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So many words for mere conjecture that is ultimately going to be used as a pat on one's own back for feeling bummed. I especially love the author's self-design

So many words for mere conjecture that is ultimately going to be used as a pat on one's own back for feeling bummed. I especially love the author's self-designation as gifted and not once expanding on this very narrow dimensionality reduction. What happened to the personality traits? What happened to character, adverse childhood experiences, education etc independent of so-called giftedness? Anyone could have come up with this; a human mind is a terrible thing to waste. Greater the mind, greater the waste. Just like an undertrained, under-exercised german shepherd is going to be much more destructive than a shitzu.

zhdc1 5y ago
> I especially love the author's self-designation as gifted... Anyone could have come up with this The author was a chaired professor who wrote several dozen peer reviewed articles and five books on the subject. He was also the chair for his state's psychology association board for several years, an associate dean, and cofounded his university's school of psychology. I'm not going to comment on the quality of the article or whether 'giftedness' is a meaningful construct, but this isn't a fluff piece written by some feel-good popular science author.
- acituan 5y ago
  > I'm not going to comment on the quality of the article or whether 'giftedness' is a meaningful construct Just that it is made aware, instead of leveling a counter-argument, you are only appealing to authority. Everyone, all the way back to Freud or Jung, would be fair game to criticize for such a young field as psychology, because new paradigms and data do surface often. I don't care if they made this their life's work, the author does not once talk about the personality traits especially regarding neuroticism, which is either independent of IQ or inversely correlated, which falls counter to their hypothesis. Empirically speaking big five has much more backing data than their conjecture based on a single 1950's psychologist. Doesn't make it automatically more true, but it would need to be accounted for.
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    > Just that it is made aware, instead of leveling a counter-argument, you are only appealing to authority. The original poster attacked the author's credibility. I pointed out that, when you help establish a concept, you're qualified to write about it to non-experts in a public venue.
    - acituan 5y ago
      I am the original poster. There is no attack to the credibility of the author, there is questioning the lack of a consideration on the confounds and a sufficient explication of the term gifted. Disappointingly a crowd of people emerged demanding reverence to their PhD, career and the verbosity of their essay without being able address my original critique. I am not saying I am necessarily correct, or they necessarily haven't thought it out etc, but it is a pretty damn valid question to ask. It is almost as if people are personally offended because they are inclined to consider themselves gifted and explain away feeling depressed with that.
garyrob 5y ago
I love how some in the Hacker News community truly believe that their immediate, knee-jerk reaction to dismiss the work of a highly experienced professional in the relevant field, who is applying their lifetime of knowledge and experience to a subject, a reaction that involves neither knowledge nor effort, is automatically correct and important for other people to read about.
- kwthrows 5y ago
  That's because we have been trained on a model where midwits speak with the exact same authority on any given subject as this author does. It's very difficult to read a blog post-style article on here without assuming that the author is a blowhard spouting nonsense whose sample size is 1. Basically, the odds are against you.
- acituan 5y ago
  Do you have a counter-argument to the content other than pretending to know my knowledge, experience, intentions on the matter, and ascribing an inflated self-importance to discredit me as a whole (also known as ad-hominem)? Have you checked other comments in this thread? Do you find my criticism truly unique? Isn't almost every quarter in HN we discuss the replication crisis in psychology? Do you nonetheless ask for a blind submission to authority? Without answering those I would say your dismissal is more shallow than mine.
  - DangitBobby 5y ago
    Calling out reasoning as fallacious is not as powerful as you think it is.
    - acituan 5y ago
      To me rationality is a pretty important normativity, not that I am after it for power. But since you seem to precisely know what I think, exactly how powerful should I feel about it?
      - 5y ago
GavinMcG 5y ago
> So many words for mere conjecture Yes, this is what's known as a "personal essay". There's some research citations, too, because the author is a researcher who has worked in this area, but if you're expecting a broad study correlating the Big 5, ACEs, existential depression, and giftedness, you should 1) look elsewhere, or 2) go get your PhD and do the work.
- acituan 5y ago
  > but if you're expecting a broad study correlating the Big 5, ACEs, existential depression, and giftedness, you should 1) look elsewhere, or 2) go get your PhD and do the work. My expectation is not that he had done a different study. My expectation was, personal essay or not, if they are throwing citations, academic credibility and 5000 words at the world about their central thesis, to eliminate the goddamn confounds first, or at least acknowledge that they haven't. It is like writing an essay about "hair color and basketball performance" and making a career out of finding out incidentally blondes perform better, not the least because blondes really liked hearing it, while even shoe size would have been a better explanatory variable. To my mind, "go elsewhere or get a PhD yourself" is a pretty elitist pushback. Rationality is a publicly available resource. We ought to make use of it.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    When you say "central thesis" and "confounds" it sounds like you think this is a piece where the author is setting out to prove something. What, though? It seems to me this is an exploration that's meant to be helpful to people who relate to what the author describes. That description doesn't need to reflect a well-defined category in order to be useful. Useful things don't even need to be true much less well-proven. Rationality is great, but you're demanding a piece that isn't making a rational argument do so. Again, though, it's a personal essay – an exploration more than an argument.
    - acituan 5y ago
      Thanks for the honest inquiry, I’ve been responding between sleep cycles and my responses has been more combative than necessary. My main grief with his exploration (and the reason for trying to dig out his thesis) is that gifted folks, which I think are over represented in this forum, are going to ascribe all their malaise to their giftedness. Which is a very misleading and harmful but also attractive proposition to buy into. I’ve suffered from this personally after more than a year and $40k wasted with a particular highly credentialed therapist that insisted on blowing sunshine up my hole by trying to explain away every single element of my suffering with giftedness. After switching to a no bs, equally credentialed therapist, and actually making progress, I was furious to realize how much of that was a collusion in lazy thinking and not doing the hard work of personal transformation. Back to the author, this guy made a career out of the notion of gifted children, so I don’t think he is merely presenting a story. He is trying to persuade an audience on this thesis. But how can we discern if he got the credentials because he was right vs because there was a high demand from parents and people alike to hear that their problem was “just being gifted”? Hence my digging up the trait theory and trying to poke holes otherwise. I would wager, admittedly with no authority, 90% of the gifted folks in “existential depression”, excluding immediate environmental factors, are simply suffering from being unequipped against the meaning crises of our times. They are under-educated, under-connected and under-spiritual, in general under-participating in life, just flowing with whatever movies, politics, articles come their way to make sense of things without exerting any will to get to the bottom of it and do their homework.

