> I suspect it is socially good for most kids to have a few classes with kids 1-2 years older and younger than them; being age-segregated all day is artificial and seems unhealthy.
Absolutely. This would have been a godsend for me as a kid who started puberty before anyone else in my grade. Wouldn’t have felt like such a freak if I’d had more older friends! And I think it would help the kids on the opposite end of the spectrum too.
While I’m quite positive on tracking, I think class skipping is much more of a mixed bag. Knowing a handful of people who did or could have skipped several grades (not a big sample size, but this study isn’t large either), I would say the results are far less consistent than this study shows, both for those who did and didn’t skip. I wouldn’t ban skipping, but to take one issue, being a part of the college social scene at 15/16 or younger is…not ideal.
The life stories are even more interesting than the ‘odds’. See Prof Joan Freeman’s illuminating book “Gifted Lives” where she traces life stories of adults whom she identified and counselled as gifted children. Life trajectories are often unpredictable, even for prodigies.
In Israel we have a program for gifted kids where they can go to a special regional school once a week, starting from the second grade. They don't accelerate the regular curriculum, but it is more of an enrichment program - some of it in more academic content, and some in soft skills such as theater, etc.
My daughter attended this program, it helped with the social issues and she was able to make more friends, but I don't think it was really stimulating or challenging in the intellectual side.
Does IQ or an isolationist temperament interacting with IQ cause the exceptional performance here? If it's raw IQ / an innate biological trait about semantic uptake speed then sure, building cohorts of the 1/10000 exceptionally gifted will work
But, if the exceptional performance described here is a combination of ~1/500 IQ with 1/50 level fixation and isolationist temperament then it's not clear we serve ourselves well by walling those children off together. Maybe they forget how to "touch grass" or work in teams or flirt idk.
Will be pretty exciting when AI curriculums enable more darwinian process and teachers exert a less stringent editorial privilege over who does and doesn't get access to challenging material. I bet that intellectually gifted children are more frequent than these exceptional cohorts suggest, but that those children simply don't have the disposition to advocate for material that isolates them from peers.
For example, a three jump is a lot, but in my experience clever twelve year olds can comfortably handle university level maths. The difference in peer composition bw a three year displacement and an eight year displacement actually matters and perhaps parents / children rightly intuit that a 12 yr old shouldn't hang with horny 20 yr olds or miserable grad students.
The dream of a self paced AI curriculum with teacher supervisors would let the wiz kids all chew on advanced material and perhaps cluster amongst the top 1/100 level talent while still hanging with other children whose relationship w sexuality & physicality are developmentally synced.
Bottom line, I think the cost of holding talent back is even larger than the forfeit counterfactual where we identify the top 1/10000 because we are instead holding back the top 1/100+
Kids in Gifted programs work in teams a lot, historically. And the highly intelligent "flirt" in a much more nuanced and subdued way. They tend to find "nigh club level" flirting repellent. The onlooker of average intelligence often fails to identify "flirting" in the high IQ context.
Why on earth would anyone concern themselves with flirting among CHILDREN anyway? Very weird. Let them study and make platonic connections with both sexes who are their actual FRIENDS. Jesus Christ.
As someone who is a critic of the superficiality of a lot of psychology measurements and the criteria used for interpretation and scoring- especially of "IQ" tests- I found a lot of insight in this article- mostly because of the additional details, and the insights inferred from them. The test subjects were more than just ciphers.
I think this is probably the most productive way to initiate the study of subjects like developmental psychology- finding the outlier cohorts and studying them at a sample size that allows for a deeper level of inquiry, and also longitudinally, across the years of early childhood when there's the most development.
I'd like to see a similar approach used for studies of "super-recallers"- that rare population with extraordinary long-term memory recall. (At what age can it be said to initially appear? Are there varying levels of acuity in the recollections?) And also "idiot savants" with uncanny math calculation abilities. Or high-performing autists with similarly exceptional abilities. (Consider Nikola Tesla, who built many of his most important inventions by visualizing them in his "mind's eye", turning them over and around in three dimensions. And who also supposedly found that inspiration while not in a wakeful state, but instead in a trance-like condition of hypnagogic reverie, while napping or sleeping.)
