Before this comment section fills with people self diagnosing themselves as geniuses: I feel this.
This post is going to sound pedantic and annoying because … that is what Aspergers does to you.
I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision.
From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual. Not so much on the mathematical side. I almost have a disability with mathematics.
I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees. Worked at the top companies in the world with PhDs and others.
However. I feel constantly discriminated against and treated like I am stupider than I am. And when people listen to me talk, they get incredibly threatened.
It has taken me years to understand that being around me and listening to me talk, reason and analyze is THREATENING to people.
I have had situations where, even after a few meetings where I felt I was just “talking about how things are” the other person left HATING me.
The way I express myself is perceived almost like being hit with a physical object. I believe I have Aspergers (have tested very highly for it).
I will tell you - it is INCREDIBLY CAREER LIMITING.
I have given up trying to work in the normal world. It just doesn’t work for me. The pattern always repeats - I join a company, I get targeted and singled out and ganged up on.
If you are like me it is like being incredibly advantaged while being incredibly disadvantaged at the same time.
It’s like being Usain Bolt except your sprinting lane has an obstacle course in it while everyone else gets to run in a normal lane.
The obstacle course is DELIBERATELY put there. It is human nature to instantly identify existential threats: People who are unusually more talented than them and take them out.
I have learned, and am adapting.
Unfortunately, if you want to succeed in this world you have to play a set of games, these are games that I really don’t want to play.
If I have to play them, I am going to try to play outside the system.
I have realized that all the advice which most people follow that works for them does not work for me.
I do things completely differently and have to come up with my own strategies about how to operate.
Here is the other reality: If you are very talented and gifted, NO ONE WILL NOTICE AND TELL YOU.
That sounds completely weird but it is true.
No one in my entire life, aside from a few offhand comments, took me aside and went: “uhhh…you are in a completely other category than these people and do not belong here. Do this instead.”
Instead it is the isolation - I do not understand why no one wants to interact or include me, and it happens very fast. Most people get a whiff and go “I have no idea what to do with this and don’t want to be around it.”
I generally gravitate towards the most autistic market niches imaginable. Usually areas which combine multiple autistic topics together that attract the weirdest people imaginable.
Yeah? Well I, for one, would like to spend more time engaging with people like you. Some of the obvious steps are helpful (eg: "read Less Wrong" was an excellent step some years ago). But I would just like to point out that there ARE some people who would like to interact with those who are very bright and a little bit focused.
Yeah, totally. In fact, when I encounter someone who speaks and behaves like they are on the spectrum, it's a positive signal to me that: they probably aren't going to like me because I'm ADD and careless, but I'm going to love working with them because they are likely to complement my weaknesses.
> I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision. From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual. [...] And when people listen to me talk, they get incredibly threatened
If your language skills are as advanced and analytical as you claim, then you should apply that innate skill to the problem of finding ways to communicate without making people feel threatened. For instance, tailor (limit) your vocabulary for your audience and don't correct other people's inconsequential errors. And of course refrain from telling people about how brilliant you are.
If you can't manage the above, then maybe you should recognize that you're not actually as brilliant as you think. This realization could give you a bit more humility and that in turn could help you interact with other people.
Lmao, I'm not here to make friends. I see a guy sniffing his own farts and am telling him off. If he's as great as he thinks he wouldn't have the problems he complains about.
You are indeed correct. Imagine writing a whole screed “I’m so smart but everyone else doesn’t think so and they’re wrong”. Imagine being serious about it.
> don't correct other people's inconsequential errors
This is a big one I feel. My best friend has Asperger’s and does this from time to time. A recent example is I was telling him about a Thule roof rack I got for my car. I pronounced it Thool, and he interrupted me and said “actually you should know it’s pronounced Tooly”.
It didn’t bother me, but we have a pact that I point out gently when he does things like that. It’s an inconsequential error because it doesn’t really matter how it is pronounced. And some people may find it rude or “know it all” to be corrected like that over something like that.
I'm not saying your comment is without merit, but regardless of how talented or analytical one is, language use is something of a subconscious process and it takes mental effort to consciously tailor it. Maybe not to the same degree as fixing bad handwriting, but it's the same idea.
It also takes emotional regulation to refrain from correcting someone's factual errors. While someone with higher intelligence may be better at understanding and analysing emotions theoretically, this doesn't always translate into practical emotional management skills.
I can’t, it requires theory of mind which I don’t have. The concept of a “this person is a This so you talk to them like That.”
I don’t have it.
Also:
I have worked with quantum physicists with multiple degrees from Harvard / Stanford / Yale etc and realized I am in the same room as and same conversations as them.
These are the upper .01% of the talent pool and my intelligence has got me to that level.
You can’t pull that off by being a complete dumb ass. I have done it over and over and over.
If I may help - I am not Asperger, but I know several and have worked with them. I am also "on the spectrum", as are a big chunk of my friends and family. Based on these experiences, it is not that others feel threatened. It's just that we don't have very good social graces, and others find that off-putting. But there is some good news, we can get better:
Me: I read "How To Win Friends And Influence People" by Dale Carnegie when I was a teen, and it changed my life.
Other: (laughs) It obviously didn't work because you're terrible at social graces!
Me: Yeah, but you didn't know me before I read that book!
So there is hope, but reading a book won't work miracles. It's a lifelong struggle with me to learn social graces.
A nice side effect of being "on the spectrum" myself is I enjoy working with people like that, including Aspergers, because I understand where their lack of social graces comes from and it doesn't bother me in the least.
Life is hard for everyone. I think it’s dramatically easier in some ways for people with particular talents.
Beautiful people have certain things easier but others harder. Highly intelligent people are the same way. I think it’s like playing the game on easy mode but has some random side quest every so often.
I’d surely not wish the ending of Flowers for Algernon on myself just in order to avoid the quests.
I spent more than a decade being suicidally depressed.
I only learned about Aspergers way later in life due to YouTube and realized it explained everything about my problems and alienation.
From some of the coaches on YouTube, they talk about how this is a pattern that shows up a lot with Aspergers - At some point people get so fed up with everything about life, relationships, work and schools not working specifically for YOU.
Aspergers individuals have a particularly hard time with jobs, it is very common for them to have employment challenges.
From your writing it is clear that you think very clearly and have good awareness.
I hope you succeed in finding a place where others compliment you, and you them and are in a team with a lead who supports you. I've been in, asked let a few such teams and we did amazing things.
I am extremely empathetic and honest. Most middle management at most companies optimizes for non-creative yet industrious which turns highly competitive over pettiness.
I just can’t see myself doing it anymore. Especially after what happened to me at my last role.
> I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision.
> From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual. Not so much on the mathematical side. I almost have a disability with mathematics.
I feel this. “Rough draft? LOL why? I can write a perfectly-structured paper beginning-to-end without having to re-arrange so much as a paragraph, and I don’t make grammatical errors or spelling mistakes that I don’t catch instantly. What’s the point of all these ‘writing steps’?”
Around age 35 I started occasionally making errors in typed text, and not noticing until re-reading it. Leaving out words. I started substituting homophones! I never, ever did that at all, before! Aging sucks.
[edit] I feel, specifically, the brilliant-at-language and hindered-at-math thing, that is. The rest of this, I’d say you’re a fair bit brighter than me. I just took to language naturally very early and have crazy-good spatial reasoning. I feel dyslexic trying to read math, though. I do OK as long as things are algorithm-focused, which is why I can have a career as a programmer, but when it’s equations and proofs, forget about it.
> Around age 35 I started occasionally making errors in typed text, and not noticing until re-reading it. Leaving out words. I started substituting homophones! I never, ever did that at all, before! Aging sucks.
I had perfect grammar and spelling until ~30. Then it went downhill.
It coincided with dating more illiterate women. So I always attributed this development to letting go of an attention to detail that went unnoticed: What's the point of writing or speaking correctly when nobody around you can tell the difference?
It might be age rather than environment, although I doubt it. I also don't really mind.
> I have had situations where, even after a few meetings where I felt I was just “talking about how things are” the other person left HATING me.
If you mean this in a way where your saying hard truths or telling it like it is, then yeah, its annoying to listen to. Especially without it being asked for.
To be fair, this could also be said about everyday life too, which is also why folks with Aspergers (like myself) tend to struggle. Social norms seem to basically down to "don't speak out unless absolutely necessary, especially not against authority figures"
Easy and logical for more tribalistic folks that live in terror of becoming outcasts, but not remotely reasonable for people who don't/can't live in this restrictive setup.
I concur with some of my sibling comments but decided to reply to you directly. I hope you give yourself some slack. My advice is simple and terse. Express yourself more tersely. Listen maybe more than you speak. Write your feelings and reactions down instead and then throw it away. Maybe choose to raise those opinions effectively another time. It's direct advice but I hope it helps. That's my take based on what you've written here.
You sound similar to some of my experiences, high IQ though I don't have Asperger's.
So I would say I agree with many people in power need to be "the smartest person in the room" and will do their best to derail or ignore you, which limits your success.
But to your comment about isolation and no one wanting to interact with you, TBH that's most probably Asperger's or your personality, not that you are some genius that people are jealous of.
> I have had situations where, even after a few meetings where I felt I was just “talking about how things are” the other person left HATING me.
This is very familiar to me. There are things nobody talks much about because they are obvious and everybody knows them already. There are also things that nobody talks about because everyone is lying to themselves about it and actually believe are not true (though some part of their brain unconsciously knows it). If you aren't one for the lies, you can mistake one of the latter for the former, and you will think that you are just stating the obvious, but really you just stepped on a landmine. Has happened to me many times.
Once there was a truck driver maneuvering his gigantic semi on narrow street. I thought I'd be helpful and offer suggestions. He interrupted me and told me to bugger off.
Ok, I backed off and then watched.
The guy moved that truck around like a ballerina. It was a pleasure watching him handle it, a true pro.
The lesson for me was to not tell someone you just met how to do their job. It's a lesson I've had to learn many times.
> However. I feel constantly discriminated against and treated like I am stupider than I am. And when people listen to me talk, they get incredibly threatened. It has taken me years to understand that being around me and listening to me talk, reason and analyze is THREATENING to people. I have had situations where, even after a few meetings where I felt I was just “talking about how things are” the other person left HATING me.
Have those people actually told you this, or is it a conclusion you came to on your own? I ask because your comment pattern-matches quite strongly for me to "mildly autistic person who doesn't realize they're constantly making failed status plays". Here are a few lines that stood out
---
> I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision. From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual.
"I'm highly gifted and unusual" is much stronger than "I'm a good technical writer."
> It’s like being Usain Bolt except your sprinting lane has an obstacle course in it while everyone else gets to run in a normal lane.
As before, but even worse. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world. He's quite literally one in eight billion. You are not.
> I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees. Worked at the top companies in the world with PhDs and others.
Having worked with PhDs is not impressive in itself. There are thousands of college sophomores who can say the same.
There are workplaces that carry some serious cachet (though bringing them up unprompted will burn most of it), but vague references to "top companies" won't cut it, and makes me think it's less "fellow at Microsoft Research" and more "software engineer at Microsoft". Which is a fine thing to be - but also a perfectly normal thing to be.
---
If your coworkers are getting the same vibe I am, then they're treating you like you're stupider than you really are because you come off as someone who wants to be seen as smarter than they really are. They're annoyed, not threatened.
> "I'm highly gifted and unusual" is much stronger than "I'm a good technical writer."
Did you stop to think that maybe that was his point?
> s before, but even worse. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world. He's quite literally one in eight billion. You are not.
Or that he didn't mean that literally he is the best in the world?
> I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees
This is legitimately impressive and obviously requires intelligence in the top 1% at minimum. Does it really not occur to you that smart people know they are smart just like people who are good at anything else know they are good at it, and not just trying to make themselves sound smarter than they are?
> Or that he didn't mean that literally he is the best in the world?
Obviously not, but I think OP does sincerely think he's smart enough that he should stand out as exceptional to most of the people he meets - and I think he's probably wrong. Most educated professionals will know dozens of people as talented as him. The people OP is hanging around will know far more, assuming he's describing them accurately: in a room full of
> quantum physicists with multiple degrees from Harvard / Stanford / Yale
having a 1-in-100 intellect is less than table stakes. There are millions of people that smart in the US alone, and most of them do not share OP's difficulties.
I've got a similar problem but for a different cause. I'm guessing that my intelligence is normal, but my theory of mind instincts are probably better than average. I get a very good idea what people want on an individual by individual basis.
However, my ability to tap into the social zeitgeist is pretty close to zero.
The end result is that I get along fantastically with most people because I can anticipate what they want. But I get along terribly with people who want me to fit in with the social rules that they are playing by. What they want is for me to act normal. And I don't know what that is.
It manifests very similar to what you're describing. After a relatively short period of time certain people get very tuned off by me and they become easily frustrated by my actions.
My theory is that they're diligently playing by the social rules and then I come in, break all of the rules right in front of them, and then I get a mostly positive reception because it's what most of the room wanted anyway (just done in kind of a funny way).
I don't really have a solution.
[At least for me things get really interesting whenever I interact with sales people. As far as I can tell like 90% of that profession runs on everyone following the appropriate social scripts. I barely understand them so thus far I've not encountered a sales tactic that actually works on me. Occasionally they get really desperate as their best plays get met with awkward silence or declining their bad deal.
The flip side is that they don't understand me either so asking for what I want doesn't seem to work. I just have to hope I'm able to find something that makes do. ]
I left a job where I tried my hardest to make it work.
The last few jobs in a row I entered with a specific, singular objective: “I vow I am not going to get into conflicts with people again.”
I try my hardest, and it doesn’t work.
A big problem is I hyper produce and hyper focus. I am juggling 18 balls and the “get along with people” ball eventually drops and when it does, it’s game over.
I have extreme capabilities for work but it also exhausts and overwhelms me.
