5 ms·

Does giftedness matter? – No

19 points by yoloswagins 10y ago

contingencies 10y ago
I personally benefited from gifted and talented education in Australia (~1992-1993). Even though all the tests are IQ based, the thrust of this article seems to be "defining giftedness with IQ was always wrong, and also fails to match accepted wisdom in the area". Accepted wisdom, specifically, is that gifted kids have deeper emotional engagement, empathy and moralistic sense. This has no correlation to IQ.
- nils-m-holm 10y ago
  Among the people around me, I see a high correlation between IQ on the one side and emotional engagement, empathy and ethics on the other. What I also see is an anticorrelation between giftedness and happiness, which makes me really sad.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    Ignorance is bliss!
  - sushid 10y ago
    Do you think that's really true or do you tend to mainly interact with your smarter friends? This may give you a skewed understanding of how your less gifted friends might feel. My closer, "gifted" friends are in tech or finance and we interact more often. My less gifted friends, I see less often and I mostly interact with them via Facebook and the likes. This makes it seem like my smarter friends are more reflective and thus less satisfied with their lives whereas my less gifted friends seem to only have fun. Just food for thought.
    - nils-m-holm 10y ago
      Did think about it! :) I spend a lot of time with all kinds of friends, so I don't think my perception is skewed. What I do observe is this: when my smarter friends are miserable, they are mostly sad or anxious, while the others are mostly frustrated or angry. The latter concentrate on finding quick fixes rather than dealing with their emotions. My smarter friends are interested in how other people feel, while the others are mostly interested in what they do. The former are very aware that their own good is linked to that of the people around them; most of the others think that life is a zero-sum game. I think it is much, much easier to agree to disagree with my smarter friends. I often feel a close connection to very smart people after having known them for only a few months or weeks. I miss this connection in most of my other relationships. So I disagree, but thanks for the input!
  - cko 10y ago
    What about moral luck: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_luck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_luck If higher IQ correlates with higher income, and higher income means better circumstances (health, safety, opportunity, etc) then wouldn't that explain greater empathy and ethics? As opposed to someone who has to fight for their survival. Because when you're talking about survival or the threat to it, all ethics go out the window. For example, I had fairly high test scores indicating high cognitive ability - this has made life relatively easier for me. I see coworkers, on the other hand, one socioeconomic class below and there is a pattern of mistrust in others, the mentality of scarcity, and the belief that people who are successful are lucky or corrupt. All of which seems to indicate less empathy.
    - nils-m-holm 10y ago
      I know a few people with very high IQs (3-sigma and above) who have been poor and miserable most of their lives, and they are among the most compassionate and sympathetic people I know. If anything, their ethics and compassion have improved during their fight for survival. OTOH, I have met quite a few wealthy people who couldn't care less about the suffering around them. But it's an interesting question: what creates compassion and empathy? Wealth? Suffering? High IQ? Combinations of the above? Which ones?
fatdog 10y ago
I've been in a number of companies where there was an obvious IQ-gap. Some people could watch everyone else like mice running a maze but couldn't explain to them how to succeed in a way they would understand. Someone with an average IQ, when compared to someone on the higher end of the curve, has all the tools to assert their interests but without much ability to reason abstractly about them or to recognize or interpret meta patterns. Gifted education is only partially to help intelligent kids, it's just to protect the order among the other ones. It isolates intelligent kids from the people they might otherwise learn to lead. Yes, gifted kids can be disruptive or withdraw in normal classrooms, but removing them to a "special" class is about helping crap teachers. Enriched education is valuable, but doing it at the expense of a childs development in the hopes of engineering better kids is awful. If you want to help them, teach gifted kids leadership skills, they'll figure out the rest.
- wccrawford 10y ago
  I was in a gifted class when I was young, and I quite enjoyed it. It was a welcome addition to all my other classwork. They didn't fully separate us, though. We were still in regular classes 4 days of the week, and we had to still do the work from the day we were missing in addition to the added work that day of Gifted class. It had the effect of keeping us with everyone else while giving us enough extra to do that we weren't as disruptive as before. (And yeah, I was quite disruptive.) I realize now that it probably could have been a lot better, if I'd gone to a school that specialized in it, but a private school wasn't really an option, and there was no way the school was going to create more of a program for so few students. (I heard later they killed the program entirely.) I was fortunate enough to experience the other end of intelligence for a while, too. My doctor advised taking allergy medication, and it had the side effect of making me stupid. I was able to tell that there were things I should have been able to do, but I wasn't unable to explain why or what they were exactly. I'd come across problems that I'd solved before and be unable to solve them, but not be able to figure out why exactly. After halting the medical, my faculties came back and it was astounding. I came to the conclusion that I was simply unable to think well enough to disprove things beyond a certain point. I found out that when I decide something is true, I do it by trying to prove it false. If I was unable to prove it false, I'd accept it as true. When I was on those pills, I was only able to go so far in my testing of the theory, and I'd accept things as true that I would not when I wasn't taking the pills. It had the side effect of making everything about me. If someone cut me off on the highway, it was because they were against me somehow. The thought that they might just be in a rush or an emergency never came, and I just accepted that they were pissed at me and attacking me. That was long-winded, but I thought it might add some insight to your IQ-gap observations.
Terretta 10y ago
The title here with the added "No" is opposite of the article's intent, to quote, "giftedness matters [so please define its dimensions scientifically]".