I'm also curious about mental "developmental windows"--it's amazing to find that some of the children were reading at age 1 or 2! I'd also want to know about when, how, and why that window closes- are late bloomers being overlooked? How does mental development track physical development? The study cited in the post shows that complex mental abilities can show up far in advance of the normal age span of early childhood physical development--does mental development ever open late, in comparison to physical development? Does the window shut later for some children than others?
One of my major problems with the current state of educational testing for "intelligence" is that it's a mass-psychology approach that puts its focus and attention on large group scores accumulated with more or less perfunctory exams in order to provide an aggregate outline of some great anonymous "bell curve" cohort and its 1st and maybe 2nd standard deviation populations. It's practically more of a Geopolitics study than a study of the intelligence of human individuals.
This emphasis is how entire populations, >1,000,000, have been assigned a single score in "national IQ" studies- "the Han Chinese are 105, White Americans are 100", "Ashkenazi Jews are 107", or what have you...this is quackery. Such group estimates don't even make sense as a population ancestry study, unless the ancestry can be completely documented- does anyone really believe that "Ashkenazi Jews" are some separate population, as if there's been no hybridity over the centuries? There has been. Multifarious hybridity. Lots of it. So how can "Ashkenazi Jews" be labelled as "IQ 105" or whatever, when it isn't a uniform category of ancestry? The ancestry is identifiable by the presence of a handful of allele variants. That doesn't make Ashkenazim a "racial population" on par with, say, the Ainu of Hokkaido.
I don't even want to get into the database and methodology problems of "national IQ" studies. They're silly. But also taken seriously, judging by the frequency of Substack articles that rely on the amorphous "national IQ score"conclusions assigned by Richard Lynn and his acolytes. In contrast to in-depth longitudinal studies of IQ and early childhood development, "National IQ" and its related aspects are a very popular topic on Substack.
I'd venture that there's a lot more insight to be gleaned from a more intensive study like the posted one, which has the possibility of discovering specific ability trait indicators that might continue to track to the next standard deviation toward the bell, and so on. Finding means of comparison that can be traced even further toward the median, etc.
The outliers are also where to focus genomic studies when it comes to questions related to possible allele and pleitropic influences on specific mental traits, and currently missing heritability, it makes more sense to focus on a few optimal examples and go on to expand the inquiry wider to the next percentile of "giftedness", rather than attempting to draw inferences from the rickety framework of studies of alleles in large regional populations. If you want to study intelligence differences--obviously they exist, and exist independently of 'nurture', as the study demonstrates--doesn't it make the most sense to focus on the aspects found as genetic features in unique individuals, rather than scattered allele samplings of large population cohorts chosen for on the basis of some "IQ score" assigned on a group basis?
That "I think this kid has something not explained by the education they're getting; the other kids aren't like this" feeling is what spurs teachers to recommend students for IQ testing. That said, many teachers interpret giftedness as obstinance or "insubordination", so that's not to say that most teachers are even capable of comprehending the underlying reason for why the child is questioning everything or being open about things that don't make logical sense.
Now if only IQ tests could investigate how good someone is at making up believable lies, at telling the future, at reading minds ..then some of the high academic performers would no longer make the cut and some new kinds of intelligent people would.
I drove a cab for many years, most often on the night shift, and found it advantageous to get in touch with my cold reading skills. I never got robbed. Almost all of the other drivers were held up at least once. Some years on, I found an online test going around: 8 photos of innocent normie IT professionals, 8 photos of serial killers, and people were invited to sort them. I got a perfect score. Just from subtle visual cues that I noted in the facial affect. I'm not sure I could still do that. So many mental skills require some form of pump priming, and continual practice!
Also, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to have something at stake. I think that problem may account for some low scorers on IQ tests--they disdain the importance of the exercise. They aren't motivated to apply themselves to the exercise.
I do recognize that there's definitely an individual variation of human mental abilities--quite a range of it--and that IQ tests are reasonably good at identifying some of the strong suits related to scholastic achievement and technical prowess, especially those related to abstract thinking and constructing concepts from other concepts by utilizing general principles of logic or pattern formation. But in my opinion there's too much emphasis on IQ tests as a determination of the full spectrum of mental abilities and intelligence acuity, and the way that the label "IQ" is used in the currency of popular speech as shorthand for some univariate linear measurement of intelligence is downright sloppy.