I get extremely exhausted from thinking all the time, I am highly obsessive and always running my engine chewing over things mentally.
So I never rest.
And what inevitably happens is that I make social mistakes, and when I do - That’s the start of the end.
I had some schooling struggles, exacerbated by being moved double digit times while I was still single digit in age, noting the wildly differing levels of standards for a given grade and subject between state to state, even school to school, and of course I didn't fit in. They told me I had a college level reading ability when I was in second grade (what does that even mean?) and I had memorized the orbital periods and rotations of the planets (back when Pluto was still one and we thought Mercury tidally locked to the Sun), and I had the periods of brief interests: take a box and attempt to manipulate it through all of the shapes it could assume by its folds; count to ten thousand; decide I was going to read an adult dictionary and hit the encyclopedia for anything which thrilled me; odd constructions of permanent magnets, wire, rubber bands, and Tinkertoys to touchlessly transfer force; arranging a box of crayons by hue, and, when thwarted by the limits of a simple circle, using the aforementioned Tinkertoys to hold layers of paper so I could also arrange by saturation. I relentlessly asked adults about all of the mysterious things in my world until they got miffed or shoved a book at me. After a while I turned my inquiries to my social difficulties and found much to learn. The first was that I lived around people and in people and that was my environment, the way a mole lives in the ground. The second was that people lied almost constantly and the point of it was that they wanted you to believe certain things because it was convenient to them for you to have misapprehensions about the world. Some of the lies were about more concrete things: how the presents got there, how babies happened, and the like. More lies were social like what do people actually like.
The third thing was: it turns out that people don't like different. Moved? Got a different accent than the rest of the children. But also? Don't be smart. Fit in. You can act bright, bright enough to help with another kid's homework, but you have to hide the rest of it, as it induces a mixture of envy and fear. Having a grown person in medical school say "You're terrifying" because you casually let slip your immediate apprehension of something which had baffled them means that kind of reaction never leaves. So as much as people mouth litanies like "Being different is okay!" the differences they mean are surface things like the coloration of your eyes or your skin, differences as the Mr. Potato Head model. And so that "helps with homework" turns with age into someone who ends up doing some very dull work, often of inappropriate import. Inappropriate, because you can see further down the line at what would be more important or impactful rather than this task you've been handed, as mindless as another sheet of multiplication problems of decades prior.
One of the equilibrium states is quietness, uttering little of surprise, imitation as protective camouflage. People will still figure out that you're smarter than the average bear, but you get fewer monkey gang-ups and reaping of the tall poppies. Fewer, but not none. Even my oldest friend has muttered "I hate you" three-quarters in jest -- but one-quarter not -- when I casually pick up some skill at which he has been slaving away over years. I've often wondered what the other paths look like and if they are more rewarding in some fashion, but more importantly, if they are any less fantastically lonely, the loneliness of the mutant.
It’s like an open faucet with words and stuff spilling out, and ideas, strategies, facts etc.
Elon Musk has talked about having a similar experience of just raw ideation to a degree that it is unpleasant.
My ideation cannot be shut off.
I walk multiple hours today just thinking obsessively and planning, iterating, ideating.
I can’t sit still, the activity of my brain is unpleasant I am just ruminating all the time.
Doesn’t happen to normal people - I think their brains are usually calmer - more in a neutral mode.
The end result is that when I do get engaged, and get into work, I tend to get extremely burned out. You can’t have this level of super output without burning out.
This is autistic melt downs / burn out I only learned about from YouTube.
>Inappropriate, because you can see further down the line at what would be more important or impactful rather than this task you've been handed, as mindless as another sheet of multiplication problems of decades prior.
This is where it's easy to get into trouble. You can either accept the task, which leaves you unfulfilled (and eventually burned out), or you can question the usefulness of the task, which superiors often view as insubordination or otherwise threatening.
It seems like working for yourself is the only way out of this, except perhaps working on a particularly well-managed team.
>Here is the other reality: If you are very talented and gifted, NO ONE WILL NOTICE AND TELL YOU.
I haven't had this experience. In any group dynamic that lasts long enough, there's usually at least a few folks making self-deprecating jokes about their intelligence in comparison, or someone explicitly asking for advice "from the big brain" or something similar.
Humor is usually involved, but I'm assuming that's just a way to make a potentially socially risky observation in a more acceptable manner.
Recruiters / management are sometimes more comfortable making blunt assessments of intelligence / talent than peers. To an extent, that's part of their job, so never having gotten that feedback professionally would seem odd.
I personally hit a wall a long time ago and only started making progress when I began to hire coaches to offer neutral 3rd party feedback and are incentivized to actually help you.
My experience is most people in highly competitive environments are peer competitors in some form . The VP above you doesn’t want you to rise and take their job. Your peers don’t want to be surpassed.
Everyone wants to keep you in a certain box.
If you are able to jump completely out of the box ahead of everyone by 10 miles, no one is going to want that.
You will only get negative feedback and told to stop. Or worse.
Don't self diagnose, really please just get a proper assessment by a good neuropsychologist. I had a suspicion that I had ASD, and I found out I had ADHD instead which surprised me. And part of ADHD is ignoring social cues subconsciously. If you end up having ADHD, OCD and anxiety for example, there are medications for that can change your life.
Even if the diagnosis ends up being some sort of ASD, ASD is a diverse condition with many subparts, so understanding how the machine of you works will be helpful. You also get an IQ test so you know what kind of gifted you are and there are books and therapy programs that can help you manage all of the diagnoses. Instead of giving up on the world and going full NEET, understand yourself first.
But why would they phrase it like that unless the veracity is in question. I doubt they would phrase it like that if they spent 12 hours in a neuropsych's office vs. use something like this online test, which is not enough on it's own: https://embrace-autism.com/raads-r/
> Most gifted children are, in fact, gifted in only one or two areas, often underperforming in others, though not necessarily because they’re unable.
It’s orthodox in education research, widely accepted, widely observed that kids who are REALLY good at one or two things wind up, when you measure them, good at everything.
take a sip at what educators are trying to push nowadays (not the [majority of] business paraphernalia from the ed. tech world)... it's usually about teaching kids types of skills not found at the grade; like emotional intelligence, resilience and even meta-analysis of their way of studying!
I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly - do you feel like emotional intelligence and resilience are not appropriate to teach kids? There are a number of fairly simple social and emotional tools/approaches I have learned in adulthood that I really wish would have been taught to me and those around me growing up.
How could your statement possibly be true? This is hugely correlative.
"Good at one thing" in children generally implies "parents are involved" which generally implies "better than average socioeconomic status" which generally implies "children at least relatively decent at most educational things". This is going to be doubly true for things like art or music (or anything with private coaching) which require a significant monetary outlay in order to be good.
About the only place where this doesn't hold are the extremes where high spectrum people can function spectacularly in math and science and yet be ferociously terrible outside of that.
The most fundamental way in which parents are involved in the life of their children is through their gametes. Unsurprisingly smart kids almost always have smart parents, which is a double advantage.
It might be the most fundamental but it's unlikely to be the most important. That award probably goes to all the things parents don't do, like drinking during pregnancy or feeding their toddler nothing but cereal and pizza for months at a time.
I hate this kind of unfounded anti-scientism. If it's so obviously wrong, it should be simple to design a study that demonstrates the opposite, why don't you try?
Yes this is true. I got into education research from physics because I thought the dynamics of learning could be very interesting to model. But we simply lack the institutional ability to implement such observations necessary to build such a model. So I zoomed out and built models on how students made choices between semesters at their university (what class they will take, will they switch their major, will they drop out). But ultimately I got bored. Now I work on ai related to acoustics. It's a shame. There are data sets out there that can be mined, I was offered a postdoc with a company in Minnesota doing it with data from millions of school children. But they were more interested in me modelling whether a student would have a behaviour problem tomorrow so they could integrate it into their platform and sell as a product to schools. I wasn't much interested in helping to build something like that.
I'm not anti-science, I'm anti performative science for the sake of "doing science". And anti "we can't do proper science so let's throw up our hands". Helping individual kids and yes, relying on anecdotes would do much more good in this specific scenario than a study.
Let me explain. Doing a "simple" study like this is nigh-impossible within the science establishment we have today. Like you said, let me try. Let's walk through the steps.
A PI would have to get a grant to help not the underserved/underprivileged kids, but rather those who are perceived to have an advantage. They have to work with hundreds of schools (gifted kids are rare). Within that set of hundreds of schools they have to control for cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds and so on. Having succeeded they'll have to get this published (and probably fight some accusations of being elitist in the process). All I am saying is: this PI better already have tenure.
This problem is not just about gifted kids. A commonly heard complaint in the field of psychiatry for example is that we only study the minds with pathologies. We don't at all look at how to improve things for healthy people. Come to think of it, that is true in medicine in general.
Serving students like Georgios is one of the things the Soviet Union did very well (of course, there was still discrimination against eg Jews).
In the US, it’s not only disrupted by the activists briefly mentioned in the article, but by the mediocre part of the elite that would rather have such a system not exist or be easily gamed/rigged than to have it exist and their child not in it. Given the more classist nature of life in the UK I’m sure this is even moreso a factor there.
By that I meant the gifted and advanced (Georgios surely had very advanced language skills), not philosophers specifically. I doubt he’d have been restricted from learning about the philosophical material he was interested in either, though depending on the year, definitely restricted from officially espousing some of that personally.
Ok, but Georgios himself would have been repressed in the Soviet Union. Likewise, anyone who had original, creative thoughts. You could only "excel" within the ruthless confines of ideological conformance.
It's not clear that the Soviet system "served" anyone except the party leaders.
> I discovered Georgios had an IQ of 145, a score in the top 1.33% for the test he took. Put simply, that meant that he was several “mental years” ahead of his peers. If a teacher taught fifty students a year for forty years, they would only meet two or three children with his raw ability.
Unless I'm mistaken, this appears to be off by an order of magnitude.
Not to mention that such an IQ is not simply several "mental years" ahead of people who are at 100, it's a qualitative difference to which the 100 cannot catch up.
AFAIK 145 IQ is three standard deviations above the mean in a normal distribution, and only 0.3% will have that score or higher, so I think the article is off by a factor of about 4.
On the usual IQ scale 145 is 99.865 percentile. In 2000 (50 per year x 40 years) you would expect 2.7 with that IQ or higher, so that part seems right.
I think what is going on is that when it says "top 1.33% for the test he took" it is referring to some test given to children who are already known or expected to have high IQs, and on that test people with IQs of 145 are 98.67 percentile.
I agree with the first part but question the second.
It appears that the author was off by precisely one order of magnitude, having mixed up .13% and 1.3%. It could be chance, but I think it’s probably a simple mathematical error. The author's conclusion (2-3 children over a career) is correct, but the intermediate step is mistaken.
Using the standard definition of IQ (mean 100, std dev 15), 145 is +3 standard deviations, so that should be in the top 0.135%, which is consistent with the 2-3 students per career number.
I'm not sure where the article got the 1.3% number, it could be either a decimal point error, or this could be a specific test that's primarily given to gifted students and so both numbers could be correct.
I am again reminded of Huxley's 'Brave New World'.
There was of course the Alphas and the Betas - and the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons beneath them.
However the very gifted were lifted from this caste system, and placed on the islands, where they might direct the future (or at least that is my somewhat dim recollection/interpretation).
I suspect these educators would probably also be impressed by the intellect of a LLM trained on philosophy books and classic literatures.
Wow, its answers are of a high level quality!
When people read books on certain topics, they start talking the talk.
E.g. “The fatal flaw, as I understand it, in Kant’s deontological ethical system is his disregard of consequentialism.”
Did the kid come up with that himself, or is he just regurgitating, verbatim, a judgment penned by some author he read somewhere? How much of it does he understand?
Might it not be that Georgios is just playing with philosophy and literature in the way, in Billy Joel's "Piano Man", the "waitress is practicing politics"? I.e. picking up talking the talk to sound intelligent and informed. E.g. memorizing some political opinion overheard from one group of customers of the bar, and repeating that later within earshot of another group.
> E.g. “The fatal flaw, as I understand it, in Kant’s deontological ethical system is his disregard of consequentialism.” Did the kid come up with that himself, or is he just regurgitating, verbatim, a judgment penned by some author he read somewhere? How much of it does he understand?
This is a weak analysis of Kant. If a sixth grader read some Kant and came up with this themselves I would think they were probably of average intelligence.
I would guess very very few sixth-graders have ever used the word "deontological" or know what it means. I'm nearly 60 and I had to look it up. No I've never read Kant.
But you're not any smarter now; you just know a fancy word that basically refers to rule-based morality.
The kid used philosophical jargon to accuse Kant of favoring a rigid rule-based moral behavior, without the flexiblity of allowing rules to be bent or flouted when they wouldn't lead to a good outcome.
Any parrot can learn to articulate an idea like this using "deontological" and "consequentialism".
It just comes across as pretentious; no wonder teachers found that irritating.
In sixth or seventh grade, we had to write an essay on a historical figure. The teacher gave us a long list of people and we could choose whoever we wanted.
I chose a random name from that list: Immanuel Kant. We went to the school's small library, and I searched and found the one book by Kant in the library: The Critique of Pure Reason. I quickly scanned through the book to see what I can find out about this Kant fellow, to be greeted with sentences such as:
> For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience?
and
> Whatever may be the content of our cognition, and in whatever manner our cognition may be related to its object, the universal, although only negative conditions of all our judgements is that they do not contradict themselves; otherwise these judgements are in themselves (even without respect to the object) nothing.
I remember closing the book, thinking to myself, "I can't write an essay about this guy", and finding it funny that his name was "I. Kant". I don't remember what I actually ended up doing for that essay. The deadline was very short so there was no possibility of reading a whole book, let alone that book (which anyways wasn't a great reference for writing about Kant, the person).
