Curse Of The Gifted (2000)

> The "I" ratio on your comment

Thanks for the very reasoned comment. It's of course hard to talk about yourself without coming off as highly narcissistic. I do work on not doing that generally, just taking advantage of this unique discussion to do share and do so. I hope to most people I come across in real life I come across as genuine and empathetic. I don't interpret this forum to be the place for that, but for an honest revelation of what goes on in the brain of somebody like me. We don't do it very often because, as you can see by some of the comments here, the social implications are often not pleasant.

> Play harder games.

I've definitely taken this to heart.

I actually think the activity this community is formed around, start ups, is a good "game" in a way. There's a wonderful amount to learn simply from the act of doing business that's very hard to simply read and meditate on.

I participate in other tough mental activities as well.

One thing that I do want to emphasize, and I realize now that I haven't done a good job of it in my other posts on this topic, is that I'm generally quite happy and satisfied with life these days. I'm simply sharing the kind of problems and "curses" people like me go through.

But mostly they were just problems to be solved. Getting out of environments like public schooling was helpful for one. Finding an awesome wife has been fantastic. I get to autodidact as much as I want and travel wherever I want in the world a few times a year and expand my horizons. I've also sought out challenging jobs where I hope other smart folks will be (sometimes I'm disappointed, but I've been pleasantly surprised in a few cases).

I write a little, here and there, little personal research papers, that sort of thing.

I've also tried to find activities that force me to "turn it off". Community art classes, or photography, and use different parts of my brain I don't normally use. I find the kind of liberal arts environments particularly relaxing because so few people are competing, you can just sort of explore yourself, in something you aren't necessarily good at, and have a teacher as a guide if you want. You don't have to produce a Rembrandt or an Ansel Adams, you produce something extremely primitive and simple and it's totally fine.

It's fun on occasion and it feels to the brain like a good stretch does to the body.

"A lesson I've learned, the hard way, many times, is that it's possible to appear intelligent when you aren't."

But why isn't this true of yourself? You've created this elaborate personal definition of intelligence, one that doesn't seem to have much correlation with anything positive that is objectively observable. And you do very well according to this definition, while others who think they are smart don't do quite as well. You don't see a problem here? It would be quite easy for anyone to come up with some vague definition of intelligence that they personally do well on.

At best, most personal definitions of intelligence held by the "gifted" tend to be extrapolated from attributes of children that are correlated with future success, especially in mentally demanding fields. We're interested in children's intelligence because it helps us project their future. But you're an adult, and not a particularly young one at that. There's no need to extrapolate. You are what you are. You're not judged by future potential, of which intelligence is one of many proxies. No serious scholar judges Nobel prize winning scientists by their high school test scores and no serious sports analyst judges professional athletes' careers by their pre-draft workouts. When you have the real thing, proxies become meaningless.

At worst, such definitions are carefully constructed to match the strengths and interests of the person doing the construction, while avoiding the weaknesses or conveniently treating them as positives. This is where all kinds of interesting inversions happen, for example, common proclamations like I'm depressed because I'm too smart or I can't succeed at that job because I'm too intelligent. Not that reversals never happen in isolated circumstances, but intelligence only has meaning because it measures mental performance potential. Whatever quality one may have, if it tends to result in negative mental outcomes, calling it intelligence renders the term meaningless.

I'm curious - you mentioned something about your wife being smarter. Does she suffer from all these problems you have due to being too smart? Does she share your disdain for those who aren't as smart?

fair enough. I suppose your view is a form of radical honesty. In my observations, it takes a particularly mature person to take public shaming in stride, and I tend not to credit most people with that level of maturity.

> But why isn't this true of yourself?

You are absolutely correct in everything you ask here. If this were a discussion called "cognitive difficulties otherwise highly intelligent people struggle with" we'd be having a different discussion. We'd talk about overcoming dyslexia or dyscalculia, or other cognitive biases and issues that might be surprising. But this isn't that kind of discussion, this is a discussion about "the difficulties that come purely from being gifted". If one of those difficulties is finding other people as gifted to relate with, then isn't that valid?

I'm not exceptionally intelligent in everything. Just in those few areas I was gifted in. I'm a pretty normal, beer drinking, average bloke to most people who know me. I'm not particularly physically gifted, I have my own cognitive deficits to deal with like anybody. I get along fine with most people and I certainly don't look down on them regardless of what you're reading into things. I get frustrated sometimes when dealing with normal folk, at where their ability to think on something ends. But I've met a few people who possessed truly superhuman intellects and I'm sure they got frustrated with me.

