it and, fortunately, in class, I had at least a couple of girls who were willing to hang out with me.
However, in college, during those years where people are forming romantic relationships, I suffered a suicidal/emotional break. I spent those years dealing with the fallout from that, so I’m not married and have no kids.
LikeLike
Thank you for that link. IDK if you’re Australian, but here in the U.S. there has been a big push against acceleration and towards “full inclusion” in classrooms with peers of the same age (and we’ve got people like this to thank.) Having research to counter this trend is very helpful.
LikeLiked by 1 person
From the Gross article:
“Equally gifted children who have been successful in concealing their
abilities, who deviate significantly in their behavior and origin from
Australian teachers’ expectations of gifted children, or whose abilities
have been masked by learning disabilities, may be underrepresented.
Research has repeatedly shown that, as in the U.S., Australian
teachers generally believe that gifted children originate from successful
professional families within the dominant culture. The underrepresentation
of children from working class and socially deprived
families among my subjects is a matter for concern.”
^So much yes.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Well, this has spun off into a morning of adventures on Google, and one of the things I came across is this:
“One group of authors views gifted and talented persons as being prone to problems and in need of special interventions to prevent or overcome their unique difficulties . . . . The other group of authors views gifted children as generally being able to fare quite well on their own, and gifted children with problems needing special interventions are seen as a relative minority . . . . These divergent views are not as contradictory as they first appear. Those authors who find that gifted children are doing relatively well on their own usually have focused on students from academic programs specifically designed for gifted children. . . . Such selection procedures are likely to limit the representativeness of the sample of the gifted children being studied and would exclude gifted children who are academically underachieving because of social or emotional problems and who are not being served educationally in special programs for gifted children. An underestimate of social and emotional issues is likely. By contrast, those authors who find frequent problems among gifted children often rely on data gathered in clinical settings and from individual case studies where the population is self-selecting. As a result, there is likely a sample bias that would prompt an over estimate of the incidence of social and emotional difficulties.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have a gender studies degree! I am totally into social sciences! But when I wrote this post I just wanted to note my observations and I was much too lazy to look into the research; I’m glad there’s research backing me up, though. 🙂
LikeLike
I wonder if anyone besides me has noticed this probably-related phenomenon:
The less time I spend in class, the more I learn.
In grade school, I did okay, because I could get by on native intelligence. I did do badly in courses for which homework was a big requirement, however.
In high school, I did pretty badly, as most of the courses required doing a lot of homework. Not doing the homework especially didn’t work for me in math and science classes, though I still got high scores on standardized math tests.
In college, I did significantly better; a fact which I attribute to better teaching, more interest and self-motivation on my part (though I know most kids don’t function this way, being FORCED to go to school as I was in grade school and high school was always something I really resented, whereas the fact that whether or not I showed up to class really depended on me in college, actually was a huge boost to my sense of investment in the process) AND, in no small part, significantly less class time.
In grad school I did much better (though, of course, the people I was comparing myself to at that point were very smart to have gotten there); well enough to get a PhD from a top institution. And, of course, the time spent in class was significantly less still. During the last couple of years, the time spent in class was basically none: I researched, wrote, and contacted advisors for help and feedback when necessary.
Now, of course, you may say, it’s all well and good to be self-directed when you’re already at PhD level and are smarter than average to begin with, but children need guidance! etc… but, I’m not so sure.
I think, no matter who you are, you don’t really learn something well until you are forced to apply it in a practical way. Just hearing about it in class generally isn’t enough for anyone but maybe geniuses. In the high school context, this is where homework is supposed to come in: you learn the new concept in class and then you go home and do 30 problems of the same type to cement it and make sure you really “get” it.
But here’s where having an atypical brain may present a problem: my attention tends to be very intense, but also somewhat limited, perhaps because of its intensity. I’m not ADD, nor would I say I’m someone who hyper-focuses on single things (though I have a number of very smart friends who fall into such categories); I just get tired very easily. Not like chronic fatigue syndrome or anything; it’s just like, if you send teenage me at 6 in the morning to a place where I am forced to sit and listen to people talk (whether engaging or boring) at me for 7 hours minus a lunch break, then when I come home I simply will not have any mental energy left to then sit down and do math problems (I’m sure the bullying didn’t help, either). It’s the same for me today, but because I have so much more control over how my time is spent, I can use my own intuitive sense of my own limits to get what needs done done in time allowed.