As an adult, I still find Kant's serpentine sentences incredibly difficult to digest. (Though some of the problems may originate from the translation.) Maybe I'm just a rube, but I wouldn't consider a sixth grader to have average intelligence if they read some Kant and come up with that criticism.
Update while writing this post: I'm not well versed in philosophy, so I quickly perused the Wikipedia summaries for Deontology and Consequentialism. The criticism, "The fatal flaw, as I understand it, in Kant’s deontological ethical system is his disregard of consequentialism." is rather shallow, wrapped in juicy terminology from moral philosophy. Though, I still think it's a notable feat for a sixth grader to read and even somewhat comprehend Kant.
> Though, I still think it's a notable feat for a sixth grader to read and even somewhat comprehend Kant.
It is if nobody in his family is putting him up to it.
If a sixth grader plays Bach, but his parents don't know who that was, that's impressive. If he had lessons since age three, not so much.
> if they read some Kant and come up with that criticism.
I agree, but if they read something about Kant and cribbed the observation from that other author, or got it from talking about Kant with someone in their family who is into philosophy, then it's not the same.
There are different levels of understanding and only so many hours in a day of which children have not had a large share of yet. His interests and depth of understanding are not unreasonable for someone who can only be expected to have just started learning about the topic.
My kids are approaching school age and I worry about them for this reason.
Our state is getting school districts to remove all advanced classes and gifted programs. All in the name of equity. Last year they got rid of all of the advanced math classes in our district because the number of minority students was too low.
Thankfully when I grew up we had enough money for me to go to a private school where they had all of these advanced programs. I would have gone crazy without them.
I'm a hardcore liberal. But... It feels like there's a brand of liberal out there now that has a totally different idea of what equity is and how we should get there to the point where I find I need to sometimes fight on the side of the more conservative parents in our school district. I don't understand how educating smart people became something that my own side hates and fights against.
> Our state is getting school districts to remove all advanced classes and gifted programs. All in the name of equity. Last year they got rid of all of the advanced math classes in our district because the number of minority students was too low.
It’s a statewide effort, but I think SF (or some place in the Bay Area) has already done away with middle school algebra, which is a common first step in the path to high school calculus.
Plenty of articles on this on the interwebs. For example:
Note that I am not the OP, so I don’t know where they are specifically, or even if they are in CA. That said, K-12 is moving this direction in CA, and I think the administrators will end up getting their way one way or another.
The article only mentioned SF schools having done so a decade ago. FWIW, I have several kids in K-12 in the Bay Area schools and can say there’s zero talk of this within our school system or from the administrators I’ve interacted with. One of my kids took algebra in middle school last year and that was after we didn’t push them into a more advanced class. My kids are wonderfully different academically: one has special education needs, another literally maxed the scale in the mathematics portion of the state standardized tests, and another is beautifully well rounded. All have been supported, encouraged, and even pushed in mathematics by our public schools.
Do you think that your situation is representative of the direction the state will go in over the next decade or so?
I’m not so sure.
Policies that focus on equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunities are very popular in education circles these days. Certain communities (esp. relatively wealthy ones with relatively high-achieving and/or ambitious parents) may be able to avoid these policies for longer than others, but I’m not sure they will be able to be avoided entirely except by students in private schools.
The math curriculum issue that CA currently has will continue and expand, imho. The DoE did not expect to get as much pushback as they got. Now it’s just a matter (from their perspective) of how they can force the outcome they want (e.g., no middle school algebra and/or high school calculus) with terms that will be or must be accepted by the population (e.g., budget cuts, manpower issues, accreditation issues, etc.).
Note that I’m not trying to be overly alarmist, and I know that this reply may seem overly negative, but I’ve heard this song played before in a different key.
The California DoE is trying to push this on the entire state:
> Proposed guidelines in the state would de-emphasize calculus, reject the idea that some children are naturally gifted and build a connection to social justice. Critics say math shouldn’t be political.
You will understand it once you realize that the modern progressive movement has abandoned the liberal principles that we grew up with. They have now adopted a Maoist political philosophy.
We had a school district near me cancel these for a different reason. All the asian parents were pushing kids hard to get into the gifted program and with preparation the test differences between the students was not significant, i.e. they found many more "gifted" than they had space for. It was also proving stressful for the kids.
in china they pretty much banned private after school tutoring for the same reason. tutoring is now only to be provided by the schools for students that actually need it.
The public schools I attended while growing up did not have funding for advanced classes. Students who were far ahead in classes with the “gen pop” were pushed into the role of unofficial teacher aides, charged with helping our struggling peers through the class content. It was hugely demoralizing as a student and discouraged doing well.
I hear this all the time now that I'm an educator (albeit at the university level). Kids report that they hated school, wasted their time, and were horribly demoralized. Only when they got something more serious to challenge them later in life did they flourish. Those that made it at least. Sorry it happened to you!
I really don't want that for my kids.
I'm amused that my comment was highly upvoted and now it sits at a zero. I guess it's a reflection of the crowd here too.
I have been told that Vonnegut wrote "Harrison Bergeron" as a kind of parody of right-wing thought about left-winger ideas of equality, but it's definitely entered into the realm of "1984 was a warning, not a manual, people."
I am also concerned by what light_hue_1 wrote, but describing what is happening today as Harrison Bergeron is A very reductive and shallow summary of what is going on.
Assuming schools have fixed budgets (that they're inconsistent, and based on property taxes is a separate discussion we should have), there's going to be a finite amount of resources to invest in every student. How do you allocate it?
A) Completely evenly regardless of merit
B) Optimizing for the best student and giving them the best chance to exceed and achieve their maximum potential
C) Optimizing for the median student
D) Optimizing for the worst student
E) Other?
A is obviously ridiculous. B is how many societies have flourished and how humanity moves forward, but is also inherently unequal. D) ensures mediocrity.
I think the most progressive minds changing schools today are trying to achieve C.
Are they misguided? It's quite hard to tell. I honestly don't know. Because the problem is answering this question requires answering a different one:
* What are the qualities of a society that is not only the "best" for the most people, but is also able to move humanity forward in a way as to resolve our existential threats (climate change, random asteroids wiping away Earth, GAI, etc.*
Those that believe the answer to THAT is B would say that any other choice is short-sighted and stupid. But I do believe that those that believe C believe in a different way. That C still allows the truly exceptional to make a mark on the world. When the median becomes great, there is no worry about the exceptional being dominated by the mediocre.
Of course the problem is there are idiots there - in every philosophical field. And are some going to cargo cult their way into Harrison Bergeron? Probably. But that's not the overall intent.
"When the median becomes great" is doing a lot of work there. If it isn't true, and I've never seen evidence to that effect, as it has gone on and on that way for ...decades, then we're really just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Over those "decades", the median has absolutely risen dramatically, across the entire world.
Generations of historically poor and disadvantaged people have been lifted worldwide. Literacy rates, secondary education, and post-secondary rates across the human population are dramatically higher than they have been in the days of our parents.
That has created it's own problems - student loan debt, overeducation, wasted degrees, and so on. But I don't understand how you can claim there is no evidence to this effect. The evidence is all around us.
This is simply false. It has nothing at all to do with money or finite resources. It is purely a race and equity issue.
Our school district is wealthy. The average income of the parents is extremely high. They spend twice the state average on students because parents willingly donate extra money to the school direct. There is no shortage of money at all.
If they had asked for money hundreds of parents in our district could each have personally endowed the entire cost of those classes forever without even noticing the cost. Never mind the district as a whole. But it's not a money issue. They didn't want the money.
What there is, is a totally different idea of what equity is. That the final result of schooling must at all costs be equal by demographic standards. And if it's not, the problem is the immediate source of inequality.
This is happening in many states. Just look at the math reform in CA. It is insane. Water down the entire math curriculum in school because the outcomes are bad for some groups. This is not related to costs at all.
The solution is of course to spend more and offer far more support so that everyone does well. But that isn't even allowed to be an answer anymore.
The US has a modern history of systemic racism out of step with the rest of the developed world. Inequality was enshrined into law until 1964. My parents were already alive, and I'm a millennial.
So, since then, the US has had to overcorrect to try to heal centuries of wounds, and as a result is more direct about actively promoting equity based on racial lines in a way that seems horrifying to the rest of the world (nay even racist itself).
This era seems to be ending - for better or for worse - with affirmative action being struck down, with standardized tests now being considered the MORE equitable solution rather than an explicitly racist one. We are heading towards an alternative path.
I agree with you the CA math reform is insane, as is cancelling things like AP and Gifted classes. However, I again maintain that I think the intention is that those that benefit from those classes will be able to thrive with or without them, while the funding for them can help lift the FLOOR for those disadvantaged - those without parents with high income who can afford tutors, or spend extra time with their kids.
I again acknowledge that the full picture of this change will not be visible for some time. But I think it's an interesting premise.
I was in many gifted classes growing up. I skipped several grades. I started university as a teenager. This was all a mixed bag. I was intellectually over-stimulated and stunted socially. I had to recover through my late teen years and early 20's. Most of the gifted kids I know from my era have mixed feelings about our experiences. We appreciated the support at the time but look back and wish the schools tried harder to protect us from bullying "normies" rather than just isolating us to separate classes. It was a cop-out marketed as for our own best interests. Some of us have thrived. Others crumbled.
When I think of my own son (currently a toddler), and whether he would have those opportunities if he happens to be advanced for his age, I believe that the responsibility for ensuring he gets the support he needs is mine and mine alone. What i will do with the funds I have to give him extra attention is find clubs, find tutors, and not expect that the school should be the one providing him those opportunities. In school, I hope he gets to learn how to be a member of society better and sooner than I did.
> I agree with you the CA math reform is insane, as is cancelling things like AP and Gifted classes. However, I again maintain that I think the intention is that those that benefit from those classes will be able to thrive with or without them, while the funding for them can help lift the FLOOR for those disadvantaged - those without parents with high income who can afford tutors, or spend extra time with their kids.
I think exactly the opposite will happen. The disadvantaged kids will now have a low ceiling, not a high floor!
Doesn't matter if you manage to break through despite your socioeconomic conditions, we cannot help you advance further in any way now because we've cancelled those classes. Before, they had the opportunity to thrive. Now, unless their parents have money, they don't.
> I again acknowledge that the full picture of this change will not be visible for some time. But I think it's an interesting premise.
I think it doesn't hold up at all.
> I was in many gifted classes growing up. I skipped several grades. I started university as a teenager. This was all a mixed bag. I was intellectually over-stimulated and stunted socially. I had to recover through my late teen years and early 20's. Most of the gifted kids I know from my era have mixed feelings about our experiences. We appreciated the support at the time but look back and wish the schools tried harder to protect us from bullying "normies" rather than just isolating us to separate classes. It was a cop-out marketed as for our own best interests. Some of us have thrived. Others crumbled.
I did the same. And for what it's worth, I loved every minute of it. By going to schools where being smart was valued, we had no "bullying normies". They got kicked out of school.
> When I think of my own son (currently a toddler), and whether he would have those opportunities if he happens to be advanced for his age, I believe that the responsibility for ensuring he gets the support he needs is mine and mine alone. What i will do with the funds I have to give him extra attention is find clubs, find tutors, and not expect that the school should be the one providing him those opportunities. In school, I hope he gets to learn how to be a member of society better and sooner than I did.
Oh sure, I'm not saying I won't spend the money for my own kids. And I would be doing all of those things even if the school provided more advanced classes. But as a matter of policy, all this is doing is driving anyone who can afford it out of the public system.
We're going to end up with a public schooling system that's for poor people and provides a base education that for most people puts a cap on what they can achieve in life. And a private system for everyone else.
This forces a zero sum frame that is not appropriate. It doesn’t cost anything to let a student (or 5) do math time with a class that’s a grade ahead. And if there are enough of them, it doesn’t cost anything to clump the kids by ability level when setting up the classes.
The reason this doesn’t happen, in my experience, is teacher unions (and, to some extent, the political leanings of administrators). Every year, my kids’ school asks us about our kids and what would be good for them to have in terms of a teacher for the next year. This makes parents think they will be placed in a class with a teacher who would be well-suited for them.
But this isn’t what happens at all! The classes are put together using a balancing approach, to make all the classes “equal” in terms of easy students, trouble students, etc. Only then are the classes assigned to teachers, without regard to what the individual students need. The randomization and balancing is done so that no teacher gets all the best behaved or worst behaved kids. The system is all about the teachers, not the students.
For this reason, our school won’t allow gifted classes to exist, since that would give certain teachers “easier” kids than others. Of course, they also don’t want to have an advanced class with Asian and white kids, but few black and Hispanic kids, from both a political and optics perspective.
But the point is, they could easily do this at no additional cost if they wanted to. And it would allow all students to learn more effectively, since their teacher would be more tightly focused on kids at a certain level.
> I have been told that Vonnegut wrote "Harrison Bergeron" as a kind of parody of right-wing thought about left-winger ideas of equality
Though I’ve heard that sentiment before, it seems unlikely, and when I looked very hard for a source, I never found anything remotely satisfactory. Barring something, anything from Vonnegut indicating otherwise, it seems reasonable to accept that he meant the story to be taken at face value.
Similar things are happening in the Bay Area. One thing you can do is get involved with the school board, who oversee the administrators. Another thing you can do is be persistent with the current administrators. It took years of seemingly-useless conversations, but eventually they let my kid do math independently. I assume that I won’t have to push as hard the second time around (I have 2 kids), since I’ve already proven that (1) yes, my child actually is that far ahead, and (2) I am not going to give up.
I’m happy to chat further with parents that are dealing with this. Contact in profile.
When I was in school, there wasn't a framework for what is more recently referred to as "twice exceptional." This means that a student is gifted and disabled. ADHD and autism fall into this category.
