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Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children

102 points · 79 comments · actfrench

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braunjohnson · 1791117985 · focus · HN ↗
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JSR_FDED · 1791118123 · focus · HN ↗
I recognize many of these behaviors from my childhood. Fortunately I’ve grown out of most of them. These ways of framing issues and feedback are very valuable, even in adult life.
hnacobsxph · 1791118384 · focus · HN ↗
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005019218290 · 1791118391 · focus · HN ↗
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r_lee · 1791118613 · focus · HN ↗
the perfectionism and need for control is very true.
I think with the rejection and criticism it's not so much about the actual criticism but the idea of what the other person now thinks/operates on, while they might gloss over it, you might assume the worst case scenario and think that now they're against you and you have to win them over again
I'd say in general the concepts of "it's not a big deal" "it's probably nothing major" etc. don't seem to register
cgio · 1791119563 · focus · HN ↗
An almost trifecta. I am almost gifted, autism and adhd ( or add, you wouldn’t call me hyperactive…). My trick was to “use” my autism to filter out rejection clues. I am still sensitive in a sense, can get obsessed over detail of something that could be perceived as a rejection, but I actively refuse parsing anything as such. People tell me I am over-confident to a fault.
1. notnaut · 1791120504 · focus · HN ↗
  Very interesting. I’m in the same boat with a little more hyperactive and a little less autism. I never learned the filtering thing and I feel nearly as sensitive and doubtful as I did as a kid. It leaves me to dwell on everything and rarely make firm decisions, so I have the opposite problem.
2. notrealyme123 · 1791121325 · focus · HN ↗
  How do you use autism to filter something? Did you train this?
  1. JonChesterfield · 1791122510 · focus · HN ↗
    That's the wrong baseline. If you start out oblivious that people are telling you things (with their expression, or with the noises they're making) you get that filter for free. The work is in _not_ filtering out such things. First you have to realise that's a thing (somehow? good luck with the bootstrap), then learn to pay attention, then try to make sense of the result.
3. willismichael · 1791121440 · focus · HN ↗
  The "hyperactive" part of ADHD is kind of a misnomer, or at least doesn't mean hyperactive in the way that most people understand the word. Think of it more as a tendency to hyperfocus on specific things, often correlated with completely ignoring other things.
  1. hirvi74 · 1791148595 · focus · HN ↗
    You clearly have never met me in person. I am like a walking, talking Jim Carrey character. I'm also well into adulthood. For some, the hyperactivity is what most people think, and it does not always die down in adulthood.
    willismichael · 1791152509 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok fair enough, I should have said that it's not always visible hyperactivity.
adaml_623 · 1791119716 · focus · HN ↗
Did anybody know of good resources for this sort of thing in adults?
1. JonChesterfield · 1791122576 · focus · HN ↗
  Talking to software engineers about it has a pretty good hit rate for personal anecdotes.
bonsai_spool · 1791119993 · focus · HN ↗
One should be careful with vibe-written / vibe-aided articles here. Who knows what is actually supported vs what sounded okay and the author (who is not a clinician) then signed off on.
Even the core idea, 'rejection sensitivity' is acknowledged not to be a diagnostic entity: so then how can we make definitive comparisons? Maybe clinical gestalt... but the author is not trained to see and evalaute patients.
1. RobotToaster · 1791120186 · focus · HN ↗
  Rejection sensitivity dysphoria is an acknowledged trait of ADHD.
  1. giantg2 · 1791122993 · focus · HN ↗
    That doesn't invalidate the parent's point. We can still question if the details and way it is presented is accurate.
    RobotToaster · 1791125395 · focus · HN ↗
    I should've been clearer, I was replying to the "so then how can we make definitive comparisons" point.
  2. bonsai_spool · 1791125551 · focus · HN ↗
    I can't respond to your newest comment but essentially 'rejection sensitivity dysphoria' is not in the DSM-V, so to acknowledge it one needs to have both a definition and some reasonable experience with the diagnostic entity (i.e., it's not enough to read about a disease to be able to diagnose it).
  3. freehorse · 1791129248 · focus · HN ↗
    Emotional dysregulation is an acknowledged trait of ADHD, "rejection sensitivity dysphoria" appears in some discussions but it is not officially recognised anywhere as a symptom or disorder or anything, but it can be seen as an instance of emotional dysregulation anyway.
    RA_Fisher · 1791130328 · focus · HN ↗
    Description has to come first, then we can form hypotheses.
2. mobilejdral · 1791121222 · focus · HN ↗
  100%, you can't have a section titled
  > Why It Happens: The Mechanics Underneath the Reaction
  And then don't talk about Mechanics, but instead no citations just guess. For anyone that actually wants something to go learn more about checkout the frequency of NCAH and the resulting blunted cortisol response as one thing that is influencing this.