zhdc1 5y ago

> I especially love the author's self-designation as gifted... Anyone could have come up with this The author was a chaired professor who wrote several dozen peer reviewed articles and five books on the subject. He was also the chair for his state's psychology association board for several years, an associate dean, and cofounded his university's school of psychology. I'm not going to comment on the quality of the article or whether 'giftedness' is a meaningful construct, but this isn't a fluff piece written by some feel-good popular science author.

acituan 5y ago
> I'm not going to comment on the quality of the article or whether 'giftedness' is a meaningful construct Just that it is made aware, instead of leveling a counter-argument, you are only appealing to authority. Everyone, all the way back to Freud or Jung, would be fair game to criticize for such a young field as psychology, because new paradigms and data do surface often. I don't care if they made this their life's work, the author does not once talk about the personality traits especially regarding neuroticism, which is either independent of IQ or inversely correlated, which falls counter to their hypothesis. Empirically speaking big five has much more backing data than their conjecture based on a single 1950's psychologist. Doesn't make it automatically more true, but it would need to be accounted for.
- zhdc1 5y ago
  > Just that it is made aware, instead of leveling a counter-argument, you are only appealing to authority. The original poster attacked the author's credibility. I pointed out that, when you help establish a concept, you're qualified to write about it to non-experts in a public venue.
  - acituan 5y ago
    I am the original poster. There is no attack to the credibility of the author, there is questioning the lack of a consideration on the confounds and a sufficient explication of the term gifted. Disappointingly a crowd of people emerged demanding reverence to their PhD, career and the verbosity of their essay without being able address my original critique. I am not saying I am necessarily correct, or they necessarily haven't thought it out etc, but it is a pretty damn valid question to ask. It is almost as if people are personally offended because they are inclined to consider themselves gifted and explain away feeling depressed with that.