Now, I’m not saying treat every high schooler like a PhD student, but I am saying, start it at 10 am, end it at 3 or 4 pm, and include a long study hall for doing work AT school. For younger students maybe a more Montesori-ish approach is good, though I can’t say I understand that as well as I’d like.
LikeLike
One other thing I’d add: I don’t think I’m at all unusual in this respect within the adult world of academia in which I now function.
If a fellow professor said to you, “well, I’ve got to spend 7 hours listening to lectures at a conference today” and you then said, “well, I guess you’ll only get half as much research and writing done today as usual, huh!” He/she would laugh, because it would obviously be a joke. He/she will get nowhere near 50% as much work done as on a day solely dedicated to work.
Listening to 7 hours of lectures is a full day’s allotment of mental exertion. Virtually no one can do that and then go home and do a bunch of extra research and writing, or even learn much new. You may go home and do a little light reading, or add a new paragraph to the thing you were working on, but the day’s mental energy is largely already spent.
If adult PhDs can’t do it, why do we expect it of children?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Being told I was the “smart one” kinda saved my life, since I basically melted down mid-high school and dropped out and went it alone for a bunch of years. But I had this sense of arrogance that told me I could just go learn everything myself. Which I did.
Which, actually I’m not that super smart or anything. At least, not compared to my coworkers or folks in my peer group. On the other hand, I worked really hard and it shows.
On the “no friends” thing, that was me — until it stopped being me. At some point I got sick of it and then went out and got friends. Which had its ups and downs, but I got into punk culture and drug culture, and actually I wasn’t the only weirdo in the crowd. Also, I learned that I could play the “smart thing” in a certain way. Like, I would just tell people I was a math geek, and then mention in passing some math thing, like really excited. Or maybe I would ramble on a bit about some obscure history fact or whatever. Then I would drop that and listen to them.
And they were not boring. Nor were they stupid. In fact, often they knew all kinds of stuff I did not know and people taught me cool skills and obscure facts about bands or culture or places they’d travelled, or actual wars they fought in, or how they deal with dating, or who they loved and why that failed, and somewhere along the way I decided that folks who think they are so much super smarter than everyone else are often kinda clueless. In fact, they’re way of thinking is often kinda stilted and broken, even if their math skills are pretty great or they know obscure shit about long dead philosophers.
And at no point did I ever stop being a weirdo tranny ADHD girl who does math for fun. But I became a weirdo tranny ADHD girl who does math for fun and *also* knows all kinds of cool people from cool places with cool backgrounds. And I ain’t better than them. And they ain’t better than me. It’s really cool.
LikeLike
Veronica, you seem to be pretty strongly focused on reacting against expected accusations of “arrogance.”
You write:
“I decided that folks who think they are so much super smarter than everyone else are often kinda clueless. In fact, they’re way of thinking is often kinda stilted and broken, even if their math skills are pretty great or they know obscure shit about long dead philosophers.”
That remark clearly positions you as “I’M not arrogant! Not like those others. Don’t attack ME! Attack them instead!”
But what does it actually mean? Are you arguing that there’s no such thing as intelligence? That everyone has the exact same amount of smarts, no one’s ever smarter than average?
That the only reason anyone thinks otherwise is if they’re “clueless” and “broken”?
If so, that’s a pretty hostile thing to say about the other posters on this thread. Not to mention our host.
Or are you arguing that most people who both are smarter than average and who also fail to go into denial about it…who manage to actually believe it and maybe even admit to it…wind up “broken”?
I’d agree they’re often “broken” in the sense of having been hurt growing up. Because they don’t fit in. Because they *are* different. Which was Ozy’s point too.
I’d add that that happens *whether or not* they admit to themselves or others that they’re smart. It’s what happens, to people with that developmental difference. They don’t fit expectations growing up; of course that causes problems. Whether or not they “think they are smart.”
But you make sure to mention the “think they are” aspect. Why is that? Is it because you know there’s a social norm against saying it, and some part of you wants to enforce that norm?
You go on: “And I ain’t better than them. And they ain’t better than me.”
But, guess who brought up “better than” in general rather than just in academics?
YOU did.
The overall message sent by this comment is that you too were “labeled the smart one” but *you* aren’t broken, oh no. *You* don’t think you’re better than others, oh no. *You* act right. Don’t attack you!
Some cultures/subcultures have an especially strong conflation of “talented” and “arrogant.” Some of them send the message that even talking about the existence of any talent is automatically arrogant, a transgression, worthy of attack. Some cultures are *especially* this way around *intellectual* talent.
