The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
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I can't comment on what it's like to grow up with the extreme parental pressure the author describes - I didn't experience that, and I'm sorry she had to go through that. But I think that's an entirely separate issue from growing up with the "gifted" label.
How the heck did you convince yourself to believe it? As a "gifted" kid, what I learned very quickly was that adults will happily exaggerate minor talents (which one acquires primarily through just spending time on them, a task made markedly easier when everybody else hates you) to absurdity- at one point I got an evaluation back from a summer program at Stanford telling me I might grow up to be "one of the best programmers of our age". What did I do to earn such acclaim? Got ahead of the rest of the class making a game, read the documentation for Flash, and used the extra time to add "voice controls" to my game (specifically, you'd shoot by yelling anything into your microphone, it was just triggered by levels.)
Seriously- how can you take that sort of praise seriously, and not just as a "look at the cute kid who knows more Adobe Flash than the rest of his age group"?
But essentially any praise from humans is not.
My sister, on the other hand, gets annoyed at my perspective - she finds it tiresome when people can't take the compliment. There's wisdom to both ways, I guess.
Made sense because compliments made me feel weird, even though I freely gave them out.
Since then I've trained myself to smile, make eye-contact and say "Thank you, I accept your compliment with confidence," before returning to the matter at hand.
It's part of why I walked away from a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of college at age 20.
I was the youngest kid at home and I learned to read at age four because my long-suffering, doting older sister reread me the same book a jillion times at my insistence. The poor woman could still quote the book in her forties.
Most of what I knew had nothing whatsoever to do with school.
Plus, it winds up being code for "You should all beat him up in the bathroom every chance you get!"
Gee, thanks.
(No, I was not literally beaten up in the bathroom.)
It was a dumb game, but it taught me an important life lesson about how adults will believe what they want to believe. You don't even have to lie to people if they're willing to lie to themselves.
and from different perspective, the feeling that this came easy to you is exactly what would make you gifted. you are not impressed by your own achievements, but they are achievements. this is what gifted means. what's hard for someone else is easy for you.
that doesn't make it a good idea to call people gifted, because that has a tendency to make them lazy. it seems you saw through that though.
That doesn't mean the society discourages you from learning arts, music or anything else. You have to make room for it in your spare time.
Also, examinations to get into prestigious universities are brutal compared to the West. Around a million students (10.43 lakhs in 2018) take up the IIT JEE exam and only around 10,000 qualify. You can take a look at how tough the exam is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h_x13xHjVs
To prepare for this, you would have to spend countless hours solving and sleepless nights studying. And even after all that, your chance at success is 1%. I am not even considering Medical (NEET), MBA (CAT) or Civil Services (UPSC) which is equally hard.
EDIT: Corrected 0.01% to 1%.
> To prepare for this, you would have to spend countless hours solving and sleepless nights studying. And even after all that, your chance at success is 0.01%.
Your numbers suggest 1%, not 0.01%. 0.01% of a million examinees would be 100 passing scores.
For example, if every eligible student takes the test and 1% of examinees pass, then the threshold for passing the test is being in the top 1% of the eligible population. If 30% of the eligible population at random take the exam, and 1% pass, then the threshold for passing the test is a little more lenient than the 1% figure makes it appear. But if some people identify beforehand that they are unlikely to pass, and don't bother -- say that the top 30% of eligible students all take the test, and the bottom 70% all don't -- then the threshold is much more strict then it appears; in the example, if 1% of examinees pass, then the passing threshold would actually be top 0.3%, not top 1%.
Now not all of these 14.3 million students appear for IIT JEE. Only 7% of these (1 million) appear for JEE. But since you talk about "eligible student", all the 14.3 million are eligible. But many don't even bother to take it because (as you mentioned) they know they don't stand a chance. Many of them are not interested in Engineering and are interested in Medical. These students take up NEET (which is equally tough). The remaining move on to do Arts, Commerce or any other stream with an aim to either do an MBA (through CAT), become a CA, LLB (for law) or pursue Civil Services (UPSC - as tough or some say even tougher than IIT JEE). The outliers are those that do not follow any of these well trodden paths: these are few and far between. So in reality only 7% of those eligible students appear for IIT JEE and then 1% of those appearing get selected.
