Were you a gifted child?

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06 Feb 2021, 11:20 am

The whole educational curriculum, in most locales, has been “dumbed down” considerably over the past 100 years.

However, the variety of subjects one could study has been expanded considerably in that same time frame.

Jiheisho
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06 Feb 2021, 11:27 am

kraftiekortie wrote:

The whole educational curriculum, in most locales, has been “dumbed down” considerably over the past 100 years.

That would not be a correct statement. 100 years ago we would be learning spelling and multiplication through rote. Education in the 1920s was pretty dismal.

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06 Feb 2021, 11:34 am

atataxia wrote:

Speed of thought is the foundation that genius is built on.

That is not true. I would simply refer you to Daniel Kahnman's work. Fluency does not lead to better outcomes.

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06 Feb 2021, 11:38 am

firemonkey wrote:

kraftiekortie wrote:

Nope. Wasn’t gifted.

Got creative as a teen, though.

I became a Wolfman gifted in Howling

Especially since I've been on the internet(1996) I've come across far more people getting A+/A , and thinking they've failed for only getting 80% on a test compared to when I was a pupil/student. A lot of people expect to perform at 'gifted' level .

I was a B to C+ student. I was not the stereotypical gifted student who got a string of straight As, was a musical virtuoso and a dab hand at debating.

To a certain degree I think the term gifted has been 'dumbed down' .

Grade inflation is a real problem. If I remember the stats correctly, in the 1960s, the most common grade was a C, it is now a B or A.

I am not sure the term gifted has been dumbed down--it is hard to study outliers by their nature.

kraftiekortie
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06 Feb 2021, 11:51 am

Maybe not the material.....but the standards....were higher in the 1920s.

I got As in college with work that would probably have garnered me a C in the 1920s. I would have had to work much harder, especially within liberal arts courses, to have gained As.

What is taught in college now, especially in liberal arts courses, was taught in high school in the 1920s. Plus, in high school, within the academic curriculum, you had to become proficient in Latin and one other foreign language. In the 19th century, one had to be proficient in Latin to gain admission to college.

I did mention that the variety of subjects studied was very narrow in the 1920s, versus the 2020s. And the overall knowledge gained is much greater now than then.

Overall, people possess much more knowledge now than they did then. Sometimes, this does not translate to school success, though.

I look to Gardner’s concepts regarding “multiple intelligences” when I assess a person’s abilities. Many so-called illiterate genuises have created great, useful inventions and philosophies.

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06 Feb 2021, 1:25 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:

Nope. Wasn’t gifted.

Got creative as a teen, though.

I became a Wolfman gifted in Howling

Yep, same. Except for the Wolfman part. Though I did grow a lot of hair during puberty.

Something that differentiated me from my peers in middle school and junior high was my creativity and my lack of caring what people thought of me. It wasn't until about the second half of 8th grade that I started caring more what people thought of me, and interestingly, this coincided with an increased desire to have a girlfriend. During this time I also became increasingly shy in the presence of girls my age, whom I subconsciously considered to have a significant degree of critical authority over me.

I don't think I became qualitatively less creative, but rather that my creativity now had a more complicated obstacle to overcome in order to be expressed--it became a more systemic challenge, because social limits were imposed upon it now that my values were adjusted toward having a girlfriend. Also interestingly, my moral outlook also changed. I'm going to say more about this even though it's tangential to the original topic.

I'm probably oversharing with this, and I risk exposing myself as having (at least part of) the basis of my moral compass being extrinsically motivated. I can't say whether this is part of human nature or just part of my own personal nature, but I consider the possibility that this experience generalizes to other humans in a meaningful way. I can recall witnessing my first junior high crush showing compassion toward another classmate who was hit in the face with a football during gym class. I remember feeling, in non-verbal terms, her expression of compassion was...awe-inspiring (or rather, aww-inspiring), and this had an impact on how I behaved toward the classmate who was hit, and "made me fall in love a little" with my crush. I don't know what Psychology™ says about what makes us romantically attracted to others, but I do know that I tend to be attracted to compassionate women, and this in turn influences my own behavior. The same goes for pretty much every other psychological trait I find attractive in women.

I also don't know how attachment styles factor into this, but the general "rule" for me personally is that whatever I find attractive in women tends also to be what I aspire to myself. That is, in general, in that I don't wish to be a psychological carbon copy of women I'm attracted to, but the traits that are attractive to me strongly inform my own moral and intellectual outlook. Maybe this is because these traits were already in me to begin with, and they were nurtured by my experience in a social system. I tend to have an anxious attachment style and I find that I behave toward my limerent in the way that I'd want them to behave toward me.