They’re wrong. Intellectual talent is a developmental difference that can cause specific problems due to lack of fit, and people who have that difference or are trying to help others with that difference have a right to discuss it without being attacked.
This comment of yours makes it appear you’re used to that kind of culture. You seem to be trying to defend yourself against what you expect will be attacks on you for being smart, by trying to redirect that expected hostility onto the rest of us in this thread instead.
Stop that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I cannot find it now, but there is this one article on LW that suggests to rationalists that they *listen to subject matter experts*, even if those subject matter experts do not use rationalist tools. The advantages to doing this are obvious. Subject matter experts often know the contours of their field of study far better than someone wandering in with no knowledge.
But why give this warning? Could it be that this is a problem rationalists have?
There is this stereotype about physicists, that they end up thinking they are just the smartest of all, and then they publish papers about topics they know little about, with some complex mathematical model that does a poor job capturing the problem.
In other words, *Assume a spherical cow*.
Now, I know a number of physics-grads (all now working in Comp Sci). Anyway, they don’t do this, but everyone laughs at the jokes. It certainly seems to be a thing.
In her article above, Ozy wrote this:
Yep. Seen that. I was gifted-girl back in school, and tons of my peers acted that way. I even acted that way, to some degree, until I went on a different course. In any case, this behavior is not limited to academics. Nor do I believe that Ozy meant to limit it thus. The context of that and the preceding paragraph clearly are talking about social interactions in general, which were *shaped* by what happened in school.
Yes abstract intelligence exists. People can build elaborate towers of thought, which often bear no relation to the actual world. On the other hand, someone with less abstract intelligence can often know quite a lot about the world, about life, about places and people — not to mention, they may be experts in their own field of study, even if they ain’t so smart at gifted-girl.
Abstract:smart people refusing to listen to experience:smart people is a real thing.
LikeLike
I felt a lot of this growing up as well, though I never felt it quite as acutely as some other people in places such as here, perhaps because I wasn’t quite as gifted as they. (Plato in third grade? No way!) I liked a lot of the “normal” hobbies such as sports, music, drinking, etc. But especially at parties and such, I never felt and still often have difficulty feeling like I truly belong. I feel often like I’m just barely included. That is, of course, as much a subjective feeling as anything else, and I’m not blaming the other people at the party. (Well, with a handful of individual exceptions of the type I’m sure all of you can imagine.) We can enjoy that world but we will always in the back of our minds kind of feel like outsiders there.
Current and former “gifted” kids have a host of psychological traits that massively cluster among them, such as introversion, conscientiousness, and a tendency towards anxiety. I think it is these traits that often lead to isolation. I don’t think having obscure interests or hobbies, and having few to share them with, is much of an explanation, because most hobbies are obscure to some extent and this doesn’t seem to apply to them.
I will also say that when I finally found myself as one of the Not Smart ones, I felt an understated sort of relief more than anything else, not a crisis in self-image. I enjoy intellectual hobbies but hate to be defined by them. I know I’m dealing with geniuses when I’m one of the dumber people in the room, and I like listening to geniuses.
LikeLike
I was only smart in some ways. I know it lacks class to talk about IQ specifics, but basically I was 3 standard deviations above the mean in two categories, and dead average in another, each time I took the WISC. Add on depression, anxiety, and OCPD and my brain is weird as hell and I really don’t like it.
Similar experiences to yours wrt study, except I’ve always hated assignments/homework too. Exams I would “study” for by doing one practice paper and reading up on anything I got wrong, and in class and at home during the year I’d read unrelated things. Got good enough scores to get guaranteed entry into engineering at university, but because I never did homework at school, I didn’t do my assignments either, and didn’t bother going to exams since you needed to pass the assignments to pass the paper. So I dropped out, and since then nothing has happened. Because I’m an idiot, and could do well with the slightest bit of effort, but can’t even do that.
LikeLike
I was in the Miraca Gross study (one of the radical accelerands), and I relate to a lot of what Ozy has posted. I was horribly bullied through high school, but became very popular at university, where I am very happy. I think part ofthe reason was that I cobsciousconsciously decided to learn how to become generally agreeable. I always had a few close friends, but I managed to learn the art of general popularity. I was also pretty unlucky with my social group at school – it was a particularly brutal year for bullying. Thankfully, that’s all behind me.
Work-wise, I was lucky/wise enough to pursue the subjects I found most challenging. I am now in a PhD program for the subject I got the worst marks in at school. This led to a lot of struggling, both with content and perfectionism issues, but it’s been a good way to stay grounded and learn to work hard.