Among the many difficulties that emerge with discussing personal experiences of being exceptionally gifted: social isolation, jealousy, fear -- is the lack of useful models, vocabulary and language to discuss the phenomenon. It's not common enough, and not well researched enough for there to be a convenient shared vocabulary we can use, especially one without such loaded words like "smart" "intelligent" and "gifted". It's not such a deficit to most people that it's really worth studying to be honest. Highly Intelligent people can usually figure out their own problems and go on to live productive enough lives. But it doesn't mean there aren't shitty aspects of the gift.

As to how do I know I possess this one quality?

It's not the hundreds of cognitive assessment tests I suffered through as a child. It's not people telling me "oh you're so smart". It's the experience of walking onto a team of smart successful people, the smartest in their field, and tackling an intractable problem in a few months that they, as a group have struggled with for years. It's cutting noise out of intensely complex problem sets and finding the core of the problem and an elegant solution (or knowing that the only solution is to brute force the problem). It's having that recognized repeatedly and then finding yourself on "hard problem" teams over and over again and ending up as the smart guy on the team of smart people.

It's being the one guy with the right solution in a room of problem solvers over and over again. And then your approach or solution gets legs and you find yourself meeting new people you have no connection with and in an offhand comment they bring up something you worked on that solved major issues for them and they don't know you were the one who came up with it.

But it's also about knowing when to stop and say "I don't know" or "I didn't know that" when you don't. It's knowing that some people are better than you are at their thing and letting them be better at it. And it's knowing where your gifts end and you turn into just regular folk. It's knowing you put pants on the same way, and go to the bathroom the same way as anybody else. And it's finding things that people are good at themselves, or better than you at, and enjoying and appreciating it as they talk about and practice their craft. Not getting jealous or scared of them for their gifts.

I'll go back to the analogy I've used here, people of extreme height. Replace "intelligence" and "gifted" in your previous questions with words like "height" and "tall". How does an extremely tall person know they're extremely tall? They just do. There all kinds of ways to measure height and if all those measures add up to "extremely tall" they just are. It doesn't mean other tall people aren't also vertically gifted. It doesn't put the hormonal output of other people's pituitary gland or the particulars of their inherited gene expressions down, it just means they aren't as tall.

>Does she share your disdain for those who aren't as smart?

So an extremely tall person who's talking about the sucky parts of being extremely tall doesn't disdain shorter people. They just have a unique experience that they'd like to share that likely nobody else in earshot will have experience with.

My wife is frequently frustrated with the cognitive limitations of others, and she also gets terribly lonely about making friends with normal folks. She finds their behavior odd and irrational and puzzling, but she doesn't put anybody down over it. She also works with excessively intelligent folks, and often ends up as the smartest kid in the room of smartest kids. Her gifts are of a very different nature than mine. But we don't often talk about them as we find it hard to relate to each other's gifts.

Her gift is more of the: take a problem with steps A through Z. She can go from A-to-Z without bothering with B,C,D or any of the the others. She can even do it with very noisy problem sets and her external thinking process when she's using her gift is extremely chaotic and hard to follow, but the output is nearly always right. She did not pursue the field her gift is useful for though, a brief childhood prodigy experience scared her away and she switched gears to several other career paths.

During college she was well known for her gift. People she didn't know from advanced classes she never took would come up and ask her for help understanding a section. She'd look at the chapter for a couple minutes, learn how to do it, and then show them. It was frequent enough that it often interfered with her own studies. I can probably say I saw it happen 50 or 60 times? (She's not a very good teacher though because it takes her a supreme effort to show the steps to somebody else. But she was always willing to give it a go to help them.)

Beyond that, she shares most of the classic gifted curses: intense social isolation, fear, jealousy, dehumanization (being treated more like an appliance than a person), and the typical sort of laziness and lack of learned skills that curses many highly gifted people.

There are degrees in how harsh and public you should shame.

If as a manager, I allow people to frequently complain about their peers with the other people absent, it sets up a terrible precedent. As manager I would become the bottleneck as people focus their energy on politics rather than problem solving.

It's not black and white, but how you lean.