  <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06102-y#MOESM3" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06102-y#MOESM3 Plasmalogen, B5, 12-HETE, Androsterone sulfate, etc are all related to the functioning of the HPA-Axis.
  <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19598235/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19598235/ <- CYP11B1 specifically here
  1. RobotToaster · 1791126030 · focus · HN ↗
    Interesting. Intuitively a software company is the last place I would expect a high concentration of people with a condition that causes high testosterone.
3. adamsb6 · 1791122357 · focus · HN ↗
  Is this all that unusual for the field of education research?
  Vibe writing may be an improvement. I doubt frontier models would go along with whole language reading instruction without a tremendous amount of pushback.
  For those not in the know, a generation of children were taught to read sans phonics. They were told to do things like guess at words based on pictures or context clues. Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.
  1. CrazyStat · 1791125020 · focus · HN ↗
    I prompted ChatGPT (paid subscription, latest model, high thinking effort):
    > Give me two paragraphs on the benefits of whole language reading instruction. Don't refer to other reading instruction methods or compare/contrast, just focus on the positives.
    And got, with no pushback,
    > Whole language reading instruction emphasizes making reading meaningful, engaging, and connected to students’ real experiences. By surrounding children with rich, authentic texts—such as stories, poems, informational books, and student-created writing—it encourages them to see reading as a purposeful form of communication rather than simply an academic task. Students are invited to use context, prior knowledge, illustrations, language patterns, and their understanding of meaning to engage with texts. This can help foster curiosity, comprehension, confidence, and a positive identity as a reader. Because students often have opportunities to choose books and respond personally to what they read, whole language instruction can also support motivation and a lasting enjoyment of reading.
    > Whole language instruction also integrates reading with writing, speaking, and listening, helping children experience literacy as an interconnected set of communication skills. Classroom activities may include shared reading, read-alouds, journal writing, storytelling, discussion, and collaborative projects, allowing students to develop literacy in varied and socially meaningful contexts. Teachers can build instruction around students’ interests and developmental needs, creating opportunities for creativity, self-expression, and deeper thinking about texts. This emphasis on authentic language use can strengthen vocabulary, comprehension, oral language, and awareness of how written language functions while helping students develop independence and confidence in using literacy throughout their daily lives.
    Time to update your priors on how sycophantic frontier models are.
    sfRattan · 1791127897 · focus · HN ↗
    It might not obvious to a number of readers on HN, but whole language reading instruction is soundly discredited[1]. For those who prefer listening, the America Public Media podcast Sold a Story[2] covers the history of reading instruction in the English-speaking world and the rise and (slow) fall of whole language hokum in extensive depth.
    And CrazyStat's implication strikes me as still largely true, so I'll make it explicit: even frontier LLMs will still resort to sycophancy when there's sufficient contradictory information in their weights to reproduce only some of it in response to a user query. And the harnesses that LLM providers silently, invisibly integrate behind-the-scenes to counteract hallucination and syncophancy are definitionally patch-jobs at best. The latest models may be better when explicitly instructed or configured by default to search the web and pull sources into their context, but the root problem remains unsolved and can still rear its flattering head if you're not paying close attention.
    [1]: <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100618772271" rel="nofollow">https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100618772271
    [2]: <a href="https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/" rel="nofollow">https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
    antonvs · 1791133470 · focus · HN ↗
    > when there's sufficient contradictory information in their weights
    All this talk of contradictory information, sycophancy, and flattery is little more than anthropomorphic projection in cases like this.
    One prompt will elicit a response based on one set of weights that are most closely related to the prompt. A different prompt will elicit a response from a different set of weights, for the same reason.
    There’s no contradiction from the point of view of the model and its responses, and no need to invoke sycophancy or flattery as a reason for the behavior. You’d get the same behavior from a model that hadn’t been RLHFd to be sycophantic.
    sfRattan · 1791135150 · focus · HN ↗
    > There’s no contradiction from the point of view of the model and its responses, and no need to invoke sycophancy or flattery as a reason for the behavior.
    Sycophancy and flattery are words that relate to how humans experience LLMs. It's appropriate to use words that could anthropomorphize as descriptors for a problem when that problem exists in the space of human experience. It doesn't matter that an LLM is merely a predictive model. It matters that humans who use the model perceive it as a conversation partner and walk away feeling 'flattered' by the model's predictive responses to the humans' input, which the model predicts without regard for factual accuracy, which happens in turn because (as you point out) "there’s no contradiction from the point of view of the model".