LikeLiked by 1 person
+1
LikeLike
Yep. I can relate to having cultivated an over-reliance on my intelligence to get me wherever I wanted in life. This is coming to a head now, as I’m waiting on the job market at the end of my graduate student career, bracing myself for the possibility that I’m just not good enough in my area to continue in academia.
I remember my fifth-grade teacher telling me (and my parents) that I was lucky, because I was one of the few people in the class who had the capacity to grow up to do whatever I wanted to do. Overall I was (and am) lucky, but I can think of at least two things wrong with my teacher’s assertion. One: I wasn’t necessarily capable of pursuing just any kind of work. Just because I tend to excel at academics doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of areas at which I seem innately incompetent (including even some academic areas). Two: the fact that I was an outstandingly bright member of my fifth grade class, which was comprised of 20-something students, doesn’t necessarily imply that I have what it takes to become, say, a successful research mathematician. (Scott related a similar situation in Growing Old.)
This didn’t really come back to bite me until graduate school, which I entered with a bold, possibly arrogant, confidence in my ability to go about as far in any area of math that I would like, and which I am exiting somewhat beaten down by the years of feeling like I’m trying to reach beyond the end of my intellectual tether. After years of it, I still haven’t really gotten the hang of how to cope either intellectually or emotionally with struggling to understand something while dominated by somewhat unhelpful and destructive thoughts like “I’m just not smart enough!” Even if I do get academic jobs, I wonder if it’s worth it to undergo what I’m sure will be further years of constantly feeling like a moron. And that’s clearly an unhealthy failing on my part to motivate myself to conquer research challenges in a constructive manner, but I can’t help but blame it in part on my having grown up with a continual message of how I’m so smart that I can’t fail at anything I want badly enough.
I’m reminded of a certain study that has been described to me in some detail, but I don’t remember who conducted it at the moment. Several groups of children were given a challenging puzzle to solve. In one group, those who succeeded were praised with “Great job, you’re obviously very smart!” In another group, those who succeeded were praised with “Great job, you obviously worked very hard!” Guess which group of children went on to be more successful at subsequent, more challenging puzzles.
LikeLike
Could it have been Carol Dweck?
While I mostly agree with this, I also wonder what she’d say to the kids who didn’t have to work very hard to solve the puzzle (but who were told they “obviously must have”).
LikeLike
On this
Honestly, this just sounds like standard *Imposture Syndrome* to me, which most of us have at some point or another. In fact, if you’re not feeling that at all, I would question whether you are pushing yourself hard enough. (I mean, maybe. I don’t know you, nor your goals. But if you *want* to excel, you should be kinda hitting places that feel too hard.)
On the hard work versus talent thing — fuck yeah. Hard work baby! All the way.
But you realize that now. So you got that.
On if you want to keep pushing, up to you. Either answer is okay.
Pushing hard is admirable. Achievement is awesome. But saying, ”Hey I need to slow down here, maybe to work on other stuff in my life, maybe just to have some fun” is fine too. Maybe in a few years you’ll say, “I need to get busy again.” Lotsa people do that.
LikeLike
If you are smart enough to have a realistic shot at an academic job you should be able to do very well in a different but (semi-related) field. The issue is you want to move fields as soon as possible unless academia looks guaranteed (take the outside view).
Does your department have any statistics on salaries of graduates. I have a math phd and my department gave me some info on where I went to school. The most common jobs where roughly “academic teaching” “quantitative analyst” and “programmer.” The starting salaries for programming was around 80-90K, quantitative analyst around 140-200K and teaching was for academia it was very low.
The talent required to succeed differs wildly by field. If you are even close to good enough to make it in pure math you have the talent to do well professionally if you drop academia immediately. But the longer you wait the worse your situation is going to become.
*I should not this was a PHD program. And many people had done some work for the company they eventually got hired out while in grad school. So my def of “starting” means the salary they received the year after graduating. 80-90K is not exactly insane money for someone who is approx 27. But its not exactly low either compared to most people.
**I do not know anyone who tried to learn programming and couldn’t get decent job.
LikeLike
I had the same problem when I was in middle school. During 7th grade math I could quite learn because I actually had to put forth and effort. This led to me falling into a deep state of depression and anxiety not to mention my situation at home where for hours I’d be yelled at because my grades were not what they used to be and I was “not trying”. I had many problems during this period of my life.
LikeLike