The other fact you need to consider is that the Government of India expanded the number of IITs from the earlier 7 (as of 2001) to now 23 (as of 2018) and increased the total number of seats from 4500 to 12000. So an approx 3x jump in the number of seats keeping in mind the total number of aspirants taking the exam. So the pass percentage remains roughly the same year-on-year. I am sure if you now take 30% of the total eligible population (from your example), viz. 4.29 million students appearing for the exam, the percentage that pass will further decrease (from 1% to 0.28%). Because students are ranked and IIT seats that are fixed (around 12000) are filled rank-wise.
In all honesty I look back at my "smartness" as a kind of attention-seeking behavior where all I really wanted was the attention you got from getting the highest grade in the class or being the only one from your school to go to the ivy league.
To me, the smart label just means you are willing to sacrifice more than others to study/learn/build. Everything I have learned about people since starting college has told me that this is a net negative.
Isn’t attention-seeking sort of hard-wired into all dependent animals? So, well. You’re normal there.
Once you realize you're playing a level up, you won't need encouragement from authority figures. You'll be trying to reach and surpass the greats, all on your own.
It wasn't until middle of the University I learned that I actually had to work and study to understanding something.
If you are made to believe that you are valuable as a human because you are x, y, or z subjective determination (smart, beautiful, athletic, etc.) and not simply because you are you, then you're likely to be driven and motivated to maximize this 'edge', but you'll also be mostly unhappy regardless of what you achieve, because there will always be others who make your achievements along that axis seem like nothing in comparison. And even if you are the absolute best in the world at something, you will always feel chased and hunted, like the thing that makes your life worthwhile is constantly hanging by a thread.
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to do great things or encourage our children to do the same if they're inspired to. But before that, we need to learn to be satisfied with a simple life just existing in the world as ourselves without any extraordinary achievements.
Amazingly put. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, I’m of two minds on this) I’m convinced this is a feature rather than a bug of American society. Deriving self worth from accomplishments is force fed culturally in every direction, including places where I wouldn’t necessarily expect it like politics (see Trumps Ivy League name dropping and Buttigiegs support relying heavily on his Harvard credentials).
Of course, would society be better off otherwise? I’m not sure.
We don’t use the S word around our kids. And when strangers tell me our young children are smart, while they are in earshot, I say, “Thank you. They work hard and practice a lot.”
My kids future high school has a reputation for being academically difficult. I’m thrilled by that. I don’t care if they’re C students, I just want them to be challenged.
For me, when I heard it, it felt like a license to be lazy. Don't need to work hard, teacher already thinks I'm smart. I wasn't bothered by poor grades because I believed I was smart (that's my natural inclination anyway).
On the other hand, I think if people had told me they were worried about me failing, or that I was nth in the class, that would've been a powerful motivator for me and I'm confident I would've worked harder at school.
The complicated thing is that different strategies will do different things for different kids. Some kids might lack self confidence and need encouragement, while others (like me) may have too much self confidence and need push back or a wake up call. The problem is delivering encouragement to the over confident and a challenge to the under confident.
https://bingschool.stanford.edu/news/carol-dweck-praising-in...
Is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism
> Critics point to the fact that Dweck's research does not appear to be replicable—a key requirement to prove its validity.
> If your effect is so fragile that it can only be reproduced [under strictly controlled conditions], then why do you think it can be reproduced by schoolteachers?
1. Dismissing someone else's personal anecdote because you have a different personal anecdote is basically broken on the face of it.
2. Saying "Being called smart doesn't hurt anyone, I know because of my personal anecdote wherein I was not called smart" is just not any kind of solid logic whatsoever.
3. Dismissing their anecdote as a single instance with your single instance when there are actually other anecdotes here in this very discussion that agree with theirs and it's the essential point of the article under discussion is not a reasonable claim in the slightest.
4. All research has its critics. Rebutting my comment with "your research has critics" while ignoring the myriad other flaws in your initial position amounts to cherry picking.
If you want to debate this further, let me suggest you address the other points I have made and also go find research that actually agrees with your world view as stronger arguments than your current one. Otherwise, it's most likely really not worth engaging.