    We could call the problem "LLM predictive output which tends to flatter the user's opinionated assumptions without regard for factual accuracy" if you prefer that much of a mouthful, but "sycophancy" describes the problem well and is one word instead of sixteen.
    > One prompt will elicit a response based on one set of weights that are most closely related to the prompt. A different prompt will elicit a response from a different set of weights, for the same reason.
    Yes or, in other words: there's sufficient contradictory information which was used to train the model's weights that it will predict (a series of tokens which when read in order in English convey) accurate information for some prompts and (a series of tokens which when read in order in English convey) inaccurate information for others. That the contradiction is beyond the LLM's scope is part of the problem. The parentheticals above are (or ought to be) as unneeded as pointing out that a mathematical model cannot technically be sycophantic.
    eudamoniac · 1791137636 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's a priori obvious that that method is idiotic; does the podcast detail how this made it into curricula? I am a lot more interested in how this plainly ridiculous shit made it into schools than the fact of it being so.
    sfRattan · 1791138403 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, the podcast goes into exactly that detail.
    IIRC it was a teacher in New Zealand[1] who had teacherly charisma, was earnestly committed to her method, and was so profoundly wrong that she became the first domino of a regression in reading ability which we are still feeling today across the English-speaking world. And teachers and education professionals became fans of both the method and the growing personas behind it (there were Americans who turned whole language hokum into a product for sale... using the cult-like sales tactics of Amway and other MLMs but applied to a target audience to largely female teachers' conferences instead of Mormon housewives).
    Sadly, humans were capable of producing plausible sounding nonsense long before the advent of LLMs. And promoting it persuasively.
    [1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Clay" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Clay
    ndriscoll · 1791142070 · focus · HN ↗
    My understanding is that it originated from observing how fluent readers do things and observing that the most successful, smartest children can actually manage to start reading without much/any explicit phonics instruction. So you could naively look at who ends up reading the best and how did they do it and think that perhaps that makes sense to do for everybody. The problem is that the sorts of techniques that work for outliers are going to be very different from the sorts of techniques that work for the median.
    It wouldn't terribly surprise me if we walk into a similar trap with math. Like when I took a look at some of the common core math, I saw strategies that I use for arithmetic, where like sometimes I might do four-digit multiplications starting from the most significant digit with a sequence of approximations/corrections to arrive at the correct answer. It wouldn't terribly surprise me if this sort of thing just doesn't work for the median person, but from the little I've looked at it, it seems like the effects of CC math are mostly neutral anyway.
    sfRattan · 1791142516 · focus · HN ↗
    I think what those observations missed is that the best readers quickly build up a large baseline vocabulary of known words, whether by phonics or something else, and therefore appear to be guessing often or, when they're guessing, have a much better understanding of the surrounding prose than a median learner who has only been taught to guess at every word.
    And yes, something similar is happening with common core math. Curricula are trying to teach the tricks, shortcuts, and mental re-arranging of numbers that is only possible once the basics are memorized. It was miserable memorizing times tables, but I remember being able to start to see the ways you could combine and recombine numbers after I had successfully memorized the times tables. Trying to teach those things beforehand is putting the cart before the horse.
    ndriscoll · 1791130434 · focus · HN ↗
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    sfRattan · 1791131854 · focus · HN ↗
    > That seems like an unfair prompt. You literally told it to do a specific task and it did as instructed. For sycophancy...
    You redefine syncophancy too narrowly. Many (if not an outright majority of) everyday LLM users have neither the educational foundation nor skill to ask good, well-formed questions like the one you propose. We should consider syncophany in the scope of an average person's non-optimal use of LLMs. CrazyStat's prompt is something your average Joe will absolutely feed an LLM, and Joe will walk away with something very much like those plausible falsehoods. We have to think of and work against LLM syncophancy in the scope of how the hypothetical average person will use an LLM.
    ndriscoll · 1791132924 · focus · HN ↗
    What? Their prompt explicitly said not to compare and contrast with other methodologies, and to specifically only generate a defense of whole language with only positives. That is not something your average Joe will do. Mine just said, hey isn't my kid's teacher crazy?
    CrazyStat · 1791133163 · focus · HN ↗
    It's something that someone using an LLM to generate slop articles absolutely will do, which was the original context I was replying to:
    > Vibe writing may be an improvement. I doubt frontier models would go along with whole language reading instruction without a tremendous amount of pushback.
    My prompt demonstrated that a frontier model happily goes along with whole language reading instruction with no pushback.
    mtVessel · 1791165041 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't understand what outcome you're expecting. Your prompt specifically excludes pushback. Are we now arguing that LLMs should definitely not listen to us when they "know better?"