Gifted students have different needs, and the school environment does not force them to develop the skills they need to succeed as an adult.
Twice exceptional students tend to use a lot of energy just trying to exist, which also prevents skill development. They look like smart students who "don't apply themselves", even if they are putting on their best effort.
This is me. I have an IQ of 163. All I heard my entire childhood was "you're so smart, you don't need help, you just have an attitude problem". Was placed in the only special class in school, where all the kids from the other side of the normal distribution were placed - retards, bullies, etc.
Got beaten every day until I learned to fight back. At what point was I supposed to have the time and energy to learn? There were no role models. My parents are horrible. Just skipped school as much as I could to play with tech/computers. Still unproven if all my experience amounts to anything. A genius quietly suffering in poverty and loneliness, fallen off every bandwagon, used and abused, desperately trying to achieve literally anything.
The worst part is the chronic thinking that I could've/should've/would've done something amazing, if a single shit had been given at any point along the way. Such a waste of human potential. Even if it wasn't my fault as a child, it's my responsibility to fix as a developmentally disabled adult. To this day nobody gives a shit. So I work out, do what little work I can, cry myself to sleep, and pray for God to use me as an instrument for good.
That's remarkable given the current world population of 8 billion.
Given a normal IQ distribution centred about 100 and a standard deviation of 10 that puts you in the upper half of the six sigma range ... along with (approx) only 7 other people on the planet.
That's about one person out of every 30,000. Not too incredibly unusual. 160 is 4-sigma. There are ten thousand people in the US like that. Probably several dozen here on HN.
IQ is scored on an SD15 or SD16 scale, not an SD10 scale. On a more typical SD15 scale an IQ of 163 is 1 in 74883 people, or around 4500 people in the US. It’s lower than my IQ, and I’ve by happenstance met people with the exact same IQ working in the same company.
Tech in particular tends to attract high IQ individuals, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are hundreds or thousands of HN users with similar IQs or higher.
I work with a lot of people (both adults and students) who have this kind of intelligence and who are used to being the smartest person around.
I can tell you that your feeling of wasted potential isn't just a consequence of how you were treated. Most people in this situation have it. Even when they are wildly successful by any other standard. Like PhDs from ivies are normal, the number of people walking down the hallway who are billionaires is astoundingly high, etc.
You would be shocked at the self harm, depression, and suicide rate that at this level. All because of this idea of "oh, I could have won a Nobel" (I'm certain that if they had they would find a way to be sad about wasted potential anyway).
The solution is therapy. Don't wait. Just go do it. Just because you're smart doesn't mean that you don't need that kind of help. It might mean that you need it even more!
I'm curious if you have any suggestions for such people to find a successful therapy fit (I'm asking both out of personal curiosity as well as hoping that it will help others)? I'm not in that category of brilliant, but I tried therapy off and on for 10 or 15 years before I started feeling like it really helped. I think part of the problem is that I didn't know what was "wrong" with me - I knew that I had trouble with maintaining romantic relationships and I knew that I was sometimes unhappy (though I was rarely willing to admit to myself how unhappy I often was), but I didn't really know why. And I spent a lot of time introspecting, so generally when I tried therapy out the therapist wouldn't have any real insights that I hadn't thought of already. I didn't dislike my therapists, but generally would give up after a few months of not feeling like any progress was being made.
I'm not sure all of what went into things working out for me in therapy the past couple of years, but I think at least a part of it was shifting into a more emotions based approach. I'm not sure how open to that I would have been when I was younger. My tendency to approach most things intellectually was a very powerful tool, but it wasn't successful at getting to the underlying feelings I was not really aware of. Having more access to those feelings has been overwhelming at times, but also has enabled a lot of ongoing progress on being more satisfied with my life.
I would recommend schema therapy to anyone. It has helped me immensely to understand feelings, thoughts, reactions, and also to decide what is and isn't something I should attend to. Additionally I would recommend dialectical behaviour therapy to anyone. It gives you the skills to interact with the knowledge gained from schema therapy. Lastly, I recommend doing mindfulness training. If you only spend 5 minutes a day it will change your life. I am able to be calm when before I wasn't, able to be thoughtful about others when before I would react, able to focus on a task and organise my day when before I could not muster the executive function to brush my teeth. These things have made my life considerably better.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is at the moment the most effective form of therapy we have. It can take a few tries to find someone who you click with.
CBT isn't about someone giving you an aha moment into your own feelings or giving you advice you hadn't thought of (although that does happen). It's more about giving you skills to reinterpret those feelings, their sources, and the actions that result from them. So even if you feel like you introspect and understand how you're doing, CBT can be very effective in being more satisfied with life.
Therapy is not a solution, it's just wasting time dwelling on the problems, which I'm already aware of and struggling to fix. There is nothing a therapist can tell me that I don't already know, and aren't already doing.
I don't self-harm, I'm not suicidal, I'm not even depressed. I'm just so late to the party that the chances of making it shrink ever smaller each year. No therapist can ever turn back time, so no therapist can ever help.
You have a very narrow view of therapy. Modern, research based therapy practice like dialectical behaviour therapy don't really care about your past or whatever oppression you suffered. They give you the skills necessary to interact with your life today. If you are struggling to handle problems yet believe you already know and are doing everything then I would suggest you find some humility.
> They give you the skills necessary to interact with your life today.
I'm fully interacting with my life today. My life today is not a problem. I'm the master of survival skills for my particular environment - I would've died already otherwise.
The problem is the circumstances that failed to cultivate and extract my potential. The problem was leaving me to fend for myself. The problem was godlessness, immorality, violence, and stupidity.
No therapist can fix that. Ergo, therapy is a waste of time.
> If you are struggling to handle problems yet believe you already know and are doing everything then I would suggest you find some humility.
Can you explain this? Knowing and doing everything is a struggle almost by definition. This struggle I welcome with glee because it's a struggle I choose to endure for the betterment of my quality of life, and through health and productivity, hopefully a benefit to all one day.
Simply from reading your own statements, I can see that you're wrong. I'm probably not as smart as you, yet I can see that you're wrong, but you cannot, why is that?
I'm happy for your alleged ability to see wrongness, but bring into question the validity of merely exclaiming so without any explanation. You didn't just read and see wrongness, you wrote about it without any content whatsoever. Your comment is entirely void of substance.
So how am I wrong, or are you satisfied merely virtue-signaling?
I've read what you've written. I won't give you a long argument about why therapy can help someone in you situation because you won't buy it.
But I will say that as someone who spends all day with people that have have his kind of intelligence, therapy is for you. Recontexualizing your life, past and present, as well as your future path is pretty much bread and butter CBT.
Too many smart people have the disease of "I know better, therapy can't help" which is why for example elite institutions have the highest suicide rates. You're falling into that trap, but it's a catch 22, once you're in it, you won't be able to logically argue your way out. Just take the leap and go to therapy.
Sure. Back when I partied, people were phoning me up, I took cabs from one party to the next. Every weekend, sometimes multiple parties on the same day. People came to hug me, some even literally said I was an "integral part of their party experience". Something about being easy to be themselves in my presence.
Your attempted ad hominem falls flatter on its face than a pancake mask at a hydraulic press factory. I've not only partied a lot in my youth and was very liked, I was deep in the scene, friends with the crews that organized the parties, the DJs, camera and audio techs, backstage, etc.
Yes I'm well aware of the grandiosity you attribute yourself which covers the hurt and vulnerable child within screaming to not be abandoned, abused, neglected, shamed or isolated. But nobody here will do that to you. This place is a safe place. People only wish you well here given all the comments urging you too bring the critical thinking that this forum is well known for to your own problems. It could be that you don't know everything. It could be that therapy could help you. You simply should try it while heartedly before you dismiss it so eagerly.
> Yes I'm well aware of the grandiosity you attribute yourself
Where is this coming from? I know it's not coming from me because my explicit narrative is precisely that my life lacks these "grandiose" things as you put them, for the obvious reasons I laid out.
Since it's not coming from me, sounds like projection coming from you.
> I can tell you that your feeling of wasted potential isn't just a consequence of how you were treated. Most people in this situation have it.
Yup. I was reasonably well-treated as a gifted kid (well, still bullied to death, but at least, I had smart + available parents and many opportunities to learn by myself). I still suffer from that.
I do have a few achievements behind my belt. I have a PhD, I have code running on your computer and in low earth orbit. Pretty much every junior developer learns stuff that I (and many, many others) have contributed to create. I raise a kid, I donate blood, money, time to charities. And I can't escape the feeling that I'm wasting my time, that I could/should be doing something greater, and that I'm basically useless as is.
> And I can't escape the feeling that I'm wasting my time, that I could/should be doing something greater, and that I'm basically useless as is.
Sometimes I feel like humans have a limiter put on them and someday we could 'fix' it. I occasionally get a glimpse of huge ideas that aren't just built on existing stuff, but then it fades and I'm back to the grind.
> The worst part is the chronic thinking that I could've/should've/would've done something amazing, if a single shit had been given at any point along the way.
Like what? Define amazing. Become the founder of some extractive start up? Write some bs science and gain a nobel prize? Be the best chess player?
My view is that you always have to put yourself together. Intellect is simply a factor, but so is honesty and the state of your heart. You can be very smart and you can still be stupid. You sound a bit resentful, but do you ever consider that your experience grants you the opportunity to lead life away from the well-travelled track to success, and do something personally and actually meaningful?
This planet has a lot of time left in it for humans to do things. One human missing an opportunity doesn't lead to the statistical outcome that that opportunity wont be fulfilled in the future. An individual is not that important to humanity as a whole progressing. Live your life.
Its not a game of aggregation, despite everything you have been told. Oneself is not humanity at large.
Ignore the jumped-up, self proclaimed authorities, the things they have taught you, the servile mentality and mental structure you are in.
Oneself is the only thing important in one's life. Every individual is infinitely valuable. It's simple too - just forget everything you know, and do right, by following truth and love. It costs nothing.
PS I recognise that I must sound like a fruitcake, but the answers come from within. The revolution will not be televised.
Yes. There's no such thing as "infinite value" and certainly not for every individual. Our value, especially as men, is entirely tied to our ability to get shit done. If you do nothing, you are literally worthless.
Possibly depends on your definition of adolescence. I'm 35. Wikipedia says "age provides only a rough marker of adolescence, and scholars have not agreed upon a precise definition", so if you want me to answer you accurately, you're going to have to provide more definition.
> There’s nothing that a therapist can tell me that I don’t already know…
Also known as arrogance.
From your many statements in this thread, you seem to be articulate and, if your cited accomplishments are truthful, generally successful. But your presumptive posturing, bordering on incurious, and projections on others for perceived failures suggests that you’re likely underestimating just how much you don’t know. “Intelligence” is a nebulous concept that manifests in a variety of ways that can be frequently difficult to pin down. Humility and the capacity for making honest evaluations for one’s own limits is a distinct form of emotional intelligence that you might find can enhance the more conventional notions of intellect that you seem to possess.
Things like higher education and therapy are not necessarily designed to imbue you with wholly novel information and experiences, absent a considerable amount of initiative and work from within. They are frameworks for providing the tools so you can achieve your potential. Nothing is perfect, you might very well find that they sometimes fail in that effort, but you are responsible for putting forth the good faith efforts to engage with these tools if you wish to achieve the success that they can facilitate.
That’s my perspective, anyway, and I wish you all the best on your path.
> do you ever consider that your experience grants you the opportunity to lead life away from the well-travelled track to success, and do something personally and actually meaningful?
Like what, fail in an entertaining manner?
Imagine telling a malnourished child that their experience grants them the opportunity to lead life away from the well-tasted fruit to satiation, and do something personally and actually meaningful, while starving to death.
That's how stupid that sounds. "Have you tried eating dirt?"
My definition of amazing at this point is not being useless then dying alone and unloved.
To pile on to what another commenter said above, therapy is for you.
I know you dismissed it out of hand. You clearly have no faith that someone (specifically, a well-trained therapist) might have something valuable to contribute.
However, while your powers of observation might border on superhuman, they are still very much just yours. A therapist can help you build an emotional toolset you will not otherwise provide yourself, and which will make you a more complete person, not least of all in the area of building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships.
Think of it like this: you can read music theory and memorize the entire western classical canon by heart and still be a terrible piano player, never improving if you don’t show up to practice at the keys with a talented teacher.
One simply cannot reason ones way around the emotional core that drives us as humans.
CBT will help you change your behavior and how things feel, but, imho, psychodynamic psychotherapy can go much deeper and truly improve your emotional IQ.
> One simply cannot reason ones way around the emotional core that drives us as humans.
Found the flaw in your argument. I am not driven by emotions. If therapy is all about that then all the more reason to not waste time with it.
My (accurate accounting of) history with building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships is fine. Why do you assume I need help with that?
In these comments I see a lot of imagining problems I supposedly have right now, when all I did was share the problems I used to suffer from, in the context of a discussion about the systemic, environmental deficiencies in how society is structured causing massive waste of human potential.
Therapy takes time and money. I don't use emotions to make decisions on how to invest my time and money. You're arguing in favor of investing my time and money into a questionably effective solution to an imagined problem.
Different people have Different speeds in $things.
If one piece of the system is at a different (slower/ faster) speed where majority pieces are on another but more or less similar speed to each othet, the one piece is going to get burnt quick.
Options...
use gears at touch points to match speed, or
have a robust outer layer to eliminate impact of friction, or
Try to control speed to match the system
A combination of these options, may work. Challenge is to identfy the required option and apply what works for a given situation, which is another activity needing quite some brain cycles.
Everything I said is inescapable fact. A victim mentality would be "I can't do anything about it". I have the opposite mindset, so you're entirely wrong to suggest this. An accurate account of history is not victim mentality, it's truth.
>The worst part is the chronic thinking that I could've/should've/would've done something amazing, if a single shit had been given at any point along the way. Such a waste of human potential.
