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Comment by facetube | Hacker News Reader

Being called gifted only made it worse. I was not. None of them were. I'm still not. It was a lie. Why couldn't people just give me credit for working hard? That was the truth. Why was my success some magical unexplainable innate attribute?

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At any rate, psychologists will tell you how harmful it can be to tell a child how smart they "are", rather than letting them know they've simply "done" a good job.

The distinction seems to be between being and doing, with the former being static and the latter dynamic.

You can certainly say that for yourself, but ascribing it merely to "hard work" for everyone is facetious.

I didn't work hard at all. I've never had a class which seriously taxed me mentally and until college at least I could get As without even trying at all.

Even more directly, on my first time taking the SAT (with 0 prep) I scored better than anyone else in my class, including people who had studied like crazy and gone through extensive prep courses.

Thinking that I'm anything but incredibly lucky would be arrogant of me. That being said, I do dislike the "gifted" terminology, primarily due to its theological and duty connotations.

IQ is quite heritable, something about h = 0.7 for adults is a good average I've seen from a couple reviews. That's quite strong, though interestingly it's lower for children.

Now, you can argue about interpreting IQ all you like, but it's really a moot point because the metric captures some of the variation humans have in cognitive ability. It doesn't mean that there's a neat linear scale (a simplification like IQ metrics leads some to falsely conclude this), but there is variation nonetheless, and it's mostly due to your genes, not your upbringing.

Does that mean you were gifted? Not necessarily; advantages in some aspects of cognition likely come with a trade-off for others. Those we consider gifted likely just have a good match of abilities with the challenges they face.

However, I would caution against the other extreme; you did not simply pull yourself up by your bootstraps in some sort of meritocratic Riefenstahl-ian fantasy. You most certainly had some advantages and fortune.

Cognitive ability is an innate attribute. This is observationally true. We can't pretend that everyone has the same capabilities, even with applied effort. That's false. However, I still think that showering someone with praise and sectioning them off into separate classes throughout childhood is not necessarily the best strategy for dealing with highly intelligent children, either. My own experience was that socially, I was years behind my peers in high school due to the isolation of gifted classes. I think it would be best to have gifted students advance in grades but still have them integrated with the general student body along with some social interaction with peers of their age group.

I was a gifted kid, I got D's all through school because fuck doing that busywork, and then slept through college and did the bare minimum to graduate with honors, which means only studying for the exams in the car on the way to school... Meanwhile other people worked really really hard to graduate with a 3.0

Please tell me how my success is due to my hard work and not the luck to have been born to my smart-but-relatively-poor parents.

I know other people can spend their life working hard and not get to where I am, and people can work less hard than me and get a lot further. This isn't a game with very structured rules. Life is chaos, and you're doing yourself and society at large a disservice by ascribing your success solely to "hard work", because applying that dogma to people with an IQ of 90 isn't going to work out well on a large scale.

Or, a different interpretation: what's the benchmark for gifted? Who's picking these people out of the crowd, and how? The programs I saw didn't test objectively, were absurdly vulnerable to parental arm-twisting, and in some cases were drawing from a student body that was, on average, performing well below grade-level.

(N.B. Amount of hard work still dwarfed by blind luck.)

At some level, everybody works hard, but some are incredibly more talented than others.

But I agree that it's misleading to call someone gifted. Intelligence is such a diverse thing. Some people can be gifted for one thing and totally deficient for some other things. I'm not even sure that a very high IQ is predictive of success in science for instance.

I also very highly doubt a very high IQ is predictive of science success - those are simply the folks we hear about because it is more popular than bragging that a philosopher or a musician is such. All three can be brilliant, but their minds simply work in different ways from each other.

Very high iq is certainly correlated with science success and predictive of it to a degree. That degree is not 100%, it's probably less than 50%

I became so much happier when I realized how much my education-minded parents and my environment gave me a leg up (even in the economically declining Eastern Europe of the time). Helped me chill out a lot and feel less pressure (and hence have much more actual productivity).

Starting advantage does not mean you are not working hard now. Just means that you should do good things with that advantage. Make it shine!

Well, probably to not feel bad about themselves. If your skills were obtained through hard work, they could have done that themselves. Whereas if it was handed to you by magic then there's nothing to be done, right?

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