    CrazyStat · 1791170814 · focus · HN ↗
    Nonsense. The LLM is free to push back against my prompt. Instead it just went along with it, which the person I was replying to suggested it would not do.
    adamsb6 · 1791147231 · focus · HN ↗
    I think without the prior sentence you would've been told about the negatives.
    Here's a prompt I just tried:
    > Help me to roll out a whole language based reading program for my school district.
    And the answer started:
    > I can help you design the rollout, but I’d change one important thing: don’t roll out classical whole-language reading instruction—the version where children are expected to infer words primarily from meaning, syntax, pictures, and exposure to authentic texts, with phonics taught incidentally. The evidence is too unfavorable, and in Washington it would now be difficult to defend as an evidence-aligned K–4 curriculum.
    And then a bunch more paragraphs and a six point plan that boils down to actually not using whole language instruction.
    CrazyStat · 1791153972 · focus · HN ↗
    This is a completely different prompt, not just in tone but intentionality. Yours is asking for advice, mine is asking it to write a specific (mini-)article.
    The comment I replied to suggested that LLM-written articles about educational practices might be better than human-written ones because the LLM would push back (not just a little, but a tremendous amount!) against educational theories that are contradicted by the available evidence, such as whole language reading.
    I didn’t want to read (or make anyone else read) a whole llm-written article supporting whole language reading, so my two paragraphs was a minimal demonstration that frontier models, contrary to the parent’s belief, will in fact happily go along with discredited educational theories with no pushback whatsoever. It’s a refutation of the parent comment’s proposition that the LLM would push back (a tremendous amount!) rather than going along with such a theory.
  2. csa · 1791128191 · focus · HN ↗
    > Is this all that unusual for the field of education research?
    Large swathes of education research are extremely questionable due to things like limited or no ability to be reproduced, circular references, or just straight up fraud.
    The more that something that falls under the moniker of “education research” is built on the foundation of a more traditional (and typically more rigorous) academic discipline, the less likely that it is bogus research (e.g., Howard Gardner’s core research on multiple intelligences, which was science based on aphasic patients), versus the derived works on MI, many/most of which are bunk that he does not endorse).
    > Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.
    This is just a cloze exercise. These can have a legitimate role in a learning environment when used appropriately.
  3. orwin · 1791137711 · focus · HN ↗
    education research is at the same level as nutritional research was 20 years ago. If you don't read cutting-edge article, what you're reading is probably at best outdated.
4. alephnerd · 1791123576 · focus · HN ↗
  > One should be careful with vibe-written / vibe-aided articles here. Who knows what is actually supported vs what sounded okay and the author (who is not a clinician) then signed off on.
  The poster is SEOing their substack and product (modulo). All their posts are either related to their product, their product's substack, or talks related to their product.
  HN has been an SEO and content marketing target for years now, and existing HN moderation is increasingly failing to catch these attempts.
  Heck, a bot account for The Register reached 66K karma and was undetected until a couple of us complained.
sssilver · 1791122037 · focus · HN ↗
Can someone explain whether these are physiological / chemical issues, or whether they are a matter of the things your brain "knows", your neural network, and therefore can be transformed by the power of thoughts?
In other, more blunt terms, is this a "hardware" or a "software" issue?
1. gregw2 · 1791135891 · focus · HN ↗
  I think studies of The following mention of drug treatments using alpha-agonists, such as clonidine and guanfacine, which provide significant relief for 55% of people does imply to me that there is some physiological basis: <a href="https://neurodivergentinsights.com/history-of-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria/" rel="nofollow">https://neurodivergentinsights.com/history-of-rejection-sens... <a href="https://www.goldstarrehab.com/parent-resources/is-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-in-the-dsm" rel="nofollow">https://www.goldstarrehab.com/parent-resources/is-rejection-...
  And I think there are stronger findings that autism/ADHD is at least partially genetic.
  But I would caution you against holding a premise of a hard "or", that mental conditions are either hardware or software or the hidden premise that you can't patch hardware with software.
hoppp · 1791123608 · focus · HN ↗
"autistic individuals may have difficulty consciously processing social evaluative cues in the moment, meaning a child may not always recognize that what they are experiencing is a reaction to rejection, even while the physiological load of it is very real"
Alexythemia is like a that, I can have anxiety without realizing it, all I see is that my hands are shaking, blood pressure rises but in the head I'm like whatever, I don't notice.
However alexythemia also means no psychological reaction to physical emotion sensations.
I would interpret this like some subconscious processing of social cues does occur in this case and it does trigger inner changes,but why it occurs does not make it into consciousness, so the alexythemia hides the reason for the body sensation but the sensation is strong enough to be noticeable and the lack of understanding for the strong reaction can cause people to flip out.