I asked to have him in my bunk; I am not a genius and will readily admit to be his inferior - so no need for competition there (I might even learn from him!). On the other hand, he had clear social deficiencies and was not very sportive, so there are plenty of things he could learn from me. He needed to be grown and changed from an egotistical insecure kid to a insightful intelligent young adult.
Instead the camp gave him to the charge of a counselor who was also a genius, and as expected they spent the whole summer each trying to prove they were smarter than the other. The kid usually won, but I can't imagine the summer contributed to a growing experience.
Remember that genius doesn't make a person. Don't let it blindside your treatment of them if you are charged with raising them. They need adults to teach them about life, even if the adults can't do math as fast as they could.
adding to that. my friend is a straight up genius, can do calculations in his head faster than you can type them into wolfram alpha. people in my highschool used to ask him to do questions like a monkey
the only friends he had were people that talked to him like a normal person, shot the shit and went to parties together instead of asking him for homework help
The best musicians in the world, as well as the best figure skaters, the best gymnasts, the best tennis players, etc. seem to have been "pushed" into it by their parents, or at the very least heavily influenced.
If parents didn't push their kids in this way, would we have the same caliber of performers/champions/etc that dominate their respective disciplines?
My baby brother was a very good soccer player and was able to go to a selective high school in Sweden which uses very competitive try outs. Some of his classmates played in the highest league in Sweden and made more money than their own parents. My brother was a hopeful for the top league, until he broke his knee. He recovered and invested months of training to get back into shape, better shape than he ever was, to make the top teams see beyond his past injury and be so good they can’t ignore him. Then he broke the other knee and was damaged goods. The third highest league was as far as he could get and soccer stayed a hobby until he had to work and study at the same time at 20.
On the other hand, my brother had classmates who really wanted to postpone college and go all in playing on the elite level, and their parents refused. These parents were often highly educated themselves and just couldn’t see how such a high risk career as athletics could be a sound investment of one’s time.
I think if youths got to make their own career choices we would still have the same caliber of artists, athletes and what not because even the children who were pushed into it had to find some meaning behind what they did. Training for five hours straight is one thing, actually being receptive to what you need to learn while training for five hours is hard for anyone who doesn’t really care.
I can understand what she means when she talks about expectations. This is too common in China and India. It is difficult to explain to those who have never gone through what she is describing. Luckily I have parents who do not pressure me to do the stuff she talks about. But I have seen my fair share to know what it is like.
I’m personally very skeptical of the utility of similar programs now. I’m beginning to think keeping consistent expectations for everyone and letting those with differing interests or aptitudes enrich themselves is more egalitarian, especially for people who aren’t intellectually gifted (like me).
Chores serve the same function as homework in terms of teaching kids responsibility. They have the added benefit of being a real world task, not "make work."
When my kids couldn't focus on their schoolwork because of video games, I locked up the controllers until school work was done. It wasn't punishment. They got them back as soon as their work was done.
When I got tired of one son blowing off household chores because he wanted to see his TV show, so he would ask if it could wait for a commercial, but then he never remembered during the commercial, I began telling him "No, this needs to be done when I ask because I'm spending hours begging you to do it and it's an unreasonable burden on me." After a few times of having his TV shows interrupted, he began taking out the trash voluntarily before his shows started and asking if there were any other chores he needed to do so he could block out uninterrupted TV viewing time.
The upshot is that a lot of people in the workplace /do/ judge you anyways, and people seem to assume that you (like them) are doing your darnedest to appear as impressive as possible. Then again, I am working in high finance.
This is one of my favourite articles ever:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4739500/
> linearly increasing heritability of intelligence from infancy (20%) through adulthood (60%).
You have the same myth in fighting sports. "Some people are just faster" sooner or later becomes someone's argument why they're not as good as others. They have the same nerves you do, and the ion cascade in their nerves is the exact same speed in theirs as it is in yours. It's just effort (in training, beforehand, not in the actual fight). Nothing more (aside from one thing: smaller people are in fact faster. Not because they think faster but because they have less torque to fight. A point that will be made in any karate tournament)
Doesn't it seem a bit convenient ? The "truly smart" examples she gives:
* a schizophrenic
One sign of schizophrenia is doing the same thing unceasingly for absurd periods of times - sometimes decades. How much effort did this guy put in ? Not for good reasons, perhaps, but ...
