Ask HN: Are you, your spouse or your children gifted?
12 comments
I was gifted with an extra number of hands, so that I can pat you and your family members on the back at the same time.
It's probably more accurate to think of giftedness on a spectrum (not that spectrum), rather than a binary "have it or don't have it".
For example, I've noticed in myself and others that in an area where I have a particular knack or an outsized "giftedness", it also comes with a corresponding lack or void somewhere else. This is not to mean that anyone is "less than", but rather, no one is good at everything all the time. We need each other, and where I may have weaknesses, you have may have strengths. I can either appreciate the difference that you're better at something than me, be humble, and ask for your help. Or I can hate you and degrade you and belittle you for being better than me, and spend my days trying to be equal or better than you at something you likely didn't "try" to be good at in the first place. You just are. So what?
In your definition, "giftedness" comes with the added responsibility of not being demeaning to those around you. Sometimes "intellectual giftedness" comes at the cost of "social giftedness". That's not bad. It's just different gifts.
For example, I've noticed in myself and others that in an area where I have a particular knack or an outsized "giftedness", it also comes with a corresponding lack or void somewhere else. This is not to mean that anyone is "less than", but rather, no one is good at everything all the time. We need each other, and where I may have weaknesses, you have may have strengths. I can either appreciate the difference that you're better at something than me, be humble, and ask for your help. Or I can hate you and degrade you and belittle you for being better than me, and spend my days trying to be equal or better than you at something you likely didn't "try" to be good at in the first place. You just are. So what?
In your definition, "giftedness" comes with the added responsibility of not being demeaning to those around you. Sometimes "intellectual giftedness" comes at the cost of "social giftedness". That's not bad. It's just different gifts.
High IQ = gotta work hard and hope for luck to realize your dreams
Low IQ = gotta work hard and hope for luck to realize your dreams
Low or high doesn't give you any new actionable piece of information, but it is true that an official piece of paper claiming high IQ will open the door to some institutions, it remains to be seen how long it takes to fall out of love with such institutions.
Low IQ = gotta work hard and hope for luck to realize your dreams
Low or high doesn't give you any new actionable piece of information, but it is true that an official piece of paper claiming high IQ will open the door to some institutions, it remains to be seen how long it takes to fall out of love with such institutions.
If you think you went to a school for the gifted without your IQ being measured, then perhaps you're not as gifted as you claim.
Yes, according to some standardized test. But in practice, I don't consider myself particularly quick or intelligent (in comparison to some of my peers, who admittedly would not represent the baseline population).
Twice exceptional. Gifted occluded by disability. Son is the same as well as my brother. His kids are all gifted as well, but some don't have a disability too. It sucks being both.
I was an 80’s gifted kid and am still friends with several others. 98th percentile IQ, went to “enrichment” classes 3 days a week in elementary school, etc.
Honestly it sounds like a joke to me. Is that a genuine question?
I feel like a more serious/interesting question could be: do you think that IQ measures anything meaningful at all? Or not, I do believe that IQ is complete bullshit.
I feel like a more serious/interesting question could be: do you think that IQ measures anything meaningful at all? Or not, I do believe that IQ is complete bullshit.
As books such as the Bell Curve have documented, IQ is as predictive of life outcomes as almost any other metric, although there is still a lot of unexplained variance in outcomes, of course.
> > As books such as the Bell Curve have documented
The Bell Curve author is just a guy, why take what he says at face value? Also in a world of low economic growth, EQ seems much more important, you know to have the ability and the pleasure to politic your way within existing organizations and societal structures as opposed to singlehandedly create new things from scratch which seems far fetched considering that the days of revolutionary inventions you could do singlehandedly such as the wheel or fire are well into the distant past. Nowdays it is more a race to call dibs and associate one's name on progress made by the collective effort of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, that's essentially what happens in corporate America, the ability to do that is very much correlated with being in position that command lots of power and compensation, much higher multiples than those who do the technical heavy lifting.
Case in point: The US couldn't build a particle accelerator because of lack of EQ and good PR production from those who really wanted the thing, maybe because they were already thinking about what to do with the experiments wrongly assuming that the public would blindly give a green light to a 20bn dollar project just to satisfy the peculiar priorities of a very restricted number of individuals.
I don't know if that's a low IQ or a low EQ mistake, but still it's a pretty gross mistake from those who are considered to be the best and the brightest and the smartest , whatever the fuck that means in practical terms.
Speaking of practicality it was Von Neumann who was very adamant about bombing the Soviets and reducing Moscow, SPB etc to nuclear wasteland. Had he be President or close advisor to the President during the Cuban Missile Crisis he'd have launched the attack thanks to the game theory and all his intricate reasoning.
JFK without any knowledge of any of game theory but with a healthy passion for cigars, whiskey, boats and hoes de-escalated the crisis and without firing a single firecracker.
You never know the kind of guy you want to have by your side in the trenches until you make it out of it in one piece.
The Bell Curve author is just a guy, why take what he says at face value? Also in a world of low economic growth, EQ seems much more important, you know to have the ability and the pleasure to politic your way within existing organizations and societal structures as opposed to singlehandedly create new things from scratch which seems far fetched considering that the days of revolutionary inventions you could do singlehandedly such as the wheel or fire are well into the distant past. Nowdays it is more a race to call dibs and associate one's name on progress made by the collective effort of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, that's essentially what happens in corporate America, the ability to do that is very much correlated with being in position that command lots of power and compensation, much higher multiples than those who do the technical heavy lifting.
Case in point: The US couldn't build a particle accelerator because of lack of EQ and good PR production from those who really wanted the thing, maybe because they were already thinking about what to do with the experiments wrongly assuming that the public would blindly give a green light to a 20bn dollar project just to satisfy the peculiar priorities of a very restricted number of individuals.
I don't know if that's a low IQ or a low EQ mistake, but still it's a pretty gross mistake from those who are considered to be the best and the brightest and the smartest , whatever the fuck that means in practical terms.
Speaking of practicality it was Von Neumann who was very adamant about bombing the Soviets and reducing Moscow, SPB etc to nuclear wasteland. Had he be President or close advisor to the President during the Cuban Missile Crisis he'd have launched the attack thanks to the game theory and all his intricate reasoning.
JFK without any knowledge of any of game theory but with a healthy passion for cigars, whiskey, boats and hoes de-escalated the crisis and without firing a single firecracker.
You never know the kind of guy you want to have by your side in the trenches until you make it out of it in one piece.
There's been a lot of responses to the dog whistles of The Bell Curve (1994) since it was published three decades ago; as an opinion piece and example of cherry picking un normalised results to get support for a pre determined viewpoint it has all the relevance of the craniometry works of Samuel George Morton.
Not so much as an example of balanced reasoned scientific examination of the full ANOVA spectrum of a domain.
Not so much as an example of balanced reasoned scientific examination of the full ANOVA spectrum of a domain.
It's actually quite a good metric, not of intelligence but of gullibility.
I myself went to a gifted high school but never had my IQ measured. My wife is profoundly gifted and our children are both gifted, with our daughter's IQ highly gifted and our son profoundly gifted, even more so than my wife. I'm in tech and my wife is in finance.