Fixation on how your present circumstances might be better if not for the wrong done by others to the extent that you describe it as a severe and chronic issue is neither inescapable nor particularly factual.
> Fixation on how your present circumstances might be better if not for the wrong done by others to the extent that you describe it as a severe and chronic issue is neither inescapable nor particularly factual.
So your stance is that I imagined the whole thing? You're not making any sense here. It's absolutely, undisputably factual that when a child lacks basic necessities for development, they don't develop properly and will suffer as a consequence.
As a consciously conscious being, I have awareness of that suffering. That's not a "fixation", it's an actual chronic issue that makes life 100x harder than it needs to be, and awareness of the issue is the antidote to preventing something similar from happening to others, especially by my doing.
You are attempting to null my experience, I don't know why, but you're failing at it because you cannot null the cold, hard, objective, measurable facts simply by saying "nuh uh".
>So your stance is that I imagined the whole thing?
Yes, the life you could've had but didn't exists only in your imagination.
>You're not making any sense here. It's absolutely, undisputably factual that when a child lacks basic necessities for development, they don't develop properly and will suffer as a consequence.
No, it isn't. Some children do alright in shit circumstances, while some fail to in great circumstances. And some people suffer despite the trappings of success while others are content with what others may describe as failure.
>As a consciously conscious being, I have awareness of that suffering. That's not a "fixation", it's an actual chronic issue that makes life 100x harder than it needs to be,
Do you think any suffering in childhood inevitably leads to a lifetime of inescapable suffering? If not, just how much early suffering does it take? If a child who suffered slightly less can get over it, why not the one who suffered slightly more?
Tbh I don't care about your history. I had a terrible childhood too. The story is long and boring but it includes beatings, broken bones, being drugged without my consent, and other terrible and traumatic abuses along with the high IQ, super ability, gifted, blah blah blah. But who cares. Now I have a PhD, I have a great job, and a wonderful gf. A lot of that is because I gave up holding onto that story I sat and told myself about how terrible and true my history was like you are doing. It doesn't matter that your accounting of your history is accurate or not. Telling yourself these things is not effective behaviour at building yourself into the person you want to be.
But nobody is going to make you change. You will either wake up one day and be so tired of your own bullshit that you will start to change. Or you won't. It's really all up to you.
I have an amazing amount of empathy for this person who is sitting there telling themselves that they are terrible, their life is a product of the traumatic history. I feel the pain in their words when they respond telling of the grandiose achievements they would have obtained if only. I understand the anger and justification they feel when they start a sentence "if only it had been different..." I have been in this headspace. But it wasn't different. My life wasn't different either no matter how much I wished that it was so. And no matter how much I felt the pain from the trauma I suffered, that trauma never went away. That's why I know the choice to move away from this identity, and it really is an identity, is a very difficult choice and requires a lot of hard work. Because at some point that trauma lives on because of your choice to keep it alive. I have spent years in therapy overcoming such trauma. And finally I'm putting it behind me. I fully support this person making similar choices and would be happy to provide resources for them to pursue. But they have to want that and they don't seem to want it in this moment. I can empathize with that decision too. I made it for a long time before I became tired of living my life in pain.
I'm a little shocked you would tell someone "[I] don't care about your history," and "they don't seem to want help." Did you ever hear people tell you that? Did it help? I certainly feel insulted by your 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps sonny," tone.
Nothing really ever helped me get out of the mindset I was in until I felt like helping myself. It is the nature of the beast in my opinion. Although I agree with you. I was being a bit dismissive. I think it's because the original poster simply dismisses what everyone has to say no matter what they are saying.
You appear to be inserting your own words into my mouth. Nowhere did I say I was terrible. In fact, I'm doing better than ever before. That's in large part due to accurate accounting. You even say I'm "sitting here" with a connotation of passivity, as if there's no way I could be typing this at a standing desk or a phone while on the move. You're trying to hammer "victim mentality" so hard down my throat it's... kind of hilarious.
These grandiose achievements as you put them consist of basic necessities for survival. The fact you use words like "grandiose" reveals a deeply dismissive attitude towards the suffering of others. I'm guessing, because you've completely dismissed your own suffering, along with the benefits of accurate accounting. Maybe that was the only way for you to move forward. I'm capable of having awareness and accounting and still moving forward.
You seem to be so afraid of past truth you're literally exclaiming "it doesn't matter" while intensely commenting on mine and sharing your own. So clearly it does matter to some repressed part of you.
> no matter how much I felt the pain from the trauma I suffered, that trauma never went away.
Soo... stop feeling the pain and just do accurate accounting. Why are you making this so complicated?
> And finally I'm putting it behind me.
No offense, the way you talk doesn't sound like that's actually happening.
> It doesn't matter that your accounting of your history is accurate or not.
There's a ridiculously destructive belief if I've ever heard one. Your PHD is an accurate accounting of your research. Your bank account is an accurate accounting of your earnings. I hope your wonderful girlfriend is accurate in her accounting of your relationship, because the alternative is she's cheating on you. See where this is going?
Dismissing accurate accounting of anything, including history, is a recipe for disaster.
Accurate accounting is the #1 skill that has drastically improved my quality of life.
> But nobody is going to make you change. You will either wake up one day and be so tired of your own bullshit that you will start to change.
You seem to be under the false belief that I'm somehow stuck unable to change. Don't know where this is coming from, but it smells of projection. You're dismissing accurate counting of history so hard it's almost like you're afraid to face the truth.
I'm not afraid of an accurate accounting of the truth, on the contrary. We call that wisdom.
I’m sure this will get downvoted but you might also have depression or PTSD. Talk to your doctor about Ketamine treatment for depression and look into MDMA for PTSD. Both drugs can be abused but can also be extremely effective at treating the above conditions.
As far as reaching your potential goes, just be kind to yourself
I have an IQ of 148 which the educational psychiatrist who did my test told me put me in the top 0.02% of the UK. I63 is.. insane
It's pretty neat to find someone smarter than me (and actually be aware of the fact).
If it helps: I think we're all a bit broken.. But whilst the first 23 years of my life were pretty rough, I'm thriving in my late 30s.
My unsolicited advice would be to find something that makes your feel good about who you are and throw yourself into it. Life and your resilience/ability to take on challenges will get so much better with a few wins under your belt.
I also can't overestimate how valuable a supportive partner is. Step 1: make sure you're worth it. Better to be kind than clever as Bezos famously said.
It would be nice to see something about gifted people that didn't conflate that with, or allude to, or even mention, ADHD, autism, or other 'neural deficiency'. Some people are just super bright, not just analytically but emotionally/empathically too - get over it.
Unfortunately, just having done that track, it's hard because _a lot_ of the gifted kids I was in class with had some kind of issue. Maybe not being neurodivergent, but there was a lot of mental health issues and obsessive behavior. Being just a standard human who smart was a minority position. It's interesting to me, because at my university those kids didn't have a high presence at all and I'm not sure if college was just biased against them a la gifted burn out stereotype or if I lived in a bubble
The only unique thing that university provides is access to a unique social network. Meanwhile, those with such issues tend to not want such social experiences, either as a direct result of their issue or as their condition leaves them to feel that they are (and maybe actually are) social outcasts. Why would you, in the general case (there are always exceptions), find them in a university? That would be much like finding vegetarians at a steakhouse.
And on the other side, having autism, ADHD, etc doesn't necessarily mean you're a super smart child prodigy either. Some people have those diagnoses and are just of normal intelligence, just as some gifted people are neurotypical.
we could also start developing other frame-works for identifying anomalies on intelligence... and treat them accordingly!
a high intelligent logic-oriented-nerd trying to create a big deal isn't much without a high intelligent designer and so on; to the heck this obsession with STEM at the pedagogic world
> At his last school, the philosophy teacher had become irritated. Deciding Georgios was a show-off, he shouted at this meek boy. After that, Georgios never raised his hand again.
> Several teachers told me, “I don’t know how you do it!” By which they meant tolerating Georgios’ odd behaviour. The truth though is that I didn’t always do it. Much of the time, Georgios' clinginess was as irritating to me as it was to them.
As it happens, just before I read this article I had an exchange with GPT-4 about combinatorial mathematics [1]. I wanted to see how feasible it would be to learn about the subject by interacting with it. While I haven’t double-checked everything it told me, I was struck once again by its infinite patience with my questions. It is an amazing resource for students of all kinds—not just gifted ones.
Addendum: Some conversations I had with it about philosophy—the area of interest of the student in the linked article—are at [2]. Again, GPT-4 showed no irritation whatsoever with my questions.
Imagine if people saw only a few different colors, and few saw the whole rainbow. Those who saw red would point to the trees and discuss the fine aspects of apples there, while the rest would have no clue or wonder why they care. Empathy is a color some see more than others. Timeliness is a color. Indexing life tasks and items to where they should be or how efficiently that can be organized is a color. Math and problem solving are colors that some find a lot more compelling than others.
You are extremely fortunate if the colors you see brightly are commonly seen by others or a part of a self-training loop like math, Montessori games, programming, and language. You have it harder if your favorite subject requires funding to practice, such as chemistry/advanced physics, etc. And you’d better learn how to make millions or billions if you like space stuff or care for gatekeeper-protected disciplines like some niche academia, medicine, regulated stuff, etc.
That said, the world changed recently. GPT4 came out those who have deep interests have a sparring partner they’ve never had before. I doubt it’s anywhere in their priority list, but OpenAI can probably run a fantastic networking mesh for people with niche interests. They’d have to keep the spam /obscenities out, but a group chat for anyone in a topic would be fun and a voice group lounge would be even more amazing. ChatGPT would beat facebook and much other social media for the gifted audience. It’s already the best teacher available (if you discount errors and hallucinations, which are on the decline).
School is a very strange place for the exceptionally gifted student, even moreso if neurodiverse. The student can get 100% on tests and essays with ease, yet cannot understand basic human interactions.
From the perspective of an autistic, ex-teacher who had his IQ measured as "somewhere over 170". I probably have ADHD as well, but a psychiatrist friend says diagnosis fails with people with ridiculously high IQs.
BTW, high IQ = good at solving certain kinds of problem, not a measure of the quality of a person.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadThis post is going to sound pedantic and annoying because … that is what Aspergers does to you.
I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision.
From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual. Not so much on the mathematical side. I almost have a disability with mathematics.
I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees. Worked at the top companies in the world with PhDs and others.
However. I feel constantly discriminated against and treated like I am stupider than I am. And when people listen to me talk, they get incredibly threatened.
It has taken me years to understand that being around me and listening to me talk, reason and analyze is THREATENING to people.
I have had situations where, even after a few meetings where I felt I was just “talking about how things are” the other person left HATING me.
The way I express myself is perceived almost like being hit with a physical object. I believe I have Aspergers (have tested very highly for it).
I will tell you - it is INCREDIBLY CAREER LIMITING.
I have given up trying to work in the normal world. It just doesn’t work for me. The pattern always repeats - I join a company, I get targeted and singled out and ganged up on.
If you are like me it is like being incredibly advantaged while being incredibly disadvantaged at the same time.
It’s like being Usain Bolt except your sprinting lane has an obstacle course in it while everyone else gets to run in a normal lane.
The obstacle course is DELIBERATELY put there. It is human nature to instantly identify existential threats: People who are unusually more talented than them and take them out.
I have learned, and am adapting.
Unfortunately, if you want to succeed in this world you have to play a set of games, these are games that I really don’t want to play.
If I have to play them, I am going to try to play outside the system.
I have realized that all the advice which most people follow that works for them does not work for me.
I do things completely differently and have to come up with my own strategies about how to operate.
Here is the other reality: If you are very talented and gifted, NO ONE WILL NOTICE AND TELL YOU.
That sounds completely weird but it is true.
No one in my entire life, aside from a few offhand comments, took me aside and went: “uhhh…you are in a completely other category than these people and do not belong here. Do this instead.”
Instead it is the isolation - I do not understand why no one wants to interact or include me, and it happens very fast. Most people get a whiff and go “I have no idea what to do with this and don’t want to be around it.”
I generally gravitate towards the most autistic market niches imaginable. Usually areas which combine multiple autistic topics together that attract the weirdest people imaginable.
If your language skills are as advanced and analytical as you claim, then you should apply that innate skill to the problem of finding ways to communicate without making people feel threatened. For instance, tailor (limit) your vocabulary for your audience and don't correct other people's inconsequential errors. And of course refrain from telling people about how brilliant you are.
If you can't manage the above, then maybe you should recognize that you're not actually as brilliant as you think. This realization could give you a bit more humility and that in turn could help you interact with other people.
This is a big one I feel. My best friend has Asperger’s and does this from time to time. A recent example is I was telling him about a Thule roof rack I got for my car. I pronounced it Thool, and he interrupted me and said “actually you should know it’s pronounced Tooly”.
It didn’t bother me, but we have a pact that I point out gently when he does things like that. It’s an inconsequential error because it doesn’t really matter how it is pronounced. And some people may find it rude or “know it all” to be corrected like that over something like that.
It also takes emotional regulation to refrain from correcting someone's factual errors. While someone with higher intelligence may be better at understanding and analysing emotions theoretically, this doesn't always translate into practical emotional management skills.
Sure, but it can get exhausting over time.
I don’t have it.
Also:
I have worked with quantum physicists with multiple degrees from Harvard / Stanford / Yale etc and realized I am in the same room as and same conversations as them.
These are the upper .01% of the talent pool and my intelligence has got me to that level.
You can’t pull that off by being a complete dumb ass. I have done it over and over and over.
Me: I read "How To Win Friends And Influence People" by Dale Carnegie when I was a teen, and it changed my life.
Other: (laughs) It obviously didn't work because you're terrible at social graces!
Me: Yeah, but you didn't know me before I read that book!