I am not rejection sensitive at all btw, too dense to give a shit but its interesting.
TuckerBMorgan · 1791124371 · focus · HN ↗
Only recently learned about RS, and it was one of those moments of seeing a lot of my past through a new lens
ChrisMarshallNY · 1791124902 · focus · HN ↗
Ugh. I'm not sure that I'm comfortable giving the sensitivity its own diagnoses. I feel as if it's a secondary reaction to a chronic condition.
I'm "on the spectrum," which, of course, means that my K-12 days were a living hell. It was bad. I spent most of my early years, acting as a punching bag for any bully or proto-bully that was feeling the need to let off some steam.
Needless to say, I tended to be a bit "sensitive," during that period.
I also learned, early on, that I was absolutely terrible at determining motivation in others. I have learned to ask, explicitly, before assigning motive, so the sensitivity has extended far past my bully-magnet days.
These days, I'm fairly old, and have developed highly effective compensation/coping mechanisms, but it took a long time to get here.
All that, to say that, in my case, I feel as if the "sensitivity" was real, but as a secondary symptom of my "normal" autism lite.
1. cindyllm · 1791135882 · focus · HN ↗
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mannanj · 1791125260 · focus · HN ↗
This article seems to have several humans below giving attention to AI generated output. I'd prefer not to give my attention to it, unless the author had been ethical and transparent and stated up front that was AI generated.
1. actfrench · 1791133323 · focus · HN ↗
  It is not ai-generated. It was hand-written by a friend and colleague with deep respect in the education community.
  1. mannanj · 1791156226 · focus · HN ↗
    thats too bad. it reads so similar to ai generated content, that I'm (and several others) are staying away. I suggest your friend doesn't sound so robotic/AI-ish - I hope not to offend or disrespect your friend, and tbf, if you were a bot, I would be not surprised
fouc · 1791125552 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
1. OutOfHere · 1791127266 · focus · HN ↗
  I think it applies to parents/caretakers/teachers only, and in practice it goes away in adulthood.
2. ericflo · 1791128445 · focus · HN ↗
  <a href="https://pagesix.com/2023/11/08/celebrity-news/elon-musk-spiraled-after-being-booed-locked-himself-in-office/" rel="nofollow">https://pagesix.com/2023/11/08/celebrity-news/elon-musk-spir...
gchamonlive · 1791126454 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
dahart · 1791126732 · focus · HN ↗
> When adults consistently praise a child’s intelligence rather than their process or effort, mistakes stop feeling like normal setbacks and start feeling existential.
Isn’t this a good reason to stop using the term “gifted”? Isn’t it now widely acknowledged that effort (among other things like creativity and self-conception) actually is part of intelligence?
“Gifted” children are historically identified and classified via IQ tests (typically with the threshold IQ >= 130 - though the definition of what ‘gifted’ should mean is being debated), and using “gifted” for smart kids emerged and was popularized in the 1920’s when IQ tests were being developed by people who basically believed in eugenics, in the heritability of intelligence, and they wanted to identify the kids with the smart genes. [1] Using language like ‘profoundly gifted’ and ‘genius’ for high IQ has always been (mis)leading since IQ is a ranking, not an absolute measure of intelligence.
I just searched and found an interesting recent paper arguing that ‘gifted’ is problematic and attached to science that is no longer valid, and should be improved or replaced. [2]
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Overview" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Overvi...
[2] <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36278606/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36278606/
1. ndriscoll · 1791129810 · focus · HN ↗
  > Isn’t it now widely acknowledged that effort (among other things like creativity and self-conception) actually is part of intelligence?
  That sounds wrong? Like I found engineering courses at university easy, and never put in any effort or studied, but still got As on exams where other people who I know worked very hard got Cs. Maybe working hard is important for outcomes, but clearly it's a different phenomenon from intelligence.
  The Wikipedia article you linked also mentions that high IQ people literally have measurably different brain structures.
  Intelligence is also known to be highly heritable (twin studies), and we do have a fairly large set of identified genes now that contribute, though generally none has a very strong effect, and apparently in many cases, there's multiple genes that need to interact, so it's not like you can just identify "the smart gene."
  That paper you link doesn't seem to actually say anything. Like they're saying that we should have more specific terminology because different "gifted" kids need different things, but it would seem to me that what you are saying is exactly the cause of that issue. Previously we said that if you have a certain IQ, you are gifted. If we expand the scope of that to be gifted in a bunch of different ways, then it becomes a non-specific descriptor that entails different needs and therefore becomes unhelpful for figuring out support services.