19 points by yoloswagins 10y ago

I personally benefited from gifted and talented education in Australia (~1992-1993). Even though all the tests are IQ based, the thrust of this article seems to be "defining giftedness with IQ was always wrong, and also fails to match accepted wisdom in the area". Accepted wisdom, specifically, is that gifted kids have deeper emotional engagement, empathy and moralistic sense. This has no correlation to IQ.

nils-m-holm 10y ago
Among the people around me, I see a high correlation between IQ on the one side and emotional engagement, empathy and ethics on the other. What I also see is an anticorrelation between giftedness and happiness, which makes me really sad.
- contingencies 10y ago
  Ignorance is bliss!
- sushid 10y ago
  Do you think that's really true or do you tend to mainly interact with your smarter friends? This may give you a skewed understanding of how your less gifted friends might feel. My closer, "gifted" friends are in tech or finance and we interact more often. My less gifted friends, I see less often and I mostly interact with them via Facebook and the likes. This makes it seem like my smarter friends are more reflective and thus less satisfied with their lives whereas my less gifted friends seem to only have fun. Just food for thought.
  - nils-m-holm 10y ago
    Did think about it! :) I spend a lot of time with all kinds of friends, so I don't think my perception is skewed. What I do observe is this: when my smarter friends are miserable, they are mostly sad or anxious, while the others are mostly frustrated or angry. The latter concentrate on finding quick fixes rather than dealing with their emotions. My smarter friends are interested in how other people feel, while the others are mostly interested in what they do. The former are very aware that their own good is linked to that of the people around them; most of the others think that life is a zero-sum game. I think it is much, much easier to agree to disagree with my smarter friends. I often feel a close connection to very smart people after having known them for only a few months or weeks. I miss this connection in most of my other relationships. So I disagree, but thanks for the input!
- cko 10y ago
  What about moral luck: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_luck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_luck If higher IQ correlates with higher income, and higher income means better circumstances (health, safety, opportunity, etc) then wouldn't that explain greater empathy and ethics? As opposed to someone who has to fight for their survival. Because when you're talking about survival or the threat to it, all ethics go out the window. For example, I had fairly high test scores indicating high cognitive ability - this has made life relatively easier for me. I see coworkers, on the other hand, one socioeconomic class below and there is a pattern of mistrust in others, the mentality of scarcity, and the belief that people who are successful are lucky or corrupt. All of which seems to indicate less empathy.
  - nils-m-holm 10y ago
    I know a few people with very high IQs (3-sigma and above) who have been poor and miserable most of their lives, and they are among the most compassionate and sympathetic people I know. If anything, their ethics and compassion have improved during their fight for survival. OTOH, I have met quite a few wealthy people who couldn't care less about the suffering around them. But it's an interesting question: what creates compassion and empathy? Wealth? Suffering? High IQ? Combinations of the above? Which ones?

fatdog 10y ago

I've been in a number of companies where there was an obvious IQ-gap. Some people could watch everyone else like mice running a maze but couldn't explain to them how to succeed in a way they would understand. Someone with an average IQ, when compared to someone on the higher end of the curve, has all the tools to assert their interests but without much ability to reason abstractly about them or to recognize or interpret meta patterns. Gifted education is only partially to help intelligent kids, it's just to protect the order among the other ones. It isolates intelligent kids from the people they might otherwise learn to lead. Yes, gifted kids can be disruptive or withdraw in normal classrooms, but removing them to a "special" class is about helping crap teachers. Enriched education is valuable, but doing it at the expense of a childs development in the hopes of engineering better kids is awful. If you want to help them, teach gifted kids leadership skills, they'll figure out the rest.

wccrawford 10y ago
I was in a gifted class when I was young, and I quite enjoyed it. It was a welcome addition to all my other classwork. They didn't fully separate us, though. We were still in regular classes 4 days of the week, and we had to still do the work from the day we were missing in addition to the added work that day of Gifted class. It had the effect of keeping us with everyone else while giving us enough extra to do that we weren't as disruptive as before. (And yeah, I was quite disruptive.) I realize now that it probably could have been a lot better, if I'd gone to a school that specialized in it, but a private school wasn't really an option, and there was no way the school was going to create more of a program for so few students. (I heard later they killed the program entirely.) I was fortunate enough to experience the other end of intelligence for a while, too. My doctor advised taking allergy medication, and it had the side effect of making me stupid. I was able to tell that there were things I should have been able to do, but I wasn't unable to explain why or what they were exactly. I'd come across problems that I'd solved before and be unable to solve them, but not be able to figure out why exactly. After halting the medical, my faculties came back and it was astounding. I came to the conclusion that I was simply unable to think well enough to disprove things beyond a certain point. I found out that when I decide something is true, I do it by trying to prove it false. If I was unable to prove it false, I'd accept it as true. When I was on those pills, I was only able to go so far in my testing of the theory, and I'd accept things as true that I would not when I wasn't taking the pills. It had the side effect of making everything about me. If someone cut me off on the highway, it was because they were against me somehow. The thought that they might just be in a rush or an emergency never came, and I just accepted that they were pissed at me and attacking me. That was long-winded, but I thought it might add some insight to your IQ-gap observations.

Terretta 10y ago

The title here with the added "No" is opposite of the article's intent, to quote, "giftedness matters [so please define its dimensions scientifically]".