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07 Feb 2021, 5:06 pm

Dial1194 wrote:

Eh... hard to say. When I went through school, a lot of the 'gifted' programs were very crude things. I got into a couple based (presumably) on good grades, and did well (if not spectacularly) enough to be part of the wallpaper. From what I gathered - hampered somewhat by my lack of networking - they were marginally less boring than the regular academic streams. I don't think we ever got taught any additional subjects; presumably it was just faster or more in-depth.

In my personal life, I didn't have any particularly intellectual or academic hobbies, other than being hyperlexic. For a while, I was the neighborhood go-to kid for configuring or un-screwing anything electronic, but it's not like I had a soldering iron and a knowledge of circuits.

Other stuff? I dunno. I wrote memory-optimization configuration files for the family PC in the mid-80s so it was capable of running some of the games of the time. Wired up an extended parallel-port cable and rigged up a home network that ran through the ceiling. Nothing exactly groundbreaking.

Were the books you read fiction, that helps problem solving skills?
"

atataxia
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08 Feb 2021, 1:24 am

diagnosedafter50 wrote:

atataxia wrote:

Yes. It has followed me like a double-edged sword, cutting both ways my whole life. I did the Montessori bit, like some of you, because of my mother. She was a proud woman. She was identical in her mental dilemma to Elizabeth Waltraub Carto. Parents died when she was young, and she made excuses for their sick mentalities because she was their little princess. She received a small fortune in children's books from my grandmother, who had saved every single one the family had ever acquired from the 1940's on. My mom also thought she'd look really fancy with complete sets, plural, of encyclopedias. She found them used at garage sales. Eventually, she had 3 sets, of which one was missing 3 books.

I sat in the basement, after her hopes to show them off became apparently unwanted. No one cared enough to discuss them, notice them, or open them. So, I had read all of them at least once by 3rd grade. I had read all of the children's books my grandma gave me. My 4th grade year, I calculated having read something like 200 books. Children's books, but nonetheless many.

When I was 7, I first told my parents the future. That same year, my dad had a car engine torn down in the garage on several carpets and rugs to be cleaned and rebuilt with his buddies. He was astonished when, while looking at the pieces, I guessed how internal combustion engines worked. I would go on to be in EL, Enhanced Learning gifted classes at school. I did mathlympics, studied the Bible at The Jesus Camp, and fixed neighborhood kids' toys for them. One of the most legendary things I did was help a few kids beat Battletoads when we hadn't even turned 10. (Anyone who knows Battletoads knows what an insane feat that is.)

I went on to high school and got good grades at a college-prep school. There were only AP classes, nothing else for gifted individuals. I could have graduated a year early, but got blocked by the guidance counselor who thought I was ret*d because I had autism. I graduated with honors, meeting every criteria to get the diploma besides a higher than 3.8 GPA. My dad pushed me to be an all-star athlete, straight A student, and to volunteer in the community. I worked with my church and local homeless shelters. I had applied to 17 colleges, received offers of scholarships from 14, with a full ride pending from Oberlin if I gave them confirmation of attendance. The last 3 were a flat acceptance from CWRU, and two rejections from Stanford and U of Michigan. I found out my dad had rewritten my entrance papers, which contained numerous errors and perpetuated his pride and hubris. I received a personalized rejection letter from U of M telling me to go f**k myself, paraphrasing.

I learned later that after 5 attempts at college, I had developed Borderline Personality Disorder from the insanity, invalidation, and neglect my parents showered on me and my sister (we both were diagnosed). I didn't settle for it, and because of all the challenges I had met, I embraced my situation and went to war with myself. I spent years correcting my life from the broken mess it became in my 20's. I beat BPD, and remain one of the only people in history to do so. I still had a few symptoms, despite my life becoming stable. And in 2018, as I was on reddit forums helping support others with BPD, I came across an article that people were being misdiagnosed as BPD when they were only autistic. I took a test from this site, and realized that I am ND.

Now, I sit in a strange and lonely place. I joined Mensa and ran laps around the people in that organization. I scored a 105 on their entrance exam. So, I know on a slow Tuesday when I was hungover that I could still run the game on a standardized test. I later scored a 97 on my ASVAB when I tried to get into the military. But they refused me entry after escorting me all the way to the final processes because I refused to lie on the entrance paperwork that I had never gone to therapy in my life. I have no where that I belong. I'm not a genius, or a nerd, or a hero, or villain, or just a regular guy. I have seen magic and miracles. And I suppose that means I'm still a gifted child. Because now, I'm doing things that no one else had thought to do. I'm solving problems for my life and for others that will help move humanity forward.