So there is hope, but reading a book won't work miracles. It's a lifelong struggle with me to learn social graces.
A nice side effect of being "on the spectrum" myself is I enjoy working with people like that, including Aspergers, because I understand where their lack of social graces comes from and it doesn't bother me in the least.
The best book I ever read was “stealing the corner office.”
I know people who are naturally intuitive and empathetic. They look at another person and go: “oh she is angry because her cat is sick.”
And I go “how the fuxk did you know that?”
More normal people have a sense sort of like this. I do not have this at all. The behavior and emotions of people are this continuous mystery.
If some VP is super angry, I can’t understand why.
Someone with more normal understand goes: yeah he is under a lot of pressure so that is normal just be more relaxed etc.
Corporations are confusing.
Beautiful people have certain things easier but others harder. Highly intelligent people are the same way. I think it’s like playing the game on easy mode but has some random side quest every so often.
I’d surely not wish the ending of Flowers for Algernon on myself just in order to avoid the quests.
I only learned about Aspergers way later in life due to YouTube and realized it explained everything about my problems and alienation.
From some of the coaches on YouTube, they talk about how this is a pattern that shows up a lot with Aspergers - At some point people get so fed up with everything about life, relationships, work and schools not working specifically for YOU.
Aspergers individuals have a particularly hard time with jobs, it is very common for them to have employment challenges.
I hope you succeed in finding a place where others compliment you, and you them and are in a team with a lead who supports you. I've been in, asked let a few such teams and we did amazing things.
I am extremely empathetic and honest. Most middle management at most companies optimizes for non-creative yet industrious which turns highly competitive over pettiness.
I just can’t see myself doing it anymore. Especially after what happened to me at my last role.
I had my naïveté taken advantage of.
If it's any consolation, that happens to everybody.
> From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual. Not so much on the mathematical side. I almost have a disability with mathematics.
I feel this. “Rough draft? LOL why? I can write a perfectly-structured paper beginning-to-end without having to re-arrange so much as a paragraph, and I don’t make grammatical errors or spelling mistakes that I don’t catch instantly. What’s the point of all these ‘writing steps’?”
Around age 35 I started occasionally making errors in typed text, and not noticing until re-reading it. Leaving out words. I started substituting homophones! I never, ever did that at all, before! Aging sucks.
[edit] I feel, specifically, the brilliant-at-language and hindered-at-math thing, that is. The rest of this, I’d say you’re a fair bit brighter than me. I just took to language naturally very early and have crazy-good spatial reasoning. I feel dyslexic trying to read math, though. I do OK as long as things are algorithm-focused, which is why I can have a career as a programmer, but when it’s equations and proofs, forget about it.
I had perfect grammar and spelling until ~30. Then it went downhill.
It coincided with dating more illiterate women. So I always attributed this development to letting go of an attention to detail that went unnoticed: What's the point of writing or speaking correctly when nobody around you can tell the difference?
It might be age rather than environment, although I doubt it. I also don't really mind.
My code hasn't become less type-safe.
Word engineer.
It’s less respected and talked about in tech but a very real capability.
If you mean this in a way where your saying hard truths or telling it like it is, then yeah, its annoying to listen to. Especially without it being asked for.
If you are X, you are not allowed to ask about Y topic etc.
People with Aspergers do not perceive these boundaries and open topics they are not supposed to or are “above their pay grade.”
Status blindness and career limiting.
Easy and logical for more tribalistic folks that live in terror of becoming outcasts, but not remotely reasonable for people who don't/can't live in this restrictive setup.
So I would say I agree with many people in power need to be "the smartest person in the room" and will do their best to derail or ignore you, which limits your success.
But to your comment about isolation and no one wanting to interact with you, TBH that's most probably Asperger's or your personality, not that you are some genius that people are jealous of.
I have absolutely nothing in common with most people and it feels like very little to talk about, and I am extremely impatient with them.
Isolating and ruminating is the alternative I guess.
This is very familiar to me. There are things nobody talks much about because they are obvious and everybody knows them already. There are also things that nobody talks about because everyone is lying to themselves about it and actually believe are not true (though some part of their brain unconsciously knows it). If you aren't one for the lies, you can mistake one of the latter for the former, and you will think that you are just stating the obvious, but really you just stepped on a landmine. Has happened to me many times.
I was really excited by it and was rattling off a list of ideas and tactics and strategies for how we could open the account.
His face turned bright red and he started SCREAMING at me.
At that point I was like “oooohk I did the thing again.” And backed off and didn’t interact with him.
After that he was a total asshole to me and started spreading rumors about me.
He felt extremely threatened I gather that he had been running this account for years and I could walk in and imagine a number of new approaches.
If I did it now I wouldn’t be so direct.
I have ideas all the time and most like do not want to have discussions like this because … they don’t have ideas themselves.
Corporate middle management are generally non creative and “brainstorming” just pisses them off.
Ok, I backed off and then watched.
The guy moved that truck around like a ballerina. It was a pleasure watching him handle it, a true pro.
The lesson for me was to not tell someone you just met how to do their job. It's a lesson I've had to learn many times.
Have those people actually told you this, or is it a conclusion you came to on your own? I ask because your comment pattern-matches quite strongly for me to "mildly autistic person who doesn't realize they're constantly making failed status plays". Here are a few lines that stood out
---
> I can write dozens of pages of highly analytical and technical text without making mistakes in real time. I can speed read complex texts and memorize them with a high degree of precision. From the “language” perspective I feel highly gifted and unusual.
"I'm highly gifted and unusual" is much stronger than "I'm a good technical writer."
> It’s like being Usain Bolt except your sprinting lane has an obstacle course in it while everyone else gets to run in a normal lane.
As before, but even worse. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world. He's quite literally one in eight billion. You are not.
> I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees. Worked at the top companies in the world with PhDs and others.
Having worked with PhDs is not impressive in itself. There are thousands of college sophomores who can say the same.
There are workplaces that carry some serious cachet (though bringing them up unprompted will burn most of it), but vague references to "top companies" won't cut it, and makes me think it's less "fellow at Microsoft Research" and more "software engineer at Microsoft". Which is a fine thing to be - but also a perfectly normal thing to be.
---
If your coworkers are getting the same vibe I am, then they're treating you like you're stupider than you really are because you come off as someone who wants to be seen as smarter than they really are. They're annoyed, not threatened.
Did you stop to think that maybe that was his point?
> s before, but even worse. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter in the world. He's quite literally one in eight billion. You are not.
Or that he didn't mean that literally he is the best in the world?
> I have taught myself advanced skills and switched careers multiple times without the required degrees
This is legitimately impressive and obviously requires intelligence in the top 1% at minimum. Does it really not occur to you that smart people know they are smart just like people who are good at anything else know they are good at it, and not just trying to make themselves sound smarter than they are?
Obviously not, but I think OP does sincerely think he's smart enough that he should stand out as exceptional to most of the people he meets - and I think he's probably wrong. Most educated professionals will know dozens of people as talented as him. The people OP is hanging around will know far more, assuming he's describing them accurately: in a room full of
> quantum physicists with multiple degrees from Harvard / Stanford / Yale
having a 1-in-100 intellect is less than table stakes. There are millions of people that smart in the US alone, and most of them do not share OP's difficulties.
And also my output is 20x higher than theirs.
However, my ability to tap into the social zeitgeist is pretty close to zero.
The end result is that I get along fantastically with most people because I can anticipate what they want. But I get along terribly with people who want me to fit in with the social rules that they are playing by. What they want is for me to act normal. And I don't know what that is.
It manifests very similar to what you're describing. After a relatively short period of time certain people get very tuned off by me and they become easily frustrated by my actions.
My theory is that they're diligently playing by the social rules and then I come in, break all of the rules right in front of them, and then I get a mostly positive reception because it's what most of the room wanted anyway (just done in kind of a funny way).
I don't really have a solution.
[At least for me things get really interesting whenever I interact with sales people. As far as I can tell like 90% of that profession runs on everyone following the appropriate social scripts. I barely understand them so thus far I've not encountered a sales tactic that actually works on me. Occasionally they get really desperate as their best plays get met with awkward silence or declining their bad deal. The flip side is that they don't understand me either so asking for what I want doesn't seem to work. I just have to hope I'm able to find something that makes do. ]
The last few jobs in a row I entered with a specific, singular objective: “I vow I am not going to get into conflicts with people again.”
I try my hardest, and it doesn’t work.
A big problem is I hyper produce and hyper focus. I am juggling 18 balls and the “get along with people” ball eventually drops and when it does, it’s game over.
I have extreme capabilities for work but it also exhausts and overwhelms me.
I get extremely exhausted from thinking all the time, I am highly obsessive and always running my engine chewing over things mentally.
So I never rest.
And what inevitably happens is that I make social mistakes, and when I do - That’s the start of the end.
The third thing was: it turns out that people don't like different. Moved? Got a different accent than the rest of the children. But also? Don't be smart. Fit in. You can act bright, bright enough to help with another kid's homework, but you have to hide the rest of it, as it induces a mixture of envy and fear. Having a grown person in medical school say "You're terrifying" because you casually let slip your immediate apprehension of something which had baffled them means that kind of reaction never leaves. So as much as people mouth litanies like "Being different is okay!" the differences they mean are surface things like the coloration of your eyes or your skin, differences as the Mr. Potato Head model. And so that "helps with homework" turns with age into someone who ends up doing some very dull work, often of inappropriate import. Inappropriate, because you can see further down the line at what would be more important or impactful rather than this task you've been handed, as mindless as another sheet of multiplication problems of decades prior.
One of the equilibrium states is quietness, uttering little of surprise, imitation as protective camouflage. People will still figure out that you're smarter than the average bear, but you get fewer monkey gang-ups and reaping of the tall poppies. Fewer, but not none. Even my oldest friend has muttered "I hate you" three-quarters in jest -- but one-quarter not -- when I casually pick up some skill at which he has been slaving away over years. I've often wondered what the other paths look like and if they are more rewarding in some fashion, but more importantly, if they are any less fantastically lonely, the loneliness of the mutant.
It’s like an open faucet with words and stuff spilling out, and ideas, strategies, facts etc.
Elon Musk has talked about having a similar experience of just raw ideation to a degree that it is unpleasant.
My ideation cannot be shut off.
I walk multiple hours today just thinking obsessively and planning, iterating, ideating.
I can’t sit still, the activity of my brain is unpleasant I am just ruminating all the time.
Doesn’t happen to normal people - I think their brains are usually calmer - more in a neutral mode.
The end result is that when I do get engaged, and get into work, I tend to get extremely burned out. You can’t have this level of super output without burning out.
This is autistic melt downs / burn out I only learned about from YouTube.
This is where it's easy to get into trouble. You can either accept the task, which leaves you unfulfilled (and eventually burned out), or you can question the usefulness of the task, which superiors often view as insubordination or otherwise threatening.
It seems like working for yourself is the only way out of this, except perhaps working on a particularly well-managed team.
I haven't had this experience. In any group dynamic that lasts long enough, there's usually at least a few folks making self-deprecating jokes about their intelligence in comparison, or someone explicitly asking for advice "from the big brain" or something similar.
Humor is usually involved, but I'm assuming that's just a way to make a potentially socially risky observation in a more acceptable manner.
Recruiters / management are sometimes more comfortable making blunt assessments of intelligence / talent than peers. To an extent, that's part of their job, so never having gotten that feedback professionally would seem odd.
My experience is most people in highly competitive environments are peer competitors in some form . The VP above you doesn’t want you to rise and take their job. Your peers don’t want to be surpassed.
Everyone wants to keep you in a certain box.
If you are able to jump completely out of the box ahead of everyone by 10 miles, no one is going to want that.
You will only get negative feedback and told to stop. Or worse.
Don't self diagnose, really please just get a proper assessment by a good neuropsychologist. I had a suspicion that I had ASD, and I found out I had ADHD instead which surprised me. And part of ADHD is ignoring social cues subconsciously. If you end up having ADHD, OCD and anxiety for example, there are medications for that can change your life.
Even if the diagnosis ends up being some sort of ASD, ASD is a diverse condition with many subparts, so understanding how the machine of you works will be helpful. You also get an IQ test so you know what kind of gifted you are and there are books and therapy programs that can help you manage all of the diagnoses. Instead of giving up on the world and going full NEET, understand yourself first.
It’s orthodox in education research, widely accepted, widely observed that kids who are REALLY good at one or two things wind up, when you measure them, good at everything.
However perhaps this is an uncomfortable truth, that we may or may not choose to face.
take a sip at what educators are trying to push nowadays (not the [majority of] business paraphernalia from the ed. tech world)... it's usually about teaching kids types of skills not found at the grade; like emotional intelligence, resilience and even meta-analysis of their way of studying!
"Good at one thing" in children generally implies "parents are involved" which generally implies "better than average socioeconomic status" which generally implies "children at least relatively decent at most educational things". This is going to be doubly true for things like art or music (or anything with private coaching) which require a significant monetary outlay in order to be good.
About the only place where this doesn't hold are the extremes where high spectrum people can function spectacularly in math and science and yet be ferociously terrible outside of that.
The most fundamental way in which parents are involved in the life of their children is through their gametes. Unsurprisingly smart kids almost always have smart parents, which is a double advantage.
You are left with comparisons between school districts and/or states
Let me explain. Doing a "simple" study like this is nigh-impossible within the science establishment we have today. Like you said, let me try. Let's walk through the steps.
A PI would have to get a grant to help not the underserved/underprivileged kids, but rather those who are perceived to have an advantage. They have to work with hundreds of schools (gifted kids are rare). Within that set of hundreds of schools they have to control for cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds and so on. Having succeeded they'll have to get this published (and probably fight some accusations of being elitist in the process). All I am saying is: this PI better already have tenure.