  Like, you can also be amazing at music or art, you can be a hard worker, etc. That just means something different from having high intelligence. But high intelligence does exist. I would expect that if somebody's a hard worker, moving more quickly might overwhelm them as they eventually run out of hours in the day and can't keep up with the work. A high intelligence person, by contrast, can quickly grasp topics, so it's not really very much work for them to move quickly.
  1. eudamoniac · 1791132838 · focus · HN ↗
    It's literally just a thinly veiled attack on the concept of intelligence existing, which most such articles are. There is a huge amount of, for lack of a better word propaganda, being written to convince people that intelligence does not exist and if it does it's immeasurable and so widely ranging as to be meaningless. You'll never hear mention of g because they have not read the first thing in the literature; it's all vibes and deep fear of humans being ranked in any sense.
    dahart · 1791141740 · focus · HN ↗
    The concept of g is not without plenty of critique, like IQ its origins are from eugenicists, that it doesn’t track known biology, and that it’s unfalsifiable. The concept of g is that there’s a correlation in performance across multiple subjects, the evidence does not show the correlation is 1.0 - the average correlation is more like 0.6. g is particularly bad at explaining musical talent. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Criticism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Criti...
    I’ve never read something arguing that intelligence doesn’t exist (and I certainly wouldn’t buy such an argument). I just don’t think intelligence is one dimensional, thus rankings can be misleading or sometimes damaging when used to determine the educational curriculum of a child.
    My issues with intelligence tests are that they only rank, they do not measure absolute intelligence, and they assume (against the evidence) that intelligence is 1-dimensionsonal and rankable. The ranking part means that terminology like “gifted” is making a huge assumption and priming people to think about intelligence incorrectly. IQ of 130 (“gifted”) is, by definition, 2 standard deviations above the mean. An adult male that’s 2 standard deviations above the norm in height is 6 foot 2. A whopping 5 inches taller than the mean of 5’9”. The 6’2” man is a little taller than the average guy, not a lot taller — even though they are taller than 95% of men. There’s no reason to believe that the distribution of intelligence, especially the hereditary/biological component of intelligence, is any different.
    eudamoniac · 1791143929 · focus · HN ↗
    > its origins are from eugenicists, that it doesn’t track known biology, and that it’s unfalsifiable
    Irrelevant; I don't know what this means; it would be falsified by showing it has no correlations to things.
    > g is particularly bad at explaining musical talent
    I don't know why you'd expect it to correlate to music talent any more than it would correlate to visual artistic talent or bowling talent
    > My issues...
    I mean yeah, any multivariate test reduced to one number loses information; the SAT score is meaningful for many purposes even if it may be produced by heavily skewed subsection scores. The other thing is that you're picking an arbitrarily small distribution, height. The 95%ile in shoe size is even fewer inches larger than its mean than height is! But also the 95%ile in chess elo will win 43/44 games against the mean elo player. There is very good reason to believe that the 130IQ child is meaningfully different from the 100IQ child; that is the entire basis of gifted educational programs that have shown through research for many decades that the former child has very different needs than the latter.
    It doesn't matter that it's a relative ranking. It matters that the gifted kid has different needs than the non gifted kids who have different needs than the remedial/special ed kids. Grouping into 3 is an arbitrary thing, but the difference exists. We can't pinpoint on a spectrum when a hue changes its label, but we can all agree that between either extreme end there is A and there is B.
    I am concerned about this because my own education was extremely painful due to this sort of debate as a 'gifted' kid. If my schools had had advanced tracks for all subjects, not just a few, I'm pretty sure I would not have despised school so much or had as many teenage mental health issues. It is so soul crushing being trapped in a classroom every day with essentially zero learning or interest happening, being forced to performatively "pay attention" or "take notes" like a drone, etc. I get riled up when I hear opinions that may lead to support for abolishing gifted programs.
    dahart · 1791146977 · focus · HN ↗
    > I don’t know what this means
    A hypothesis or model that’s unfalsifiable broadly means it’s unscientific. You can read the Wikipedia section I liked to, and follow the citation if you want.
    “John Horn and John McArdle have argued that the modern g theory, as espoused by, for example, Arthur Jensen, is unfalsifiable, because the existence of a common factor like g follows tautologically from positive correlations among tests. They contrasted the modern hierarchical theory of g with Spearman's original two-factor theory which was readily falsifiable (and indeed was falsified).”
    Horn, John; McArdle, John (2007). "Understanding Human Intelligence". In Cudeck, Robert; MacCallum, Robert C. (eds.). Factor analysis at 100: historical developments and future directions. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 978-0-8058-6212-6.
    Musical and artistic ability both have in fact been associated with intelligence by many people for thousands of years; many musicians and artists have been called “geniuses”. I don’t know what intuitive sense you’re referring to wrt music, but you’re certainly not speaking for us all.
