"Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart" just sounds like a parent's humblebrag to me.
The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
61–70 of 110 posts
Re: The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claiming success is a social construct seems to me to be trivially true, not a staggering claim. Intelligence is less obvious since there is a vast literature around it, but, again, it is clearly a social construct; we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct. I'm also not sure what "scientific evidence" would look like here. You seem to have had some sort of a…
>we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct. 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.
Yes? And? This is one of the most profound and basic observations of twentieth century philosophy. That is what social construction is, it underlies our basic notions of perception and reality.
Read this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_R...
Re: The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are staggeringly enormous claims. Got any scientific evidence?
Just for argument’s sake, my opinion is that intelligence is a kind of social construct. What we view as “intelligence” is the manifestation of traits that are important for our current society to function. i.e, we value bridges, so the traits of bridge builders are viewed as positive traits, which we call “intelligence”. In other environments these traits might not be seen as intelligent. For example, from what I’ve…
The fact that intelligent people were seen as mentally inferior doesn't negate the existence of their intelligence. The upper classes relied on the expertise of engineers, scribes, musicians, mathematicians, and artists and supported them materially even as they debased them in other ways. Otherwise that intelligence wouldn't have been selected for and inherited by later generations.
Re: The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still remember eighth grade and the teacher who used the 'smart' kids of the advanced math classes as an excuse to not actually bother teaching anything and make it all 'self study'. My math grade went from a solid A to a D in the course of one semester because I couldn't just figure it out myself from the book.
I was one of the "smart kids" the teachers held up as an example. It made me a target of rampant hatred and helped to socially isolate me at school. It's part of why I walked away from a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of college at age 20.
“Look at Tim, he’s 16 and already 6’ tall. Why can’t the rest of you actually try to be tall, like Tim. You’re just slacking, sitting there at only 5’4”.”
Re: The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
>we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct. 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.
Yes? And? This is one of the most profound and basic observations of twentieth century philosophy. That is what social construction is, it underlies our basic notions of perception and reality. Read this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_R...
What you've said is not profound. When you go around saying "the sky is blue" people aren't wrong to assume you meant something relevant, rather than just tossing out vague and trivial statements.
Re: The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's nice to hear I'm not the only one as a kid whose reflex was to get suspicious of/thought it was lazy when/ people would quickly decide "you're smart". It seemed to me just like a way to score cheap points. It also made me feel worse about not understanding things easily.. people were telling me I was smart, after all! :P My sister, on the other hand, gets annoyed at my perspective - she finds it tiresome when pe…
You can be nice about a well-meaning but ultimately misguided complement without taking it seriously.
Someone once pointed out to me I had a tendency to momentarily scowl when complimented and then pretend I hadn't heard it.
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.
Re: The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
#67There is a distinction between the pressure that comes from growing up in a "tiger family" and the consequences of growing up with the "smart" label, and I feel like the author is conflating the two. Personally, growing up with the label (but not the parental pressure) was one of the best things that could have happened for me and my education - the fact that others believed (whether true or not) that I was lightyear…
Growing up with the "smart" label was the worst thing that happened for me and my education. It made me lazy and I almost never got challenged. If I had grown up in a challenging environment I could've easily progressed years faster (in areas like math and programming) than I did. I didn't have any parental pressure, or pressure of any kind either. It wasn't until middle of the University I learned that I actually ha…
You weren't challenged because the school system regards every child who gets an A as a success, full stop. That they put no effort into doing so or were capable of learning the requisite material three years before is immaterial. The smart label is irrelevant compared to the incentives teachers and administrators labour under and they get nothing for helping children fulfil their potential. They’re judged by average achievement on tests set for average children.
Re: The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
#68There is a distinction between the pressure that comes from growing up in a "tiger family" and the consequences of growing up with the "smart" label, and I feel like the author is conflating the two. Personally, growing up with the label (but not the parental pressure) was one of the best things that could have happened for me and my education - the fact that others believed (whether true or not) that I was lightyear…
I'm glad the label worked for you but it did not work at all for me. It kind of shoehorned me in to a personality type and limited my social options. 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 ju…
Believe me, it’s much worse being considered not intelligent instead. I knew so many people growing up that were orders of magnitude more intelligent and accomplished than me (and I still do).
Re: The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was one of the "smart kids" the teachers held up as an example. It made me a target of rampant hatred and helped to socially isolate me at school. It's part of why I walked away from a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of college at age 20.
“Look at Tim, he’s 16 and already 6’ tall. Why can’t the rest of you actually try to be tall, like Tim. You’re just slacking, sitting there at only 5’4”.”
Yes. Only more like "I'm such an amazing teacher, that's why he's so tall. But you slackers aren't even trying and it's making me look bad!"
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.)
Re: The Intelligence Myth – Why I cringe when someone tells me my child is smart
#70Being a new dad, this is something I've begun thinking a lot about. Reading about CBT (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy) has shed some light on this issue for me. I think the core problem is when a child is taught that their value to the family and to society is based on extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors.
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.