Comment by fatdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fatdog | Hacker News Reader

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I've been in a number of companies where there was an obvious IQ-gap. Some people could watch everyone else like mice running a maze but couldn't explain to them how to succeed in a way they would understand.

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 was in a gifted class when I was young, and I quite enjoyed it. It was a welcome addition to all my other classwork. They didn't fully separate us, though. We were still in regular classes 4 days of the week, and we had to still do the work from the day we were missing in addition to the added work that day of Gifted class. It had the effect of keeping us with everyone else while giving us enough extra to do that we weren't as disruptive as before. (And yeah, I was quite disruptive.)

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.

Were the mental effects of the allergy medicine mentioned in the package leaflet? I worry that modern medicine doesn't look closely enough for mental side effects. It would reassure me to know that the effects were mentioned. It would help me to know how it was phrased, so that I can understand the information if I run across it.

There was no mention of those effects at all, and it happened with 2 or 3 different medicines to different degrees. At least, not that I know of.

I've also never heard of it happening to anyone else, so it wouldn't surprise me that it's not mentioned anywhere.

While IQ is a blunt instrument, saying giftedness doesn't matter is like saying money doesn't matter. It doesn't, but it does.

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.

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