garyrob 5y ago

I love how some in the Hacker News community truly believe that their immediate, knee-jerk reaction to dismiss the work of a highly experienced professional in the relevant field, who is applying their lifetime of knowledge and experience to a subject, a reaction that involves neither knowledge nor effort, is automatically correct and important for other people to read about.

kwthrows 5y ago
That's because we have been trained on a model where midwits speak with the exact same authority on any given subject as this author does. It's very difficult to read a blog post-style article on here without assuming that the author is a blowhard spouting nonsense whose sample size is 1. Basically, the odds are against you.
acituan 5y ago
Do you have a counter-argument to the content other than pretending to know my knowledge, experience, intentions on the matter, and ascribing an inflated self-importance to discredit me as a whole (also known as ad-hominem)? Have you checked other comments in this thread? Do you find my criticism truly unique? Isn't almost every quarter in HN we discuss the replication crisis in psychology? Do you nonetheless ask for a blind submission to authority? Without answering those I would say your dismissal is more shallow than mine.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  Calling out reasoning as fallacious is not as powerful as you think it is.
  - acituan 5y ago
    To me rationality is a pretty important normativity, not that I am after it for power. But since you seem to precisely know what I think, exactly how powerful should I feel about it?
    - 5y ago

GavinMcG 5y ago

> So many words for mere conjecture Yes, this is what's known as a "personal essay". There's some research citations, too, because the author is a researcher who has worked in this area, but if you're expecting a broad study correlating the Big 5, ACEs, existential depression, and giftedness, you should 1) look elsewhere, or 2) go get your PhD and do the work.

acituan 5y ago
> but if you're expecting a broad study correlating the Big 5, ACEs, existential depression, and giftedness, you should 1) look elsewhere, or 2) go get your PhD and do the work. My expectation is not that he had done a different study. My expectation was, personal essay or not, if they are throwing citations, academic credibility and 5000 words at the world about their central thesis, to eliminate the goddamn confounds first, or at least acknowledge that they haven't. It is like writing an essay about "hair color and basketball performance" and making a career out of finding out incidentally blondes perform better, not the least because blondes really liked hearing it, while even shoe size would have been a better explanatory variable. To my mind, "go elsewhere or get a PhD yourself" is a pretty elitist pushback. Rationality is a publicly available resource. We ought to make use of it.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  When you say "central thesis" and "confounds" it sounds like you think this is a piece where the author is setting out to prove something. What, though? It seems to me this is an exploration that's meant to be helpful to people who relate to what the author describes. That description doesn't need to reflect a well-defined category in order to be useful. Useful things don't even need to be true much less well-proven. Rationality is great, but you're demanding a piece that isn't making a rational argument do so. Again, though, it's a personal essay – an exploration more than an argument.
  - acituan 5y ago
    Thanks for the honest inquiry, I’ve been responding between sleep cycles and my responses has been more combative than necessary. My main grief with his exploration (and the reason for trying to dig out his thesis) is that gifted folks, which I think are over represented in this forum, are going to ascribe all their malaise to their giftedness. Which is a very misleading and harmful but also attractive proposition to buy into. I’ve suffered from this personally after more than a year and $40k wasted with a particular highly credentialed therapist that insisted on blowing sunshine up my hole by trying to explain away every single element of my suffering with giftedness. After switching to a no bs, equally credentialed therapist, and actually making progress, I was furious to realize how much of that was a collusion in lazy thinking and not doing the hard work of personal transformation. Back to the author, this guy made a career out of the notion of gifted children, so I don’t think he is merely presenting a story. He is trying to persuade an audience on this thesis. But how can we discern if he got the credentials because he was right vs because there was a high demand from parents and people alike to hear that their problem was “just being gifted”? Hence my digging up the trait theory and trying to poke holes otherwise. I would wager, admittedly with no authority, 90% of the gifted folks in “existential depression”, excluding immediate environmental factors, are simply suffering from being unequipped against the meaning crises of our times. They are under-educated, under-connected and under-spiritual, in general under-participating in life, just flowing with whatever movies, politics, articles come their way to make sense of things without exerting any will to get to the bottom of it and do their homework.