.. dedicated her whole life to work. Then, one day, her husband asked her for a divorce because she barely came home. After 18 years, her children realized that she wasn’t the one who raised them ...
They often have no balance in their own mental well being. Once they have identified an intellectual need, they try to fulfill that need single-mindedly at all cost. These are the people who are truly “gifted”.
My intellect was in fact much more average than anyone realized. It was my “work ethic” that made me seem like an “intellectually gifted” person.
It's very important to not say three things to kids:
- "You're my favorite" - this is incredibly corrosive to relationships between siblings, and lasts forever.
- "You're so smart"- when you say this, you're telling the child that they have an intrinsic gift that replaces having to work hard. Just say, "Good job." or "How can you improve it next time?"
- "You's so pretty." - when you say this, you're telling the child that they have an intrinsic gift, and are above working hard on relationships or a career.
It's also fairly silly to assume if you don't tell your kid it won't notice it has these gifts, rather it will notice that you never acknowledge this.
using these labels has to be done with care foe the desired effect. if a child thinks they are dumb, then calling them smart, and showing them hat makes them smart may be helpful to raise their self-esteem. but otherwise it may backfire.
same goes for beauty. it can have a positive effect, but it can also make the child care more about outward appearances.
Is it that smart children are overburdened by expectations and anxiety? If so, the "evidence" is a set of personal anecdotes and hyperbolic generalizations. It is, quite simply, not factual that teenagers are made to study 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. If that occurred, the teenager would die.
> by junwuwriter 28 minutes ago
> WRITTEN BY Jun Wu Single Mom Writer, Technologist, Poet: Tech, AI, Data Science, Psych, Parenting, Edu, Life, Work,Poetry etc. Find Me: https://junwuwriter.com
Ah. Got it.
From the very first part of the abstract: “[...] the literature has not fully explored distinctions between the ways leaders of these organizations socially construct success, [...]”
It's so frustrating to me that we keep regressing our political conversations with assertions of this nature, that intelligence is a social construction, when in doing so we are literally turning a blind eye to what is arguably one of the greatest injustices our society faces. Intelligence is not a social construction, and it's not distributed equitably, and that isn't fair. It's the single greatest psychological signifier for material success. I'd much rather accept reality as it is, and spend resources attempting to ameliorate objective injustices, rather than making assertions that intelligence is a social construction because it gives some opening for a utopian alternative that can simply dispense with our "oppressive conceptions of competence."
This is exactly what social construction is: reifying a set of observations into an abstract notion. Intelligence is a social construction.
Doesn’t mean it’s not “real”. But I also would not say it’s “abstract” in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not derived from first principles, nor do we have any kind of theoretical model of intelligence that’s good enough to construct measures around.
I'm also not sure what "scientific evidence" would look like here. You seem to have had some sort of allergic reaction to the assertion of social construction and retreated instinctively to familiar but hollow epistemic grounds.
This makes everything a social construct, which negates any usefulness of the distinction. Having to agree to definitions cannot be a realistic definition of social construct, because it's a basic part of using language.
Read this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_R...
Furthermore, she's a woman in a man's world. Women tend to spend a great deal of their time performing unpaid labor in the form of raising children and running the household -- aka "women's work." This creates myriad problems in them trying to establish a public reputation.
I was a military wife and homeschooling mom for a lot of years. I've really struggled to create some kind of public reputation that will lead to adequate financial compensation, so it's a problem space I know a lot about. Women are constantly put in a double bind when it comes to trying to claim their competence, establish a public life, etc.
What a backwards society we increasingly live in, where putting time and effort into one of the most rewarding aspects of life, tending to the success and well-being of your offspring, is dismissed as "unpaid labor."
>Women are constantly put in a double bind when it comes to trying to claim their competence, establish a public life, etc.
Maybe that's because they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. The choice to leave the breadwinning to the male and become the primary caregiver is ultimately a male one in today's heavily pro-female corporate climate.
and i hated it. it was boring, unfulfilling, and i didn't feel that i got enough time to work (which was where i'd seek that fulfillment)
when working, my wife often talks about how she'd like to stay home to take care of the kids, but since i work from home i know that she also feels unfulfilled if she is not at work.
we are fortunate that we live in a country where having a nanny is common and socially acceptable (means, it's not considered a rich peoples privilege), (most often it's a relative like the kids grandparents).
i eventually developed a theory that men are really privileged to live in a society where it is acceptable for them to leave this work to their partner.