I think some of the current insistence on the importance of IQ is related to the frustrations of the way superior athletic ability is visibly evident--and celebrated--while superior mental capabilities are an interior process, and one that isn't as easily demonstrated, and more recondite. This is frustrating, that Nobel prizewinners in Science get one day a year and some crumb level of money and celebrity, while Pro Athletes grab the headlines, the 8-figure salaries, etc. So the intellectuals, the scholars, are encouraged by their egos to assert that while superior athletic skill is a narrow subset of human ability (which it is) that has little direct relevance off the playing field, Superior Intelligence is actually Important. The True Arbiter of Superiority.
But just as an athlete superior at sprinting may not be all that good at hitting a baseball, someone adept at making complex mathematical calculations may find that their superior ability in that specialized Event does not carry over to, say, perspicacity in making a business investment, or their short-term memory, or to picking up signals from their spouse, or their own children.*
Also, to reiterate one of my points, intelligence is essentially an Invisible ability. And also one that's resistant to sure measures of its potential. It's a pretty sure thing that the athletes in an Olympics event are going to go all-out from the starting line, pushing their physical atheltic potential to its limit. Is there an analogous means of reliably ascertaining that someone is pushing a particular intellectual ability to its limit?
Not really. We have to be satisfied with observations of activated ability, such as the precocious children studied in the post we're discussing.
(*I think there's also a related conceit--that the default condition of humans is to be dialed-in, self-aware, that our knowledge input is easily interpreted and incorporated. That the human condition is perfectible, and that we're almost there. I've come around to the view that humans are basically self-absorbed, often semi-somnabulist and running on rote programming, more ignorant than we like to think, and infuriatingly liable to reset to default assumptions that are not duly examined or challenged. Also inclined to think that our subjective perspective encompasses the world, the cosmos, the whole damn universe. That's what "original sin" is, to me. That inescapable default inclination toward judging Good and Evil, based on personal biases. I don't think that humans are naturally "good" or naturally "evil." But we are naturally Bad. Inertially prone to be more stupid than we think we are. Humility should always inform our studies.)
People of average intelligence are much more likely to be arrogant than high intelligent people. The latter know that their experience isn’t the whole universe; it’s a hallmark of a highly capable mind.
“Also, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to have something at stake. I think that problem may account for some low scorers on IQ tests--they disdain the importance of the exercise. They aren't motivated to apply themselves to the exercise.”
This is mostly a cop-out, as the gifted child tends to be VERY invested in figuring out why they feel so different, why the other kids seem to be so threatened, and whether the special program (GATE, TAG, etc) can give them some kind of outlet and challenge so desperately needed.
Now, all government programs are disappointments. But when you’re a brilliant 8 year old, you’re just hoping something will be better than the typical classroom.
It’s time for the crabs in the bucket to stop sabotaging the high IQ and let support them as they do what they do best: problem solving, invention, theory-creation, art, leadership on a large scale.
"Original sin is probably just the lie. People of average intelligence are much more likely to be arrogant than high intelligent people. The latter know that their experience isn’t the whole universe; it’s a hallmark of a highly capable mind."
Oh ho ho. You're kidding yourself. The heart of the problem isn't a matter of comparing between "people of average intelligence" and "high intelligent people." Even if your premise is granted*, the core problem is that even most of the "high intelligent people" lack sufficient humility to check the presumptuousness default of human awareness, often while wielding much more power to do harm than people who aren't at an elite level of functioning. Qualities like humility have an unstable and often fractious relationship with abilities like abstract reasoning, not the inextricable linkage that you imply. Most of the catastrophes of human history have resulted from the decisions of "people of high intelligence", often as a shared consensus of "high performers." Because personal ego and ambition are peerless at short-circuiting considerations like probity, impartiality, and sobriety. Notwithstanding whatever strong suits someone might have in regard to particular intelligence abilities.
My comments about the level of motivation to do well aren't particularly directed at the students who perform the best on IQ tests; it makes sense that their success is correlated with their level of motivation. But the social milieu that surrounds a child can and often does work to discourage them from cultivating their particular intelligence or demonstrating those abilities- especially to their age group peers- and simply presenting them with an IQ exam is unlikely to unlock a level of high-performing potential that they've hidden, or that they may only dimly intuit that they possess.
