
Does giftedness matter? – No - yoloswagins
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/does-giftedness-matter/
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fatdog
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
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.

~~~
alan-crowe
Were the mental effects of the allergy medicine mentioned in the package
leaflet? I worry that modern medicine doesn't look closely enough for mental
side effects. It would reassure me to know that the effects were mentioned. It
would help me to know how it was phrased, so that I can understand the
information if I run across it.

~~~
wccrawford
There was no mention of those effects at all, and it happened with 2 or 3
different medicines to different degrees. At least, not that I know of.

I've also never heard of it happening to anyone else, so it wouldn't surprise
me that it's not mentioned anywhere.

~~~
fatdog
While IQ is a blunt instrument, saying giftedness doesn't matter is like
saying money doesn't matter. It doesn't, but it does.

Compare the purchasing power and variety of options for solving problems of a
millionaire to someone who earns low hundreds of thousands a year. Compare
those to that of a billionaire.

Then compare how someone who inherited the money to someone who saved it, and
again to someone who got it as part of an exit.

Intelligence is analogous to money this way in that you can acquire it from
inheritance and upbringing, slog through work/academia and study, or get it as
the result of drive and experience/risk.

Someone who had money who becomes poor is a different kind of poor, and
someone who is poor who becomes wealthy is a different kind of rich.

Giftedness is a kind of class that has its own pitfalls and outcomes. When you
have money, like intelligence, it's not something you think about much, even
if it is weirdly revered by a lot of other people.

A lot of people think they could solve a lot of their problems if they were
only richer or more intelligent, but when you are rich or intelligent, you
realize quickly that these are not so much solutions as they are excuses that
keep their circumstances bearable.

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

------
contingencies
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
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.

~~~
cko
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
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?