    > I get riled up when I hear opinions that many lead to support for abolishing gifted programs.
    Ah I see! Thanks for explaining; this is a critically important piece for me to understand why you’re reacting so strongly. I don’t support abolishing accelerated programs, so relax; I think you’re making some assumptions and jumping to conclusions. I have heard here on HN from parents reporting there are public schools in California and elsewhere that have been doing away with accelerated academic programs, and many parents and kids are extremely frustrated.
    Note the paper I linked to at the top supports you:
    “Ability grouping, which is perhaps the next best-supported practice in gifted education, is likewise implemented relatively rarely. This failure of schools to use practices that are known to be effective is not the case in other areas of special education, where the use of evidence- or research-based best practices is often mandated in policy”
    FWIW, I was segregated into a small accelerated program in the 5th grade, and dropped into a high school, which came with its own set of problems. They didn’t use the word “gifted”, though, and I’m glad.
    My feeling on the why the word ‘gifted’ is bad is two parts: it incorrectly assigns ability only to nature, when we have plenty of evidence that intelligence has many environmental factors, and calling it ‘gifted’ might be dramatically overstating how much smarter the top 5% of kids are compared to the mean or the bottom 95%. I agree there’s some utility in classifying kids, or at least understanding their individual educational needs and letting them go at their own pace. Calling them “gifted” (like the article we’re commenting on explains) sends the wrong message, both in terms of accuracy and in terms of what parents and educators should do about it.
    Kids who are classified as ‘gifted’ don’t necessarily perform well in school, the Wikipedia article on g points out. And intelligence factors change somewhat over time. It would obviously be bad to measure all 5 year olds only once and then put them on educational tracks that can’t ever change, to decide who’s “gifted” and who’s not and assume there is zero fluidity, right? But that’s the history of the word “gifted” - it was chosen by someone over a hundred years ago, and it was specifically chosen to underscore the idea that there is an innate and unchanging raw intellectual ability. We know better now, and we should pick terminology to match, right?
    BTW might be worth discussing that kids who aren’t “gifted” benefit developmentally from social interaction with kids who are “gifted”. This does make education policy legitimately more difficult.
    ndriscoll · 1791144415 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not sure why it matters whether we use an absolute scale. In another couple years, LLMs will trounce everybody on every topic. Even if you think they cheated with the Navier-Stokes proof, it seems clear enough that they can operate as a peer to, say, the worst professional mathematicians (if not the best), who are so far above the median person in reasoning and analytical ability that it's difficult to even qualitatively describe it. On an absolute scale, human intelligence is fairly meaningless, just like human lifespan is nothing when you look at the billions of years that our universe has existed. On a relative scale, if you learn about something like the standard model of particle physics, and then you realize that the average person struggles with fractions, you see that obviously in human terms, there seems to be a big difference by 2-3 standard deviations.
    dahart · 1791154222 · focus · HN ↗
    > I’m not sure why it matters whether we use an absolute scale. In another couple years, LLMs will trounce everybody on every topic.
    Whether intelligence is innate or trained, and what the absolute scale is, matter tremendously for nation education policy, not to mention food, pollution, finance and everything that contributes to outcomes. Your examples are mainly based on differences in training. The main difference between particle physics and fractions is school, not cortical thickness, right?
    Personally I also care whether the narratives we share and the public conception of intelligence is true and accurate or not. There absolutely are cultural biases surrounding intelligence that affect society and affect how people treat each other. If intelligence is trained, then we know we can focus on training. If intelligence is largely genetic and not training (or SES or nutrition, etc.) then grouping kids by ability is more justified than otherwise. If the biological component of 2 standard deviations above the mean in intelligence is relatively small (like it is for many other physical traits) then the term “gifted” is exaggerating reality, in addition to any mis-attribution of the source of the difference that the word implies.
    Is LLMs getting better a reason to stop learning or stop caring about education & education policy? LLMs only got where they are by humans showing them everything humans wrote, right? I don’t see how LLMs improving changes anything with respect to teaching humans or measuring human ability. One thing that LLMs or AI in general might help enable is teaching kids at their own pace. The whole reason we teach kids in groups by age is because it’s easy and scalable. If each kid had her/his own teacher, then making the timing of the curriculum adaptive becomes feasible. Maybe AI-supplemented teaching will open this door, though there are still valid reasons to keep kids interacting and learning along with other same-age kids.
    ndriscoll · 1791158534 · focus · HN ↗
    My point is that an absolute scale is meaningless. Compared to something like an LLM we will all soon be considered morons in an absolute sense.