Much of your complaint is directed at the anti-intellectual character of the society that you observe surrounding you, wherever that might be. I certainly notice it in my own society- America, the US- and in fact it's a problem that's only grown over time, influencing everything from informal public attitudes to news media discourse to education priorities (in both public and private schools) and what American voters value in terms of the intellectual caliber of their elected officials. I agree with you on that.
I also agree that the general run of K-12 schools neglect or even actively impair the potential of the most scholastically gifted students. In my view, the most important players in remedying that situation are the parents (it's a lot easier if there are two of them). Because workarounds are available- home-schooling, early admission to local college classes instead of remaining stunted and stagnant in a high school, even scholarships to private schools. But as a practical reality, the parents need to be proactive on that score. The institutions don't put much energy into making active suggestions in that regard. Neither do they put much energy into providing an extra level of challenge for high-performing students, judging by how competitive the process is. Magnet schools separate out the elite of the elite as a cupola, but what about the next tier of advanced performance? The bottom line is that the educational priorities of this society are mostly lip service; the learning institutions aren't even competent at supplying a sufficient number of skilled technical workers, much less prizing intellectual ability the way it rewards skill in spectator sports.
*I think it's only conditionally valid. The problem I speak of is not merely a matter of Dunning-Kruger overestimation.
Not reading all that. Stopped at the Santa-laugh. Highly intelligent people are more aware of what they don't know.
High IQ kids have always been much more balanced and a greater tendency to say, "I don't know, let me look into that".
Less intelligent people try to make something up, and ironically look at intelligent people like they are stupid for admitting they need to study that area.
Average to stupid people watch high IQ people like hawks so that the second the latter makes any mistake whatsoever, the former can jump up in front of the room, pointing with a fully extended dominant arm, screaming "LOOK!QQ!1 YOU GOT THAT WRONG!!!!"11 HEY EVERYBOEDYYY!1"
High IQ tend to think differently and others can't grasp it. They would rather tell themselves that person must be wrong than to confess that maybe it's tough for them to comprehend thoughts of a higher order.
Prof Joan Freeman’s book “Gifted Lives” may interest you. She follows through the lives of adults whom she identified and mentored, as an eminent psychologist specializing in the development of gifted children.
thanks for the recommendation. I'd be interested in any accounts of "super-recallers", too. The latent potential of encoded memory that's indicated by those cases would be a good topic for more intensive research.
I'm skeptical of any parents who are giving their 6 yr old an IQ test. You can teach any bright child a skill early if that's what you chose to do, but it comes at significant opportunity cost. It's likely why these kids never grow up to be anything of note.
Also there are plenty of people who don't exactly become figures of note (say, famous scientists) simply because we just don't have many figures of note. Certainly not many intellectual figures of note.
It's unrealistic to expect child prodigies to become famous because it's unrealistic to expect just about any intellectual pursuit to make you famous.
Yeah, there seem to be people who say things of the form "Aha! Only 1 in 15 of these high-scoring children became notable scientists/mathematicians!" (aside from Gross's sample, Hollingworth's sample of 12 children over 180 IQ included Murray Gerstenhaber), and act like this proves the test scores are irrelevant. They don't mention that the general public has more like a 1 in 20,000 chance of becoming a notable scientist, and therefore getting these high scores as a child gives you 1000x better odds.
The paper also admits, "This evidence does not conflict with the finding that early exceptional performers are [much] more likely to become adult exceptional performers compared with the remainder of the population in a domain ... Those who reach international junior championships, compared with the remainder of the population, are 49 times as likely to go on to reach international senior championships". While it doesn't prove causation, it certainly doesn't support your intuition.
just being able to try a broad range of things to nurture intellectual curiosity and help them find their passion. ballet, writing music, martial arts, building stuff, art, morse code, submarines, WW2 aircraft, birds of prey, butterflies, cartography, oscilloscopery, hunting- just to name a few of my kids' interests.
if i was making them do phonics drills all day long they'd lose a lot.
“It’s my duty to pluck the tall poppies” 😯
> I suspect it is socially good for most kids to have a few classes with kids 1-2 years older and younger than them; being age-segregated all day is artificial and seems unhealthy.
Absolutely. This would have been a godsend for me as a kid who started puberty before anyone else in my grade. Wouldn’t have felt like such a freak if I’d had more older friends! And I think it would help the kids on the opposite end of the spectrum too.