Who knows. What I do know is that if you're telling yourself you're not gifted because you didn't do well in school, then you don't know what gifted is. Speed of thought is the foundation that genius is built on. When I was the GenY coordinator for my local Mensa chapter, I got to see plenty of "smart" folks. You want a quick litmus for who's the smartest person in the room? Tell a commonly funny joke. Whoever laughs first is the smartest one. Tell a few more jokes. See if it holds that they get to the punchline faster than others. That's real intelligence. Memorizing things doesn't mean s**t, if it takes thousands of hours.

Hi, Reading all those old children's books gave you a great valuable gift.

When you say you were 7 and you told your parents the future, do you mean that you had a paranormal gift?

Guessing how engines worked sounded like those old children's books helped you become intuitive and psychic. The books seemed to help with problem solving.neighborhood kids' toys for them.
I don't know battletoads

Sorry your guidance counselor judged you as ret*d.

You sound empathetic and spiritually gifted.

Was your dad narcissistic?

The institutions who rejected you lost out.

You don't sound borderline.

Honesty is a sign of spiritual gifts.

I am very interested to know what magic and miracles you have seen, would you mind elaborating please?

Caring for humanity is another spiritual gift.
thank you.

I learned to social engineer and mask, like most asd folks. I was highly intelligent and spent much of my time asking profound questions. I call it telling the future. But the reality was it was more like the con artistry of a medium. I knew likelihoods and probabilities. So, predictions were just a “most likely” scenario given the data.

Real magic and miracles are just things that are mathematically impossible, but happen anyway. People beating cancer. Finding their wallets when they were lost at the bottom of a lake. Meeting the right person at the exact right moment.

I was having dinner with a friend one time trying to explain what “social magic” was. She had an autistic brother. And I was explaining how if asd people are actively attentive in their environment, they can conjure up the impossible. Then, a few new guests sat next to us. I started chatting them up, since it was a shared table at a tightly packed rooftop bar in sf. Turns out, dude who got sat graduated with my friend some 5 years beforehand, in a different state. The coincidence was astronomical.

My dad and mom are both potentially spectrum. They were raised to 100% mask or be cast from our families. They were as narcissistic as anyone really. But because of their low awareness, their problems are constantly made a burden others must solve.

I appreciate the supportive comments. I am no longer BPD symptomatic. I consider myself to have bested it. I believe in therapy, weekly when needed. And I have had therapists tell me they didn’t believe anyone could beat borderline, and this, said I was a liar. I had them fired. I am merciless when it comes to protecting my stability.

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08 Feb 2021, 1:37 am

It feels a bit weird for me to revisit this topic. I forget there was this very long chapter in my life. Today, when I'm not busy staring at a wall, I play video games. I'm happy with that. For most of my life it was not like this though. I had a bright future to catch up to. It was right over there, just around the corner. Juuuuust around the corner.

I don't miss that. I really don't. It feels like several lifetimes ago though. A bad dream. So it's okay.

Besides the fact that I just don't get along with people (especially people combined with deadlines), I think one thing that exacerbated the problem for me was that it was never clear what path I should even try. People usually talk about math skills and language skills as if they're nearly mutually exclusive, and I don't know if that's how it is for most people, but for me it just wasn't like that. I was always better than nearly everyone around me at both (before college, at least).

Ultimately I tend to be more interested in language-related topics, but I could never imagine (still can't) what I could have ever done with a language degree that I don't already do without it. I majored in computer science (which I still think is a cool subject, even if I don't think about it much anymore), but the pure math part of the program (and there was a lot of it) felt like torture. I liked the concepts involved, but the classes were abysmally boring, and I absolutely hated the sterile way how they demanded us to prove our understanding. Like... why on earth should you ever be expected to have memorized dozens of formulas before even learning where they came from? That's just stupid. And it all felt just so... disembodied. Disconnected. Pointless. Mere curiosities that we were demanded to know as strict and serious things. Just because. Tradition.

I have ADHD (you can guess at what point in that storyline I found out about it), so following up on anything complex and long-term is not my strong suit, to put it mildly. I don't think I'll ever have the motivation again to even try and start anything that fits that description. But if I did have that motivation, that long-term thing would probably involve computational linguistics.

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08 Feb 2021, 1:55 pm

Jiheisho wrote:

firemonkey wrote:

kraftiekortie wrote:

Nope. Wasn’t gifted.

Got creative as a teen, though.

I became a Wolfman gifted in Howling

I confess I cannot come to a conclusion regarding grade inflation or not.

It may depend on how grades are set.

If all the papers that year are first scored, then the scores plotted out to determine if they fit the bell curve, and then papers allcated grades on the basis of, for sake of argument, A = top one standards deviation, B one and a half standard deviations down and so forth, then in one way the grades never inflate, but how certain would it be that the grades actually remain consistent over the years.

