Does giftedness matter? – No
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Someone with an average IQ, when compared to someone on the higher end of the curve, has all the tools to assert their interests but without much ability to reason abstractly about them or to recognize or interpret meta patterns.
Gifted education is only partially to help intelligent kids, it's just to protect the order among the other ones. It isolates intelligent kids from the people they might otherwise learn to lead. Yes, gifted kids can be disruptive or withdraw in normal classrooms, but removing them to a "special" class is about helping crap teachers.
Enriched education is valuable, but doing it at the expense of a childs development in the hopes of engineering better kids is awful. If you want to help them, teach gifted kids leadership skills, they'll figure out the rest.
I realize now that it probably could have been a lot better, if I'd gone to a school that specialized in it, but a private school wasn't really an option, and there was no way the school was going to create more of a program for so few students. (I heard later they killed the program entirely.)
I was fortunate enough to experience the other end of intelligence for a while, too. My doctor advised taking allergy medication, and it had the side effect of making me stupid. I was able to tell that there were things I should have been able to do, but I wasn't unable to explain why or what they were exactly. I'd come across problems that I'd solved before and be unable to solve them, but not be able to figure out why exactly.
After halting the medical, my faculties came back and it was astounding. I came to the conclusion that I was simply unable to think well enough to disprove things beyond a certain point. I found out that when I decide something is true, I do it by trying to prove it false. If I was unable to prove it false, I'd accept it as true. When I was on those pills, I was only able to go so far in my testing of the theory, and I'd accept things as true that I would not when I wasn't taking the pills.
It had the side effect of making everything about me. If someone cut me off on the highway, it was because they were against me somehow. The thought that they might just be in a rush or an emergency never came, and I just accepted that they were pissed at me and attacking me.
That was long-winded, but I thought it might add some insight to your IQ-gap observations.
I've also never heard of it happening to anyone else, so it wouldn't surprise me that it's not mentioned anywhere.
Compare the purchasing power and variety of options for solving problems of a millionaire to someone who earns low hundreds of thousands a year. Compare those to that of a billionaire.
Then compare how someone who inherited the money to someone who saved it, and again to someone who got it as part of an exit.
Intelligence is analogous to money this way in that you can acquire it from inheritance and upbringing, slog through work/academia and study, or get it as the result of drive and experience/risk.
Someone who had money who becomes poor is a different kind of poor, and someone who is poor who becomes wealthy is a different kind of rich.
Giftedness is a kind of class that has its own pitfalls and outcomes. When you have money, like intelligence, it's not something you think about much, even if it is weirdly revered by a lot of other people.
A lot of people think they could solve a lot of their problems if they were only richer or more intelligent, but when you are rich or intelligent, you realize quickly that these are not so much solutions as they are excuses that keep their circumstances bearable.
What I also see is an anticorrelation between giftedness and happiness, which makes me really sad.
My closer, "gifted" friends are in tech or finance and we interact more often. My less gifted friends, I see less often and I mostly interact with them via Facebook and the likes.
This makes it seem like my smarter friends are more reflective and thus less satisfied with their lives whereas my less gifted friends seem to only have fun.
Just food for thought.
I spend a lot of time with all kinds of friends, so I don't think my perception is skewed.
What I do observe is this: when my smarter friends are miserable, they are mostly sad or anxious, while the others are mostly frustrated or angry. The latter concentrate on finding quick fixes rather than dealing with their emotions.
My smarter friends are interested in how other people feel, while the others are mostly interested in what they do. The former are very aware that their own good is linked to that of the people around them; most of the others think that life is a zero-sum game.
I think it is much, much easier to agree to disagree with my smarter friends.
I often feel a close connection to very smart people after having known them for only a few months or weeks. I miss this connection in most of my other relationships.
So I disagree, but thanks for the input!
If higher IQ correlates with higher income, and higher income means better circumstances (health, safety, opportunity, etc) then wouldn't that explain greater empathy and ethics? As opposed to someone who has to fight for their survival. Because when you're talking about survival or the threat to it, all ethics go out the window.
For example, I had fairly high test scores indicating high cognitive ability - this has made life relatively easier for me. I see coworkers, on the other hand, one socioeconomic class below and there is a pattern of mistrust in others, the mentality of scarcity, and the belief that people who are successful are lucky or corrupt. All of which seems to indicate less empathy.
OTOH, I have met quite a few wealthy people who couldn't care less about the suffering around them.
But it's an interesting question: what creates compassion and empathy? Wealth? Suffering? High IQ? Combinations of the above? Which ones?