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The Trouble with Bright Kids

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Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#141

Post by zargon »

steve-howard wrote: post #135
cperciva wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But that doesn't distinguish between the cases of "there is no God" and "there is a God, but He doesn't behave according to Catholic doctrine".

And you may not agree, but I posit that there's also a difference between "God is all-powerful and thus can overrule the laws of physics when so inclined" and "God can't exist because the laws of physics disprove him." I'm not too solidly decided on faith myself, but if God created the universe, then you can't use the properties of that universe to disprove Him. It's like proving a theorem, finding it conflicts with…

In your analogy, you assume that god exists. I could argue that if all unicorns are pink, then you can't disprove all unicorns are pink by showing me a blue one. That's like proving a theorem, finding it conflicts with your axiom, and saying you've disproved the axiom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#142

Post by steve-howard »

zargon wrote: post #141
steve-howard wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you may not agree, but I posit that there's also a difference between "God is all-powerful and thus can overrule the laws of physics when so inclined" and "God can't exist because the laws of physics disprove him." I'm not too solidly decided on faith myself, but if God created the universe, then you can't use the properties of that universe to disprove Him. It's like proving a theorem, finding it conflicts with…

In your analogy, you assume that god exists. I could argue that if all unicorns are pink, then you can't disprove all unicorns are pink by showing me a blue one. That's like proving a theorem, finding it conflicts with your axiom, and saying you've disproved the axiom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

You're quite right, and I'm a little off. The point I'm trying to articulate, if not too well, is that in the case that God doesn't exist (at least as an omnipotent being), these questions hardly matter, and in the case that he does, it doesn't make sense to use the system we're in to prove the non-existence of something outside of it.

This is quite off-topic now, so if you want to reply, please send it to the address in my public profile. :)

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#143

Post by iso8859-1 »

neutronicus wrote: post #110
itmag wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. So what you're saying is basically that if a kid is smart then he will be smart even without verbal acknowledgement of it. So it's better to keep hammering "you're really disciplined!" because then the kid will be smart AND disciplined. The latter of which is a learned trait, as opposed to raw smarts.

I went to college with people who had been raised according to the "praise hard work" theory (i.e. Asians), and it's got its own set of problems, I think.

Which problems?

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#144

Post by dbattaglia »

chunky1994 wrote: post #18
nod wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chunky, do you have a role model? A mentor? Whether a PG-type or someone successful in some other dimension, I'd encourage, nay, exhort you, to find and talk with a mentor who can tell you about the world that awaits your beyond your "beach of dreams" and current educational straight-jacket. Please, please don't assume that your smarts are all you need to see your future from your current vantage point. Many have wal…

Indeed there is, but even when I do talk to that person, it's seems to just highlight the fact that I'm stuck in a place I don't want to be, and though I want to get out of it, there's no conceivable way to do so. There' so little time to do anything, and this year's going to decide my future. It's really hard to not think of it like a noose around your neck, and whenever I do think about it, I keep wondering whether…

> this year's going to decide my future.

Trust me, everyone here is 100% right when they say that this is just so not true. Myself, I went to college to study music and audio engineering, I discovered partying and living on my own and dropped out. I got married. I got divorced. I lost all my possessions multiple times. I've experienced addiction, depression, the whole nine yards. I didn't discover programming until I turned 25. I'm turning 32 next year, and I couldn't be happier with my life. The whole thing has been a terrifying rollercoaster so far, and I'm not betting on it slowing down that much for a while. But trust me the one thing I can promise you is that things change, lots, all the time!!

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#145

Post by tdfx »

gyardley wrote: post #96
mcobrien wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this. I have a bright five year-old and, having read articles like this one, my partner and I try praise effort as much as we can. Here's the problem. For nearly all of the tasks she's set in school, she doesn't need to expend much effort at all. We say, "nice work, you must have tried really hard!" and she replies, a little confused at us, "no". It sounds like you found everything too easy as well…

You don't need to change your feedback, you need to change what she's doing. Get her into some more challenging stuff, stat. I sailed through my cow-town high school and then got my ass handed to me in the first semester of a competitive engineering program. Academic probation, failed classes, and all the low self-esteem that came with it. Yes, I eventually figured out how to succeed by working hard, but it would've…

  Plus I had the capacity to learn a lot more as a child than I actually did.
I feel like this is true of the majority of people. I, for one, know that when I was doing math in grade school I usually grasped the concept on the day it was introduced, yet was forced to repetitively solve quiz-like problems for weeks afterwards. This only served to make me absolutely hate the idea of math. And I don't believe my ability to understand the concepts was far beyond most of the others in my class. In my classes at least, the pace of instruction was always slowed to the level of the slowest students. I consider it a tragedy that most of my fellow students and I could've been hammering through calculus by eighth grade and instead were barely scratching the surface of algebra.