This problem is not just about gifted kids. A commonly heard complaint in the field of psychiatry for example is that we only study the minds with pathologies. We don't at all look at how to improve things for healthy people. Come to think of it, that is true in medicine in general.
In the US, it’s not only disrupted by the activists briefly mentioned in the article, but by the mediocre part of the elite that would rather have such a system not exist or be easily gamed/rigged than to have it exist and their child not in it. Given the more classist nature of life in the UK I’m sure this is even moreso a factor there.
Philosophers? I think not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_in_the_Soviet_Union
It's not clear that the Soviet system "served" anyone except the party leaders.
Unless I'm mistaken, this appears to be off by an order of magnitude.
So the end result is accurate, it would be 2-3 students with that ability level.
I think what is going on is that when it says "top 1.33% for the test he took" it is referring to some test given to children who are already known or expected to have high IQs, and on that test people with IQs of 145 are 98.67 percentile.
It appears that the author was off by precisely one order of magnitude, having mixed up .13% and 1.3%. It could be chance, but I think it’s probably a simple mathematical error. The author's conclusion (2-3 children over a career) is correct, but the intermediate step is mistaken.
Pedantry—the warm refuge of everyone else in the 99.87%!
I'm not sure where the article got the 1.3% number, it could be either a decimal point error, or this could be a specific test that's primarily given to gifted students and so both numbers could be correct.
There was of course the Alphas and the Betas - and the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons beneath them.
However the very gifted were lifted from this caste system, and placed on the islands, where they might direct the future (or at least that is my somewhat dim recollection/interpretation).
Wow, its answers are of a high level quality!
When people read books on certain topics, they start talking the talk.
E.g. “The fatal flaw, as I understand it, in Kant’s deontological ethical system is his disregard of consequentialism.”
Did the kid come up with that himself, or is he just regurgitating, verbatim, a judgment penned by some author he read somewhere? How much of it does he understand?
Might it not be that Georgios is just playing with philosophy and literature in the way, in Billy Joel's "Piano Man", the "waitress is practicing politics"? I.e. picking up talking the talk to sound intelligent and informed. E.g. memorizing some political opinion overheard from one group of customers of the bar, and repeating that later within earshot of another group.
This is a weak analysis of Kant. If a sixth grader read some Kant and came up with this themselves I would think they were probably of average intelligence.
The kid used philosophical jargon to accuse Kant of favoring a rigid rule-based moral behavior, without the flexiblity of allowing rules to be bent or flouted when they wouldn't lead to a good outcome.
Any parrot can learn to articulate an idea like this using "deontological" and "consequentialism".
It just comes across as pretentious; no wonder teachers found that irritating.
I chose a random name from that list: Immanuel Kant. We went to the school's small library, and I searched and found the one book by Kant in the library: The Critique of Pure Reason. I quickly scanned through the book to see what I can find out about this Kant fellow, to be greeted with sentences such as:
> For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience?
and
> Whatever may be the content of our cognition, and in whatever manner our cognition may be related to its object, the universal, although only negative conditions of all our judgements is that they do not contradict themselves; otherwise these judgements are in themselves (even without respect to the object) nothing.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm
I remember closing the book, thinking to myself, "I can't write an essay about this guy", and finding it funny that his name was "I. Kant". I don't remember what I actually ended up doing for that essay. The deadline was very short so there was no possibility of reading a whole book, let alone that book (which anyways wasn't a great reference for writing about Kant, the person).
As an adult, I still find Kant's serpentine sentences incredibly difficult to digest. (Though some of the problems may originate from the translation.) Maybe I'm just a rube, but I wouldn't consider a sixth grader to have average intelligence if they read some Kant and come up with that criticism.
Update while writing this post: I'm not well versed in philosophy, so I quickly perused the Wikipedia summaries for Deontology and Consequentialism. The criticism, "The fatal flaw, as I understand it, in Kant’s deontological ethical system is his disregard of consequentialism." is rather shallow, wrapped in juicy terminology from moral philosophy. Though, I still think it's a notable feat for a sixth grader to read and even somewhat comprehend Kant.
It is if nobody in his family is putting him up to it.
If a sixth grader plays Bach, but his parents don't know who that was, that's impressive. If he had lessons since age three, not so much.
> if they read some Kant and come up with that criticism.
I agree, but if they read something about Kant and cribbed the observation from that other author, or got it from talking about Kant with someone in their family who is into philosophy, then it's not the same.
Our state is getting school districts to remove all advanced classes and gifted programs. All in the name of equity. Last year they got rid of all of the advanced math classes in our district because the number of minority students was too low.
Thankfully when I grew up we had enough money for me to go to a private school where they had all of these advanced programs. I would have gone crazy without them.
I'm a hardcore liberal. But... It feels like there's a brand of liberal out there now that has a totally different idea of what equity is and how we should get there to the point where I find I need to sometimes fight on the side of the more conservative parents in our school district. I don't understand how educating smart people became something that my own side hates and fights against.
wtf
Plenty of articles on this on the interwebs. For example:
https://reason.com/2023/10/04/california-state-guidelines-di...
Note that I am not the OP, so I don’t know where they are specifically, or even if they are in CA. That said, K-12 is moving this direction in CA, and I think the administrators will end up getting their way one way or another.
I’m not so sure.
Policies that focus on equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunities are very popular in education circles these days. Certain communities (esp. relatively wealthy ones with relatively high-achieving and/or ambitious parents) may be able to avoid these policies for longer than others, but I’m not sure they will be able to be avoided entirely except by students in private schools.
The math curriculum issue that CA currently has will continue and expand, imho. The DoE did not expect to get as much pushback as they got. Now it’s just a matter (from their perspective) of how they can force the outcome they want (e.g., no middle school algebra and/or high school calculus) with terms that will be or must be accepted by the population (e.g., budget cuts, manpower issues, accreditation issues, etc.).
Note that I’m not trying to be overly alarmist, and I know that this reply may seem overly negative, but I’ve heard this song played before in a different key.
> Proposed guidelines in the state would de-emphasize calculus, reject the idea that some children are naturally gifted and build a connection to social justice. Critics say math shouldn’t be political.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/california-math-curric...
It's definitely not a simple dichotomy. But yes, liberals who want everyone and everything to be mediocre have the loudest voices right now.
I really don't want that for my kids.
I'm amused that my comment was highly upvoted and now it sits at a zero. I guess it's a reflection of the crowd here too.
Assuming schools have fixed budgets (that they're inconsistent, and based on property taxes is a separate discussion we should have), there's going to be a finite amount of resources to invest in every student. How do you allocate it?
A) Completely evenly regardless of merit
B) Optimizing for the best student and giving them the best chance to exceed and achieve their maximum potential
C) Optimizing for the median student
D) Optimizing for the worst student
E) Other?
A is obviously ridiculous. B is how many societies have flourished and how humanity moves forward, but is also inherently unequal. D) ensures mediocrity.
I think the most progressive minds changing schools today are trying to achieve C.
Are they misguided? It's quite hard to tell. I honestly don't know. Because the problem is answering this question requires answering a different one:
* What are the qualities of a society that is not only the "best" for the most people, but is also able to move humanity forward in a way as to resolve our existential threats (climate change, random asteroids wiping away Earth, GAI, etc.*
Those that believe the answer to THAT is B would say that any other choice is short-sighted and stupid. But I do believe that those that believe C believe in a different way. That C still allows the truly exceptional to make a mark on the world. When the median becomes great, there is no worry about the exceptional being dominated by the mediocre.
Of course the problem is there are idiots there - in every philosophical field. And are some going to cargo cult their way into Harrison Bergeron? Probably. But that's not the overall intent.
Generations of historically poor and disadvantaged people have been lifted worldwide. Literacy rates, secondary education, and post-secondary rates across the human population are dramatically higher than they have been in the days of our parents.
That has created it's own problems - student loan debt, overeducation, wasted degrees, and so on. But I don't understand how you can claim there is no evidence to this effect. The evidence is all around us.
Our school district is wealthy. The average income of the parents is extremely high. They spend twice the state average on students because parents willingly donate extra money to the school direct. There is no shortage of money at all.
If they had asked for money hundreds of parents in our district could each have personally endowed the entire cost of those classes forever without even noticing the cost. Never mind the district as a whole. But it's not a money issue. They didn't want the money.
What there is, is a totally different idea of what equity is. That the final result of schooling must at all costs be equal by demographic standards. And if it's not, the problem is the immediate source of inequality.
This is happening in many states. Just look at the math reform in CA. It is insane. Water down the entire math curriculum in school because the outcomes are bad for some groups. This is not related to costs at all.
The solution is of course to spend more and offer far more support so that everyone does well. But that isn't even allowed to be an answer anymore.
So, since then, the US has had to overcorrect to try to heal centuries of wounds, and as a result is more direct about actively promoting equity based on racial lines in a way that seems horrifying to the rest of the world (nay even racist itself).
This era seems to be ending - for better or for worse - with affirmative action being struck down, with standardized tests now being considered the MORE equitable solution rather than an explicitly racist one. We are heading towards an alternative path.
I agree with you the CA math reform is insane, as is cancelling things like AP and Gifted classes. However, I again maintain that I think the intention is that those that benefit from those classes will be able to thrive with or without them, while the funding for them can help lift the FLOOR for those disadvantaged - those without parents with high income who can afford tutors, or spend extra time with their kids.
I again acknowledge that the full picture of this change will not be visible for some time. But I think it's an interesting premise.
I was in many gifted classes growing up. I skipped several grades. I started university as a teenager. This was all a mixed bag. I was intellectually over-stimulated and stunted socially. I had to recover through my late teen years and early 20's. Most of the gifted kids I know from my era have mixed feelings about our experiences. We appreciated the support at the time but look back and wish the schools tried harder to protect us from bullying "normies" rather than just isolating us to separate classes. It was a cop-out marketed as for our own best interests. Some of us have thrived. Others crumbled.
When I think of my own son (currently a toddler), and whether he would have those opportunities if he happens to be advanced for his age, I believe that the responsibility for ensuring he gets the support he needs is mine and mine alone. What i will do with the funds I have to give him extra attention is find clubs, find tutors, and not expect that the school should be the one providing him those opportunities. In school, I hope he gets to learn how to be a member of society better and sooner than I did.
I think exactly the opposite will happen. The disadvantaged kids will now have a low ceiling, not a high floor!
Doesn't matter if you manage to break through despite your socioeconomic conditions, we cannot help you advance further in any way now because we've cancelled those classes. Before, they had the opportunity to thrive. Now, unless their parents have money, they don't.
> I again acknowledge that the full picture of this change will not be visible for some time. But I think it's an interesting premise.
I think it doesn't hold up at all.
> I was in many gifted classes growing up. I skipped several grades. I started university as a teenager. This was all a mixed bag. I was intellectually over-stimulated and stunted socially. I had to recover through my late teen years and early 20's. Most of the gifted kids I know from my era have mixed feelings about our experiences. We appreciated the support at the time but look back and wish the schools tried harder to protect us from bullying "normies" rather than just isolating us to separate classes. It was a cop-out marketed as for our own best interests. Some of us have thrived. Others crumbled.
I did the same. And for what it's worth, I loved every minute of it. By going to schools where being smart was valued, we had no "bullying normies". They got kicked out of school.
> When I think of my own son (currently a toddler), and whether he would have those opportunities if he happens to be advanced for his age, I believe that the responsibility for ensuring he gets the support he needs is mine and mine alone. What i will do with the funds I have to give him extra attention is find clubs, find tutors, and not expect that the school should be the one providing him those opportunities. In school, I hope he gets to learn how to be a member of society better and sooner than I did.
Oh sure, I'm not saying I won't spend the money for my own kids. And I would be doing all of those things even if the school provided more advanced classes. But as a matter of policy, all this is doing is driving anyone who can afford it out of the public system.
We're going to end up with a public schooling system that's for poor people and provides a base education that for most people puts a cap on what they can achieve in life. And a private system for everyone else.
The reason this doesn’t happen, in my experience, is teacher unions (and, to some extent, the political leanings of administrators). Every year, my kids’ school asks us about our kids and what would be good for them to have in terms of a teacher for the next year. This makes parents think they will be placed in a class with a teacher who would be well-suited for them.
But this isn’t what happens at all! The classes are put together using a balancing approach, to make all the classes “equal” in terms of easy students, trouble students, etc. Only then are the classes assigned to teachers, without regard to what the individual students need. The randomization and balancing is done so that no teacher gets all the best behaved or worst behaved kids. The system is all about the teachers, not the students.
For this reason, our school won’t allow gifted classes to exist, since that would give certain teachers “easier” kids than others. Of course, they also don’t want to have an advanced class with Asian and white kids, but few black and Hispanic kids, from both a political and optics perspective.
But the point is, they could easily do this at no additional cost if they wanted to. And it would allow all students to learn more effectively, since their teacher would be more tightly focused on kids at a certain level.
Though I’ve heard that sentiment before, it seems unlikely, and when I looked very hard for a source, I never found anything remotely satisfactory. Barring something, anything from Vonnegut indicating otherwise, it seems reasonable to accept that he meant the story to be taken at face value.
In any case, we're heading for the Torment Nexus in this one.
I’m happy to chat further with parents that are dealing with this. Contact in profile.
Gifted students have different needs, and the school environment does not force them to develop the skills they need to succeed as an adult.
Twice exceptional students tend to use a lot of energy just trying to exist, which also prevents skill development. They look like smart students who "don't apply themselves", even if they are putting on their best effort.
Got beaten every day until I learned to fight back. At what point was I supposed to have the time and energy to learn? There were no role models. My parents are horrible. Just skipped school as much as I could to play with tech/computers. Still unproven if all my experience amounts to anything. A genius quietly suffering in poverty and loneliness, fallen off every bandwagon, used and abused, desperately trying to achieve literally anything.
