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> 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 Ph

> 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.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    I think you are not taking into account the path to existential depression. The article describes some very specific experiences of so-called gifted people, which leads to the possibility of existential depression. It seems very unlikely that the experiences he describes are common among most people. I didn't read the article so much as "I am gifted, therefore I will be existentially depressed" but more along the lines of "I am gifted, and the effect this has on my life and experiences may cause existential depression". This article opened my eyes as to why I may have had particular experiences in my life.

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.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  I think you are not taking into account the path to existential depression. The article describes some very specific experiences of so-called gifted people, which leads to the possibility of existential depression. It seems very unlikely that the experiences he describes are common among most people. I didn't read the article so much as "I am gifted, therefore I will be existentially depressed" but more along the lines of "I am gifted, and the effect this has on my life and experiences may cause existential depression". This article opened my eyes as to why I may have had particular experiences in my life.