Curse Of The Gifted (2000)

The solution is to make the gifted people working on something that _is_ challenging to them. You can't expect gifted people to work on annoyingly simple problems in school, yet still develop discipline. If you want them to develop discipline, give them hard problems, that will require discipline of them.

I see this as a failure of the education system, not the gifted people.

Or, put another way, you can't blame Linus for not having discipline if he never needed it. It's the educational system's fault for not showing him he will need it.

There is one on hand the "gifted" who runs on his own fumes with no other form of external effort. Much like @austennailred notes about his efforts in high school mathematics, this type of "gifted" often suffers from something similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect in the long run --> in other words, a sense of superiority can potentially drive you into believing you are better than you actually are.

This, I believe, can happen when people attempt to pursue things which do not particularly satisfy their innate curiosity or their genuine interests. Sure you can be great at math naturally, but your view of how good you are limited by the population size of those you compare yourself against can leave you damagingly unprepared when you realize that you actually aren't as great as you thought you were.

What makes the "curse of the gifted" the "blessing of the gifted" on the other hand, is when that moment where you realize your own fallibility seems to provide a moment of illumination rather than a sense of dejection.

For me, my first attempts at genuine college level discrete mathematics versus having used basic counting, permutations, probability, number theory principles in the past showed that computer science or at least the mathematics of computer science can be difficult. I had a similar issue in chemistry as well. The difference was even though I was always a strong math and science student, approaching college level chemistry made me just feel inferior and made me drop it. On the other hand, when faced with adversity in mathematics/CS I tended to take the difficulty as a challenge. Rather than drop it, realizing that perhaps there were others who could be better at mathematics, CS in this new environment drove me to pushing myself to a place of intense focus I had had before.

Now this is where I think passion crosses with the concept of the "curse of the gifted" to make it more of a blessing than a curse. When you love something and you know what it feels like to be best, realizing your own shortcomings can sometimes cause you to miss that feeling. Now in order to get back to a place where you "feel gifted" you have to be in love with the work to get there over "the idea of being gifted" and this I think can happen to those who are put in a position where the feeling of "being gifted" is compromised.

Anyway, just my view, first "longer" post I've written on HN but I thought austennailred had a great point and just wanted to comment.

Great piece by both Eric and Linus and crazy to think how 14 years later, we have Git.

It's hard to get tone across when talking about one's own experiences. In my case my experience is about having the attribute of high intelligence.

If this was a discussion about being tall instead of being intelligent, and I happened to be very tall, would it change your opinion if my deduction had been that tall people can dunk basketballs more easily than short people and then relayed an experience where I, though I don't play basketball, demonstrated this to a short fanatical basketball fanatic by dunking a ball?

It doesn't mean I'm always right, or that my deductions are always correct. I'm not omniscient. In that anecdote it turns out I was, and it was destructive to my relationship.

Being highly intelligent is like walking around with a bomb in your head. You have to be very careful how you approach other people because your mere existence is hard for them to accept. It's not a good feeling to hurt or scare people by doing what you were born to do.

Just being tall, and doing tall people things, like grabbing something off of a high shelf, is not likely to elicit the same response.

You have to constantly translate the complex interconnected mental world you swim in into a simpler model you can communicate with. When I meet another high-intelligence person, I don't have to do that beyond establishing a common vocabulary. It's a fun thrill to have a conversation with somebody who's mind races along like yours, just like it's fun for a tall person to be around other tall people.

One of the issues with being highly intelligent is that you're right more than most people, which makes it difficult to trust the input of more normal folks. So you end up trusting yourself all the time, which means that when you are wrong, you don't know or recognize it until it explodes spectacularly in your face.