The worst part is the chronic thinking that I could've/should've/would've done something amazing, if a single shit had been given at any point along the way. Such a waste of human potential. Even if it wasn't my fault as a child, it's my responsibility to fix as a developmentally disabled adult. To this day nobody gives a shit. So I work out, do what little work I can, cry myself to sleep, and pray for God to use me as an instrument for good.
The next 10 years will make or break me.
That's remarkable given the current world population of 8 billion.
Given a normal IQ distribution centred about 100 and a standard deviation of 10 that puts you in the upper half of the six sigma range ... along with (approx) only 7 other people on the planet.
Tech in particular tends to attract high IQ individuals, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are hundreds or thousands of HN users with similar IQs or higher.
I can tell you that your feeling of wasted potential isn't just a consequence of how you were treated. Most people in this situation have it. Even when they are wildly successful by any other standard. Like PhDs from ivies are normal, the number of people walking down the hallway who are billionaires is astoundingly high, etc.
You would be shocked at the self harm, depression, and suicide rate that at this level. All because of this idea of "oh, I could have won a Nobel" (I'm certain that if they had they would find a way to be sad about wasted potential anyway).
The solution is therapy. Don't wait. Just go do it. Just because you're smart doesn't mean that you don't need that kind of help. It might mean that you need it even more!
I'm not sure all of what went into things working out for me in therapy the past couple of years, but I think at least a part of it was shifting into a more emotions based approach. I'm not sure how open to that I would have been when I was younger. My tendency to approach most things intellectually was a very powerful tool, but it wasn't successful at getting to the underlying feelings I was not really aware of. Having more access to those feelings has been overwhelming at times, but also has enabled a lot of ongoing progress on being more satisfied with my life.
CBT isn't about someone giving you an aha moment into your own feelings or giving you advice you hadn't thought of (although that does happen). It's more about giving you skills to reinterpret those feelings, their sources, and the actions that result from them. So even if you feel like you introspect and understand how you're doing, CBT can be very effective in being more satisfied with life.
I don't self-harm, I'm not suicidal, I'm not even depressed. I'm just so late to the party that the chances of making it shrink ever smaller each year. No therapist can ever turn back time, so no therapist can ever help.
I'm fully interacting with my life today. My life today is not a problem. I'm the master of survival skills for my particular environment - I would've died already otherwise.
The problem is the circumstances that failed to cultivate and extract my potential. The problem was leaving me to fend for myself. The problem was godlessness, immorality, violence, and stupidity.
No therapist can fix that. Ergo, therapy is a waste of time.
> If you are struggling to handle problems yet believe you already know and are doing everything then I would suggest you find some humility.
Can you explain this? Knowing and doing everything is a struggle almost by definition. This struggle I welcome with glee because it's a struggle I choose to endure for the betterment of my quality of life, and through health and productivity, hopefully a benefit to all one day.
So how am I wrong, or are you satisfied merely virtue-signaling?
But I will say that as someone who spends all day with people that have have his kind of intelligence, therapy is for you. Recontexualizing your life, past and present, as well as your future path is pretty much bread and butter CBT.
Too many smart people have the disease of "I know better, therapy can't help" which is why for example elite institutions have the highest suicide rates. You're falling into that trap, but it's a catch 22, once you're in it, you won't be able to logically argue your way out. Just take the leap and go to therapy.
If you truly believed that therapy is for me, you'd be glad to give me the long argument. You already know I won't buy it because you know it isn't.
Your attempted ad hominem falls flatter on its face than a pancake mask at a hydraulic press factory. I've not only partied a lot in my youth and was very liked, I was deep in the scene, friends with the crews that organized the parties, the DJs, camera and audio techs, backstage, etc.
Where is this coming from? I know it's not coming from me because my explicit narrative is precisely that my life lacks these "grandiose" things as you put them, for the obvious reasons I laid out.
Since it's not coming from me, sounds like projection coming from you.
Yup. I was reasonably well-treated as a gifted kid (well, still bullied to death, but at least, I had smart + available parents and many opportunities to learn by myself). I still suffer from that.
I do have a few achievements behind my belt. I have a PhD, I have code running on your computer and in low earth orbit. Pretty much every junior developer learns stuff that I (and many, many others) have contributed to create. I raise a kid, I donate blood, money, time to charities. And I can't escape the feeling that I'm wasting my time, that I could/should be doing something greater, and that I'm basically useless as is.
Yes, I probably need some kind of therapy :)
Sometimes I feel like humans have a limiter put on them and someday we could 'fix' it. I occasionally get a glimpse of huge ideas that aren't just built on existing stuff, but then it fades and I'm back to the grind.
Like what? Define amazing. Become the founder of some extractive start up? Write some bs science and gain a nobel prize? Be the best chess player?
My view is that you always have to put yourself together. Intellect is simply a factor, but so is honesty and the state of your heart. You can be very smart and you can still be stupid. You sound a bit resentful, but do you ever consider that your experience grants you the opportunity to lead life away from the well-travelled track to success, and do something personally and actually meaningful?
Ignore the jumped-up, self proclaimed authorities, the things they have taught you, the servile mentality and mental structure you are in.
Oneself is the only thing important in one's life. Every individual is infinitely valuable. It's simple too - just forget everything you know, and do right, by following truth and love. It costs nothing.
PS I recognise that I must sound like a fruitcake, but the answers come from within. The revolution will not be televised.
Also known as narcissism.
> Oneself is the only thing important in one's life. Every individual is infinitely valuable.
Is that narcissistic too?
Also known as arrogance.
From your many statements in this thread, you seem to be articulate and, if your cited accomplishments are truthful, generally successful. But your presumptive posturing, bordering on incurious, and projections on others for perceived failures suggests that you’re likely underestimating just how much you don’t know. “Intelligence” is a nebulous concept that manifests in a variety of ways that can be frequently difficult to pin down. Humility and the capacity for making honest evaluations for one’s own limits is a distinct form of emotional intelligence that you might find can enhance the more conventional notions of intellect that you seem to possess.
Things like higher education and therapy are not necessarily designed to imbue you with wholly novel information and experiences, absent a considerable amount of initiative and work from within. They are frameworks for providing the tools so you can achieve your potential. Nothing is perfect, you might very well find that they sometimes fail in that effort, but you are responsible for putting forth the good faith efforts to engage with these tools if you wish to achieve the success that they can facilitate.
That’s my perspective, anyway, and I wish you all the best on your path.
Like what, fail in an entertaining manner?
Imagine telling a malnourished child that their experience grants them the opportunity to lead life away from the well-tasted fruit to satiation, and do something personally and actually meaningful, while starving to death.
That's how stupid that sounds. "Have you tried eating dirt?"
My definition of amazing at this point is not being useless then dying alone and unloved.
I know you dismissed it out of hand. You clearly have no faith that someone (specifically, a well-trained therapist) might have something valuable to contribute.
However, while your powers of observation might border on superhuman, they are still very much just yours. A therapist can help you build an emotional toolset you will not otherwise provide yourself, and which will make you a more complete person, not least of all in the area of building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships.
Think of it like this: you can read music theory and memorize the entire western classical canon by heart and still be a terrible piano player, never improving if you don’t show up to practice at the keys with a talented teacher.
One simply cannot reason ones way around the emotional core that drives us as humans.
CBT will help you change your behavior and how things feel, but, imho, psychodynamic psychotherapy can go much deeper and truly improve your emotional IQ.
Found the flaw in your argument. I am not driven by emotions. If therapy is all about that then all the more reason to not waste time with it.
My (accurate accounting of) history with building and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships is fine. Why do you assume I need help with that?
In these comments I see a lot of imagining problems I supposedly have right now, when all I did was share the problems I used to suffer from, in the context of a discussion about the systemic, environmental deficiencies in how society is structured causing massive waste of human potential.
Therapy takes time and money. I don't use emotions to make decisions on how to invest my time and money. You're arguing in favor of investing my time and money into a questionably effective solution to an imagined problem.
Options... use gears at touch points to match speed, or have a robust outer layer to eliminate impact of friction, or Try to control speed to match the system
A combination of these options, may work. Challenge is to identfy the required option and apply what works for a given situation, which is another activity needing quite some brain cycles.
Just an observation...
Hope your upcoming life is pleasant.
Fixation on how your present circumstances might be better if not for the wrong done by others to the extent that you describe it as a severe and chronic issue is neither inescapable nor particularly factual.
So your stance is that I imagined the whole thing? You're not making any sense here. It's absolutely, undisputably factual that when a child lacks basic necessities for development, they don't develop properly and will suffer as a consequence.
As a consciously conscious being, I have awareness of that suffering. That's not a "fixation", it's an actual chronic issue that makes life 100x harder than it needs to be, and awareness of the issue is the antidote to preventing something similar from happening to others, especially by my doing.
You are attempting to null my experience, I don't know why, but you're failing at it because you cannot null the cold, hard, objective, measurable facts simply by saying "nuh uh".
Yes, the life you could've had but didn't exists only in your imagination.
>You're not making any sense here. It's absolutely, undisputably factual that when a child lacks basic necessities for development, they don't develop properly and will suffer as a consequence.
No, it isn't. Some children do alright in shit circumstances, while some fail to in great circumstances. And some people suffer despite the trappings of success while others are content with what others may describe as failure.
>As a consciously conscious being, I have awareness of that suffering. That's not a "fixation", it's an actual chronic issue that makes life 100x harder than it needs to be,
Do you think any suffering in childhood inevitably leads to a lifetime of inescapable suffering? If not, just how much early suffering does it take? If a child who suffered slightly less can get over it, why not the one who suffered slightly more?
But nobody is going to make you change. You will either wake up one day and be so tired of your own bullshit that you will start to change. Or you won't. It's really all up to you.
These grandiose achievements as you put them consist of basic necessities for survival. The fact you use words like "grandiose" reveals a deeply dismissive attitude towards the suffering of others. I'm guessing, because you've completely dismissed your own suffering, along with the benefits of accurate accounting. Maybe that was the only way for you to move forward. I'm capable of having awareness and accounting and still moving forward.
You seem to be so afraid of past truth you're literally exclaiming "it doesn't matter" while intensely commenting on mine and sharing your own. So clearly it does matter to some repressed part of you.
> no matter how much I felt the pain from the trauma I suffered, that trauma never went away.
Soo... stop feeling the pain and just do accurate accounting. Why are you making this so complicated?
> And finally I'm putting it behind me.
No offense, the way you talk doesn't sound like that's actually happening.
There's a ridiculously destructive belief if I've ever heard one. Your PHD is an accurate accounting of your research. Your bank account is an accurate accounting of your earnings. I hope your wonderful girlfriend is accurate in her accounting of your relationship, because the alternative is she's cheating on you. See where this is going?
Dismissing accurate accounting of anything, including history, is a recipe for disaster.
Accurate accounting is the #1 skill that has drastically improved my quality of life.
> But nobody is going to make you change. You will either wake up one day and be so tired of your own bullshit that you will start to change.
You seem to be under the false belief that I'm somehow stuck unable to change. Don't know where this is coming from, but it smells of projection. You're dismissing accurate counting of history so hard it's almost like you're afraid to face the truth.
I'm not afraid of an accurate accounting of the truth, on the contrary. We call that wisdom.
As far as reaching your potential goes, just be kind to yourself
It's pretty neat to find someone smarter than me (and actually be aware of the fact).
If it helps: I think we're all a bit broken.. But whilst the first 23 years of my life were pretty rough, I'm thriving in my late 30s.
My unsolicited advice would be to find something that makes your feel good about who you are and throw yourself into it. Life and your resilience/ability to take on challenges will get so much better with a few wins under your belt.
I also can't overestimate how valuable a supportive partner is. Step 1: make sure you're worth it. Better to be kind than clever as Bezos famously said.
a high intelligent logic-oriented-nerd trying to create a big deal isn't much without a high intelligent designer and so on; to the heck this obsession with STEM at the pedagogic world
> Several teachers told me, “I don’t know how you do it!” By which they meant tolerating Georgios’ odd behaviour. The truth though is that I didn’t always do it. Much of the time, Georgios' clinginess was as irritating to me as it was to them.
As it happens, just before I read this article I had an exchange with GPT-4 about combinatorial mathematics [1]. I wanted to see how feasible it would be to learn about the subject by interacting with it. While I haven’t double-checked everything it told me, I was struck once again by its infinite patience with my questions. It is an amazing resource for students of all kinds—not just gifted ones.
Addendum: Some conversations I had with it about philosophy—the area of interest of the student in the linked article—are at [2]. Again, GPT-4 showed no irritation whatsoever with my questions.
[1] https://gally.net/temp/20240107combinatorialmathematics/inde...
[2] https://youtube.com/@Tom_Gally_UTokyo?si=qDZzPkPcFAC4Tvfc
You are extremely fortunate if the colors you see brightly are commonly seen by others or a part of a self-training loop like math, Montessori games, programming, and language. You have it harder if your favorite subject requires funding to practice, such as chemistry/advanced physics, etc. And you’d better learn how to make millions or billions if you like space stuff or care for gatekeeper-protected disciplines like some niche academia, medicine, regulated stuff, etc.
That said, the world changed recently. GPT4 came out those who have deep interests have a sparring partner they’ve never had before. I doubt it’s anywhere in their priority list, but OpenAI can probably run a fantastic networking mesh for people with niche interests. They’d have to keep the spam /obscenities out, but a group chat for anyone in a topic would be fun and a voice group lounge would be even more amazing. ChatGPT would beat facebook and much other social media for the gifted audience. It’s already the best teacher available (if you discount errors and hallucinations, which are on the decline).
From the perspective of an autistic, ex-teacher who had his IQ measured as "somewhere over 170". I probably have ADHD as well, but a psychiatrist friend says diagnosis fails with people with ridiculously high IQs.
BTW, high IQ = good at solving certain kinds of problem, not a measure of the quality of a person.