While I’m quite positive on tracking, I think class skipping is much more of a mixed bag. Knowing a handful of people who did or could have skipped several grades (not a big sample size, but this study isn’t large either), I would say the results are far less consistent than this study shows, both for those who did and didn’t skip. I wouldn’t ban skipping, but to take one issue, being a part of the college social scene at 15/16 or younger is…not ideal.
The life stories are even more interesting than the ‘odds’. See Prof Joan Freeman’s illuminating book “Gifted Lives” where she traces life stories of adults whom she identified and counselled as gifted children. Life trajectories are often unpredictable, even for prodigies.
In Israel we have a program for gifted kids where they can go to a special regional school once a week, starting from the second grade. They don't accelerate the regular curriculum, but it is more of an enrichment program - some of it in more academic content, and some in soft skills such as theater, etc.
My daughter attended this program, it helped with the social issues and she was able to make more friends, but I don't think it was really stimulating or challenging in the intellectual side.
Does IQ or an isolationist temperament interacting with IQ cause the exceptional performance here? If it's raw IQ / an innate biological trait about semantic uptake speed then sure, building cohorts of the 1/10000 exceptionally gifted will work
But, if the exceptional performance described here is a combination of ~1/500 IQ with 1/50 level fixation and isolationist temperament then it's not clear we serve ourselves well by walling those children off together. Maybe they forget how to "touch grass" or work in teams or flirt idk.
Will be pretty exciting when AI curriculums enable more darwinian process and teachers exert a less stringent editorial privilege over who does and doesn't get access to challenging material. I bet that intellectually gifted children are more frequent than these exceptional cohorts suggest, but that those children simply don't have the disposition to advocate for material that isolates them from peers.
For example, a three jump is a lot, but in my experience clever twelve year olds can comfortably handle university level maths. The difference in peer composition bw a three year displacement and an eight year displacement actually matters and perhaps parents / children rightly intuit that a 12 yr old shouldn't hang with horny 20 yr olds or miserable grad students.
The dream of a self paced AI curriculum with teacher supervisors would let the wiz kids all chew on advanced material and perhaps cluster amongst the top 1/100 level talent while still hanging with other children whose relationship w sexuality & physicality are developmentally synced.
Bottom line, I think the cost of holding talent back is even larger than the forfeit counterfactual where we identify the top 1/10000 because we are instead holding back the top 1/100+
"Work in teams or flirt idk."
Kids in Gifted programs work in teams a lot, historically. And the highly intelligent "flirt" in a much more nuanced and subdued way. They tend to find "nigh club level" flirting repellent. The onlooker of average intelligence often fails to identify "flirting" in the high IQ context.
Why on earth would anyone concern themselves with flirting among CHILDREN anyway? Very weird. Let them study and make platonic connections with both sexes who are their actual FRIENDS. Jesus Christ.
As someone who is a critic of the superficiality of a lot of psychology measurements and the criteria used for interpretation and scoring- especially of "IQ" tests- I found a lot of insight in this article- mostly because of the additional details, and the insights inferred from them. The test subjects were more than just ciphers.
I think this is probably the most productive way to initiate the study of subjects like developmental psychology- finding the outlier cohorts and studying them at a sample size that allows for a deeper level of inquiry, and also longitudinally, across the years of early childhood when there's the most development.
I'd like to see a similar approach used for studies of "super-recallers"- that rare population with extraordinary long-term memory recall. (At what age can it be said to initially appear? Are there varying levels of acuity in the recollections?) And also "idiot savants" with uncanny math calculation abilities. Or high-performing autists with similarly exceptional abilities. (Consider Nikola Tesla, who built many of his most important inventions by visualizing them in his "mind's eye", turning them over and around in three dimensions. And who also supposedly found that inspiration while not in a wakeful state, but instead in a trance-like condition of hypnagogic reverie, while napping or sleeping.)
I'm also curious about mental "developmental windows"--it's amazing to find that some of the children were reading at age 1 or 2! I'd also want to know about when, how, and why that window closes- are late bloomers being overlooked? How does mental development track physical development? The study cited in the post shows that complex mental abilities can show up far in advance of the normal age span of early childhood physical development--does mental development ever open late, in comparison to physical development? Does the window shut later for some children than others?