If on the other hand, there is a definite standard to achieve, and over the years more papers reach that standard, is their inflation in the grades or is teaching and learning improving, for example by teachers making use of all the feedback which exam boards offer and working it into their teaching so that more and more scripts meet the standard.

Plus, would I find the physics A-level or equivalent paper seemed easier now simply because back then I had had to learn it, and now I have had a career applying a good subset of that knowledge in my working life.

All interesting stuff to ponder.

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08 Feb 2021, 3:42 pm

I wasn't gifted, in any way that I recall but my main experience of childhood was intense frustration. I was able to visualise things very clearly - things I wanted to make. Tree-houses, go-karts, underground tunnel networks, hovercraft - that sort of thing. And I would try to bring these things into reality, lacking the skills and the know-how and get hugely frustrated that I couldn't make these things as well as I could imagine them. That might be all kids, I don't know.

At school I was always above my reading age and had an unusually wide vocabularly, I think because I was trying to avoid people misunderstanding me so I used very precise language. But mainly I learned how to coast through doing minimum work without attracting attention to myself.

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09 Feb 2021, 2:21 am

'
I wasn't gifted, in any way that I recall but my main experience of childhood was intense frustration. I was able to visualise things very clearly - things I wanted to make. Tree-houses, go-karts, underground tunnel networks, hovercraft - that sort of thing. And I would try to bring these things into reality, lacking the skills and the know-how and get hugely frustrated that I couldn't make these things as well as I could imagine them.
'

I play minecraft (or space engineers) bc of this. Even at 50 :nerdy: The collecting or resources is part of the whole prosess for me. At school I was lucky to have excellent handcraft teachers, I still have some of the more artful things hanging around. I'm not gifted, or maybe a bit for observing things and remember and assess.

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09 Feb 2021, 2:26 am

Jiheisho wrote:

firemonkey wrote:

kraftiekortie wrote:

Nope. Wasn’t gifted.

Got creative as a teen, though.

I became a Wolfman gifted in Howling

This is a bit tricky, since the IQ quotient has gone from 100 to 120 in the last 100 years or so. I think the difference is mostly that thinking-tools are more widely spread not stuck in families or groups. I think its D.Dennet that wrote a book about this!?

atataxia
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09 Feb 2021, 1:00 pm

Jiheisho wrote:

atataxia wrote:

Speed of thought is the foundation that genius is built on.

That is not true. I would simply refer you to Daniel Kahnman's work. Fluency does not lead to better outcomes.

I think you're actually agreeing with me. Fluency is the issue many of these people face. They can art but not science. They can math but not read. Fluency, since you're the one who used the word, would indicate cross-specialization in a normalized setting being the necessary trait to demonstrate intelligence. In short, you have to be good at things you don't specialize in under test conditions in order to show you're smart.

What I am saying is this fluency IS the problem with identifying genius intellect. Since autism spectrum disorder takes specific interest in an enormously wide range of fields in its people, I had to figure out a way to collect more of them in a pool that equalizes them. I give you, the funniest joke in the world. This isn't the most funny joke, it is simply the one more people get cross-culturally across the globe.

"Two hunters were walking through the woods and decided to separate to cover more ground. After a short while, the first hunter sees movement in the distance and fires his gun. He runs over to discover that he has wounded his friend. While his friend cries in agony, the first hunter calls emergency services. The operator asks the hunter to describe his emergency.

'Help. I've shot my friend. I think he might be dying.'

'The first thing we need to do is make sure you're friend is dead or not, sir,' the operator tells him.

Ka-blam, the operator hears over the phone.

'Ok, he's dead. Now what?' the hunter says."

I've told this joke hundreds of times as an icebreaker. I have only once had someone not "get it." That happened because she observed late, and thought I was telling a story about a time I shot someone. So, it was disturbing to her when everyone started laughing because I told them I killed my friend....

It has served as an observational way to determine if humor is a good litmus for intelligence. Obviously, there are humorless people in the world who will resist a joke by yeeting themselves from an 8 story window before you get to the punchline. As they parachute away, they won't be able to hear you, and thus, you may not be able to determine if they would have laughed first. But try it.

Fluency is great and all, like in the case of the SATs. But for there is no true aggregate test that will work for every human on the planet. Despite how similar everyone is, they're just too different for that to be the case. My test really only works if the person isn't taking everything too seriously.

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09 Feb 2021, 1:46 pm

I only got O levels, and never went to college/university . Compared to a lot of you I'm a lame donkey taking part in the Kentucky derby.

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09 Feb 2021, 1:48 pm

You're an autodidact, Firemonkey. You don't get those high IQs for nothing.....

Have you thought about taking university courses? It's never too late. I hear about people graduating in their 80s.

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