I also have a serious medical condition, so you can't blame it entirely on my gender. But I'm quite confident my gender is a significant factor in my intractable poverty.
My sons are incredibly loyal to me. They still live with me and tell me every single day "You're an awesome mom and I'm so glad you raised me."
I certainly don't regret raising them. But I'm extremely tired of being poor and also tired of listening to bullshit about how it's somehow not actually due to sexism.
Being told I'm being dismissive of the value of the work I lovingly devoted myself to for leaving a supportive comment about some other woman's writing is ...wow. I don't even have the words for this.
Like I said, women are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And I hope other people here see your reply as evidence of the kind of uphill battle I'm talking about.
It's quite the rarity these days for an American woman of my age who is college educated to have spent two decades as a homemaker. If I can't comment on the pitfalls involved in that without being attacked as disrespecting women, who the hell can?
Oh, I know: no one. Because the entire point is to make it impossible to escape the trap. The entire point of societal sexism is to keep women "barefoot and pregnant."
To attribute your predicament to you being a women seems shortsighted to me. But this is only from the information I gained from reading your post and I don't actually know what experiences you went through.
It doesn't seem to me that she has an understanding of how much more picky females are than males when it comes to sexual selection. Her son needs to compete hard in his life, whether she likes it or not.
Our complex brains, societies, and medicine (like birth control) significantly change our mate selection. We are not antelopes.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a gnu.
Yes, science reveals inconvenient truths. It tells us that we’re responsible for climate change, and it also tells us that our brains come pre-loaded with a wealth of routines shaped by millennia of evolution.
Can’t just accept some results and pretend others aren’t also well-supported. Well-supported scientific findings are what they are.
Also you can just try a dating site using an average looking man and average looking woman and get similar results to this experiment:
https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
We just don't have data on how humans behave when such huge reprodutive variables change. Seeing how a single generation responds isn't a long enough time period, because children accumulate the social norms of their parents.
1. https://www.livescience.com/37777-history-of-marriage.html
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...
> How Intelligence Affects Fertility 30 Years On: Retherford and Sewell Revisited — With Polygenic Scores and Numbers of Grandchildren
> Using newly available polygenic scores for educational attainment and cognitive ability, this paper investigates the possible presence and causes of a negative association between IQ and fertility in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study sample, an issue that Retherford and Sewell first addressed 30 years ago. The effect of the polygenic score on the sample’s reproductive characteristics was indirect: a latent cognitive ability measure, comprised of both educational attainment and IQ, wholly mediated the relationship. Age at first birth mediated the negative effect of cognitive ability on sample fertility, which had a direct (positive) effect on the number of grandchildren. Significantly greater impacts of cognitive ability on the sample’s fertility characteristics were found among the female subsample. This indicates that, in this sample, having a genetic disposition toward higher cognitive ability does not directly reduce number of offspring; instead, higher cognitive ability is a risk factor for prolonging reproductive debut, which, especially for women, reduces the fertility window and, thus, the number of children and grandchildren that can be produced. By estimating the effect of the sample’s reproductive characteristics on the strength of polygenic selection, it was found that the genetic variance component of IQ should be declining at a rate between −.208 (95% CI [−.020, −.383]) and −.424 (95% CI [−.041, −.766]) points per decade, depending on whether GCTA-GREML or classical behavior genetic estimates of IQ heritability are used to correct for ‘missing’ heritability.
And yeah we are not antelopes, we are big apes.
Perhaps a further question, though, is: SHOULD it be this way? Should we actively try to rein in this tendency of our firmware, just as we try to rein in other tendencies like our quickness to anger?
The meat still matters, for sure, but I wonder if we should be trying harder to transcend its less helpful qualities.
Then again, perhaps the competitiveness you’re referring to could be viewed as a net positive...
What does sexual selection has to do with this article?
How do you define „picky” in this context? Do you have sources on females being more picky?