One of my major problems with the current state of educational testing for "intelligence" is that it's a mass-psychology approach that puts its focus and attention on large group scores accumulated with more or less perfunctory exams in order to provide an aggregate outline of some great anonymous "bell curve" cohort and its 1st and maybe 2nd standard deviation populations. It's practically more of a Geopolitics study than a study of the intelligence of human individuals.
This emphasis is how entire populations, >1,000,000, have been assigned a single score in "national IQ" studies- "the Han Chinese are 105, White Americans are 100", "Ashkenazi Jews are 107", or what have you...this is quackery. Such group estimates don't even make sense as a population ancestry study, unless the ancestry can be completely documented- does anyone really believe that "Ashkenazi Jews" are some separate population, as if there's been no hybridity over the centuries? There has been. Multifarious hybridity. Lots of it. So how can "Ashkenazi Jews" be labelled as "IQ 105" or whatever, when it isn't a uniform category of ancestry? The ancestry is identifiable by the presence of a handful of allele variants. That doesn't make Ashkenazim a "racial population" on par with, say, the Ainu of Hokkaido.
I don't even want to get into the database and methodology problems of "national IQ" studies. They're silly. But also taken seriously, judging by the frequency of Substack articles that rely on the amorphous "national IQ score"conclusions assigned by Richard Lynn and his acolytes. In contrast to in-depth longitudinal studies of IQ and early childhood development, "National IQ" and its related aspects are a very popular topic on Substack.
I'd venture that there's a lot more insight to be gleaned from a more intensive study like the posted one, which has the possibility of discovering specific ability trait indicators that might continue to track to the next standard deviation toward the bell, and so on. Finding means of comparison that can be traced even further toward the median, etc.
The outliers are also where to focus genomic studies when it comes to questions related to possible allele and pleitropic influences on specific mental traits, and currently missing heritability, it makes more sense to focus on a few optimal examples and go on to expand the inquiry wider to the next percentile of "giftedness", rather than attempting to draw inferences from the rickety framework of studies of alleles in large regional populations. If you want to study intelligence differences--obviously they exist, and exist independently of 'nurture', as the study demonstrates--doesn't it make the most sense to focus on the aspects found as genetic features in unique individuals, rather than scattered allele samplings of large population cohorts chosen for on the basis of some "IQ score" assigned on a group basis?
That "I think this kid has something not explained by the education they're getting; the other kids aren't like this" feeling is what spurs teachers to recommend students for IQ testing. That said, many teachers interpret giftedness as obstinance or "insubordination", so that's not to say that most teachers are even capable of comprehending the underlying reason for why the child is questioning everything or being open about things that don't make logical sense.
Now if only IQ tests could investigate how good someone is at making up believable lies, at telling the future, at reading minds ..then some of the high academic performers would no longer make the cut and some new kinds of intelligent people would.
I drove a cab for many years, most often on the night shift, and found it advantageous to get in touch with my cold reading skills. I never got robbed. Almost all of the other drivers were held up at least once. Some years on, I found an online test going around: 8 photos of innocent normie IT professionals, 8 photos of serial killers, and people were invited to sort them. I got a perfect score. Just from subtle visual cues that I noted in the facial affect. I'm not sure I could still do that. So many mental skills require some form of pump priming, and continual practice!
Also, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to have something at stake. I think that problem may account for some low scorers on IQ tests--they disdain the importance of the exercise. They aren't motivated to apply themselves to the exercise.
I do recognize that there's definitely an individual variation of human mental abilities--quite a range of it--and that IQ tests are reasonably good at identifying some of the strong suits related to scholastic achievement and technical prowess, especially those related to abstract thinking and constructing concepts from other concepts by utilizing general principles of logic or pattern formation. But in my opinion there's too much emphasis on IQ tests as a determination of the full spectrum of mental abilities and intelligence acuity, and the way that the label "IQ" is used in the currency of popular speech as shorthand for some univariate linear measurement of intelligence is downright sloppy.
