Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

These kinds of things are rare enough that they tend to get a lot of attention, and I've yet to hear of a horror story of the kind that people tend to raise in the abstract, so I think that between parents, school administrators, and the particular students involved when this actually occurs in practice, things are generally handled fairly well.

That's not to say that there isn't legitimate reason to consider carefully, but I think the idea that this is somehow universally an unacceptable risk in every case is simply unsupportable from the factual experience. I'm interested in seeing any concrete evidence that would suggest otherwise, but generalization from what is typical of age groups to cases that are clearly atypical for their age group is, I think, insufficient to make that case.

The way I think about "intelligence" is not to mull over what it "really means" but to think about lots of common "intellectual" tasks (in which aptitude can be measured) that people are interested in: reading, writing, math, programming, solving puzzles, etc. Or ideally, theoretical "potential" in each of these tasks, since one person may put more or less effort into another field.

What's supported by research and anectodal evidence is that if you did principal components analysis on these measured "aptitudes", there would be a principal component explaining a lot of the variation. A good test can try to measure this principal component.

But when you're talking about the very highest levels of specific tasks like cycling or swimming, it would be reasonable to expect that amongst the population of already "elite athletes" there would be less of a dominant first principal component

I see this claim often and when pressed it looks like there's a lot of social pressure to "learn the test," and the people those cultures produce are vastly uncreative, difficult to work with, and often very dishonest (openly cheat for example), but test well in their cultures.

There's a big difference between talent and schooling. The latter can be gamed, and often is.

In most sports, we have clear rules about who is better at it. Let's say long jump. It's clear that a person with larger limbs (genetics) will have an advantage above one that has shorter limbs. How do we translate this in cognitive ability?

A person is more intelligent than other because they passed a test? because they can draw better? Everything is loosely defined.

Because if you have some kind of test for identifying the geniuses who can enter your "special gifted genius program", the test is going to have a some cut-off line or threshold, and that's going to be unfair. For example, assume you're using an IQ test, and the kids who score above some arbitrary threshold would be ushered into the special awesome program, but the kid who scores only one point below the threshold does not get in. Even if the difference is just one point ... That would be a quite silly (and deeply unfair) policy, because there's always going to be some random noise in the test taking.