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#146

Post by tdfx »

Vargas wrote: post #105
kaybe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have loved for someone to point the numerous events going on for kids all over the world, like NASA summer schools and the like. Your kid is probably a bit young, but if you keep your eyes open, you can find the good stuff in time. As others said, focus away from school sounds good. The nice thing about these activities is that you meet other kids like you (giving you a better frame of reference and tons of a…

This. I agree completely. Get a bright kid to know other, possibly brighter kids in an environment that values them.

This is exactly the reason I have been drawn to HN. Being around people that are smarter than you is great motivation to increase your own knowledge. I only wish I could've been exposed to groups of similarly well-read and knowledgable people at an earlier age.

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#147

Post by lutorm »

nknight wrote: post #134
lutorm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, moral and ethical choices aren't really the topic of the article, development of skills is, so that seems like a separate subject. However, it doesn't seem to me that praising someone for not stealing every day is a good idea either. You should not steal because it's wrong, not because you get praised for it. I don't know how you interpret the Dweck research as implying that results are unimportant. Why would y…

Sorry, I was wrong. The disconnect is that you're not having anything like the conversation I'm having. I'm not interpreting any particular research done by any particular person, I'm speaking with regard to a particular action and child based on real-world personal experience and general informal psychological education. Comment threads frequently run far away from the specifics of the originally linked article. You…

Ah, ok. I think we're on the same page now. Sorry to impart thoughts to you that weren't there.

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#148

Post by c3o »

chunky1994 wrote: post #21
bane wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. No matter how bad it seems right now . It gets better. Don't ever give up, no matter how trapped you feel. Feel like the entire Ocean is over your head and drowning? Just wait a bit. Even the tides fall to the moon. Talk to someone. But just as important, don't give up. There's very few things you can get yourself into that you can't work your way out of. I'm thinking of particularly recent cases like poo…

But what I do rather than giving up is just sink into my own world, and if that's not destructive, I don't know what is. I just feel depressed, and then end up feeling that I should be stronger and I'm weak because I'm depressed, which just makes me even more miserable.

That's common: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-...

Maybe give this game a shot, that a game designer created after herself having suicidal thoughts – it's a playful way to get you to do things that help when you're depressed (talking to people, focusing on short term plans, finding things that make you happy, etc): https://www.superbetter.com

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#149

Post by superuser2 »

cperciva wrote: post #80
cletus wrote: post #40

Like others who have posted here, I have s story similar to this. By the sounds of it, I wouldn't call myself as "gifted" as some who have posted here but, relative to the environment I was in, I was "gifted". I grew up in three small towns. For the first 9 years, in a town of less than 1,000 where the 3rd and 4th grades (for example) were in the same class. When I was 8 I was doing the same work as the 7th graders w…

I can distinctly remember at age 10 reasoning out that God didn't exist Your logic was faulty. A God which does not interact with the universe is indistinguishable from a lack of God. (cf. Higgs Boson)

I, like many "atheists," am not actually anti-God; I am anti-"having faith in particular answers to questions of fact". I believe OP (and most people who call themselves atheists) hold the same sentiment. This is technically agnosticism, but that carries an inaccurate connotation:

God is possible; that doesn't make it acceptable to accept with all your soul that he most certainly exists and is a good reason to allocate funding, make curriculum decisions, raise your children a certain way, etc. Whereas "agnostics" tend to say any religious belief/practice is acceptable.

Yes, scientists have theories, but these are tentative, with certainty increasing as warranted by evidence, and they're replaced (or expanded upon) when they break down. This is not at all the same thing as faith.

Re: The Trouble with Bright Kids

#150

Post by bane »

jh3 wrote: post #93
bane wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds hopelessly stupid, but it saved me. I'm one of the few percentage of the population that can frisson to certain works of music. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson When I was sitting there, knife to my wrist, the thought of all of the music that I would miss, that I wouldn't discover or be able to frisson to (I didn't know what it was called at the time and only learned what it was decades later, but I kne…

> I'm one of the few percentage of the population that can frisson to certain works of music. I've been labeling this feeling as an ASMR[1] (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). Is it really a rare occurrence? I can pretty much do this on demand when listening to certain songs/types of music. [1] http://www.asmr-research.org/

My understanding is that ASMR and Frisson are similar, but different experiences. As far as I can tell, I can frisson, but not ASMR.

Interestingly, reddit has both a frisson and an ASMR subreddit.

I know that frisson is highly personal. What causes me to frisson won't cause another person to frisson, and I only know a couple people personally who I believe can frisson (but nobody really talks about it, because there's simply no awareness of it).

I don't know if the same is true for ASMR. But the triggers people post in the subreddit are not representative of anything that's ever triggered a frisson in me (soft voices, clicking sounds, etc.).

But that doesn't stop people from trying to share their triggers for each phenomenon!

http://www.reddit.com/r/asmr/comments/g76xg/lets_settle_this...

http://www.reddit.com/r/asmr/

http://www.reddit.com/r/frisson

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