I think some of the current insistence on the importance of IQ is related to the frustrations of the way superior athletic ability is visibly evident--and celebrated--while superior mental capabilities are an interior process, and one that isn't as easily demonstrated, and more recondite. This is frustrating, that Nobel prizewinners in Science get one day a year and some crumb level of money and celebrity, while Pro Athletes grab the headlines, the 8-figure salaries, etc. So the intellectuals, the scholars, are encouraged by their egos to assert that while superior athletic skill is a narrow subset of human ability (which it is) that has little direct relevance off the playing field, Superior Intelligence is actually Important. The True Arbiter of Superiority.
But just as an athlete superior at sprinting may not be all that good at hitting a baseball, someone adept at making complex mathematical calculations may find that their superior ability in that specialized Event does not carry over to, say, perspicacity in making a business investment, or their short-term memory, or to picking up signals from their spouse, or their own children.*
Also, to reiterate one of my points, intelligence is essentially an Invisible ability. And also one that's resistant to sure measures of its potential. It's a pretty sure thing that the athletes in an Olympics event are going to go all-out from the starting line, pushing their physical atheltic potential to its limit. Is there an analogous means of reliably ascertaining that someone is pushing a particular intellectual ability to its limit?
Not really. We have to be satisfied with observations of activated ability, such as the precocious children studied in the post we're discussing.
(*I think there's also a related conceit--that the default condition of humans is to be dialed-in, self-aware, that our knowledge input is easily interpreted and incorporated. That the human condition is perfectible, and that we're almost there. I've come around to the view that humans are basically self-absorbed, often semi-somnabulist and running on rote programming, more ignorant than we like to think, and infuriatingly liable to reset to default assumptions that are not duly examined or challenged. Also inclined to think that our subjective perspective encompasses the world, the cosmos, the whole damn universe. That's what "original sin" is, to me. That inescapable default inclination toward judging Good and Evil, based on personal biases. I don't think that humans are naturally "good" or naturally "evil." But we are naturally Bad. Inertially prone to be more stupid than we think we are. Humility should always inform our studies.)
Original sin is probably just the lie.
People of average intelligence are much more likely to be arrogant than high intelligent people. The latter know that their experience isn’t the whole universe; it’s a hallmark of a highly capable mind.
“Also, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to have something at stake. I think that problem may account for some low scorers on IQ tests--they disdain the importance of the exercise. They aren't motivated to apply themselves to the exercise.”
This is mostly a cop-out, as the gifted child tends to be VERY invested in figuring out why they feel so different, why the other kids seem to be so threatened, and whether the special program (GATE, TAG, etc) can give them some kind of outlet and challenge so desperately needed.
Now, all government programs are disappointments. But when you’re a brilliant 8 year old, you’re just hoping something will be better than the typical classroom.
It’s time for the crabs in the bucket to stop sabotaging the high IQ and let support them as they do what they do best: problem solving, invention, theory-creation, art, leadership on a large scale.
"Original sin is probably just the lie. People of average intelligence are much more likely to be arrogant than high intelligent people. The latter know that their experience isn’t the whole universe; it’s a hallmark of a highly capable mind."
Oh ho ho. You're kidding yourself. The heart of the problem isn't a matter of comparing between "people of average intelligence" and "high intelligent people." Even if your premise is granted*, the core problem is that even most of the "high intelligent people" lack sufficient humility to check the presumptuousness default of human awareness, often while wielding much more power to do harm than people who aren't at an elite level of functioning. Qualities like humility have an unstable and often fractious relationship with abilities like abstract reasoning, not the inextricable linkage that you imply. Most of the catastrophes of human history have resulted from the decisions of "people of high intelligence", often as a shared consensus of "high performers." Because personal ego and ambition are peerless at short-circuiting considerations like probity, impartiality, and sobriety. Notwithstanding whatever strong suits someone might have in regard to particular intelligence abilities.
My comments about the level of motivation to do well aren't particularly directed at the students who perform the best on IQ tests; it makes sense that their success is correlated with their level of motivation. But the social milieu that surrounds a child can and often does work to discourage them from cultivating their particular intelligence or demonstrating those abilities- especially to their age group peers- and simply presenting them with an IQ exam is unlikely to unlock a level of high-performing potential that they've hidden, or that they may only dimly intuit that they possess.
Much of your complaint is directed at the anti-intellectual character of the society that you observe surrounding you, wherever that might be. I certainly notice it in my own society- America, the US- and in fact it's a problem that's only grown over time, influencing everything from informal public attitudes to news media discourse to education priorities (in both public and private schools) and what American voters value in terms of the intellectual caliber of their elected officials. I agree with you on that.
I also agree that the general run of K-12 schools neglect or even actively impair the potential of the most scholastically gifted students. In my view, the most important players in remedying that situation are the parents (it's a lot easier if there are two of them). Because workarounds are available- home-schooling, early admission to local college classes instead of remaining stunted and stagnant in a high school, even scholarships to private schools. But as a practical reality, the parents need to be proactive on that score. The institutions don't put much energy into making active suggestions in that regard. Neither do they put much energy into providing an extra level of challenge for high-performing students, judging by how competitive the process is. Magnet schools separate out the elite of the elite as a cupola, but what about the next tier of advanced performance? The bottom line is that the educational priorities of this society are mostly lip service; the learning institutions aren't even competent at supplying a sufficient number of skilled technical workers, much less prizing intellectual ability the way it rewards skill in spectator sports.
*I think it's only conditionally valid. The problem I speak of is not merely a matter of Dunning-Kruger overestimation.
Not reading all that. Stopped at the Santa-laugh. Highly intelligent people are more aware of what they don't know.
High IQ kids have always been much more balanced and a greater tendency to say, "I don't know, let me look into that".
Less intelligent people try to make something up, and ironically look at intelligent people like they are stupid for admitting they need to study that area.
Average to stupid people watch high IQ people like hawks so that the second the latter makes any mistake whatsoever, the former can jump up in front of the room, pointing with a fully extended dominant arm, screaming "LOOK!QQ!1 YOU GOT THAT WRONG!!!!"11 HEY EVERYBOEDYYY!1"
High IQ tend to think differently and others can't grasp it. They would rather tell themselves that person must be wrong than to confess that maybe it's tough for them to comprehend thoughts of a higher order.
Prof Joan Freeman’s book “Gifted Lives” may interest you. She follows through the lives of adults whom she identified and mentored, as an eminent psychologist specializing in the development of gifted children.
thanks for the recommendation. I'd be interested in any accounts of "super-recallers", too. The latent potential of encoded memory that's indicated by those cases would be a good topic for more intensive research.
Everybody should want them to have friends, but if they're bored all day every day, they're going to have trouble.
I'm skeptical of any parents who are giving their 6 yr old an IQ test. You can teach any bright child a skill early if that's what you chose to do, but it comes at significant opportunity cost. It's likely why these kids never grow up to be anything of note.
did you miss the revelation that the very first anecdote was about Terrance Tao?
She missed a lot more than that.
Also there are plenty of people who don't exactly become figures of note (say, famous scientists) simply because we just don't have many figures of note. Certainly not many intellectual figures of note.
It's unrealistic to expect child prodigies to become famous because it's unrealistic to expect just about any intellectual pursuit to make you famous.
Yeah, there seem to be people who say things of the form "Aha! Only 1 in 15 of these high-scoring children became notable scientists/mathematicians!" (aside from Gross's sample, Hollingworth's sample of 12 children over 180 IQ included Murray Gerstenhaber), and act like this proves the test scores are irrelevant. They don't mention that the general public has more like a 1 in 20,000 chance of becoming a notable scientist, and therefore getting these high scores as a child gives you 1000x better odds.
there's actually some recent evidence to support my intuition: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41411418/
"Young exceptional performers and later adult world-class performers are largely two discrete populations over time."
The paper also admits, "This evidence does not conflict with the finding that early exceptional performers are [much] more likely to become adult exceptional performers compared with the remainder of the population in a domain ... Those who reach international junior championships, compared with the remainder of the population, are 49 times as likely to go on to reach international senior championships". While it doesn't prove causation, it certainly doesn't support your intuition.
Some additional commentary on that paper: https://x.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521
Would you care to share what opportunities are being lost?
just being able to try a broad range of things to nurture intellectual curiosity and help them find their passion. ballet, writing music, martial arts, building stuff, art, morse code, submarines, WW2 aircraft, birds of prey, butterflies, cartography, oscilloscopery, hunting- just to name a few of my kids' interests.
if i was making them do phonics drills all day long they'd lose a lot.
kids learn primarily by play.
Whoever implied, let alone said, that anyone was “doing phonics drills all day”.