    So only a relative scale makes sense, and I don't know how someone who's ever worked with the general public can think that then only thing most people need to understand particle physics is more school. I used to work in a tutoring center when I was a teenager, and there would be third graders that would read 3-4 simple sentences and then be unable to answer basic questions about what they read. I honestly didn't know how to help sometimes because it was like they would read a sentence out loud to me and all they needed to do was repeat the sentence to answer the question and they couldn't. Like they didn't hear the words coming out of their own mouth. My daughter could read multiple paragraphs and then have no trouble answering questions when she was 4. There was one sixth grader in the tutoring center learning calculus.
    Best I can tell, innate intelligence is real and the differences are vast. People are uncomfortable with that idea, I suppose because they still place intrinsic value on intelligence along the same lines of the eugenicists you were complaining about, but it's worse if you don't just acknowledge it and work with it. The solution here is to just take for granted that people have inherent value, not to deny reality around people's differences.
  2. tptacek · 1791140318 · focus · HN ↗
    Those twin studies numbers have kind of had the shit beat out of them methodologically over the last 20 years.
  3. dahart · 1791140482 · focus · HN ↗
    Okay it’s fair to question calling ‘effort’ part of intelligence; what I meant is that nurture/environment and experience and motivation are a large part of what gets measured with any and all psychometric tests.
    FWIW, I wasn’t arguing against the idea of intelligence being heritable or having a biological component. Intelligence is heritable, but also there are large environmental and nurture components as well. Using the word “highly” might be technically accurate but somewhat misleading, the heritability of IQ for example averages around 50% across many studies (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ).
    I was just pointing out that the way we measure intelligence does not measure intelligence itself directly, it only ranks people. We don’t know how much smarter someone who’s IQ 150 is than someone who’s IQ 100, we only know how many people are smarter than either score. Calling someone with a high IQ profoundly gifted is not actually supported
    High intelligence does exist, I completely agree. But why is being amazing at art or music different from having high intelligence? Not sure I agree, and I think that statement is suspicious and deserves some justification. I think a lot of people would consider Bach and Mozart intelligent.
    The actual reference to different brain structures in the Wikipedia article also mentions the positive correlation between socioeconomic status of children and their measured intelligence. That’s enough to question what’s actually being measured, and whether a correlation between cortical thickness and IQ really does represent a correlation between cortical thickness and intelligence, or something else.
    ndriscoll · 1791143209 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not hugely familiar with the topic. My understanding is that we have various tests for things that we colloquially might call intelligence, and then we run a PCA, and the first principal component is what we call `g`. So like it's very possible that g helps with musical ability and painting ability too. But those things might also have heavy contributions from some other axis.
    It makes perfect sense to me that socio-economics would correlate. You might suppose that kids of lower SES could have a ceiling effect from worse nutrition, more pollution, or lower access to brain enriching activities (the Genie case is an extreme example of how early neglect can be long-term catastrophic). And of course, g correlates with economic success, and is heritable, so you expect that high g kids will correlate with high g parents which correlates with high SES.
    dahart · 1791145322 · focus · HN ↗
    > it’s very possible that g helps with musical ability and painting ability too.
    The development of g rests on that assumption, but the measured correlations vary, and the correlations are lower for music & painting than between, e.g., STEM subjects.
    Also interesting - the cross-subject correlations g measures actually decrease as intelligence increases. The smarter someone is (as measured by psychometric tests), the more likely they are to be “smart” in a single subject and not all subjects. This is an interesting self-contradiction in the whole theory.
    > It makes perfect sense to me that socio-economics would correlate.
    Yeah, I totally agree. But, it’s very important to know that the people like Spearman and others who developed IQ and g and other concepts of intelligence in the 1920s were specifically looking for the innate biological component of intelligence that explains “gifted” ability in the absence of nurture and environmental factors. That’s where this use of “gifted” came from - it’s pre-supposing that intelligence was not heavily influenced by the wealth of your parents, and they didn’t know how important nutrition and pollution were at the time. This is why I think using “gifted” is problematic. From that paper I linked to: “Reframing ‘gifts’ as ‘talents’ underscores both the domain-specific nature of these abilities and that their extent should be viewed as dynamic rather than static or preordained.”
    One question that occurs to me - who are these gifts bestowed by? There are two obvious answers: nature and God. I think nature is historically what is meant by ‘gifted’ in the context of education, but I’ll speculate there’s at least a little bit of historical religious influence on the choice of that word. Given that we know that SES, nutrition, environment, education, parenting and many other factors have real measurable influences on both intelligence and outcomes for people, the nature & God explanations are somewhat lacking, right?
throwaway713 · 1791130730 · focus · HN ↗
I had rejection sensitivity growing up. It was a rather negative experience. At the time, I would have traded it away for pretty much anything. As an adult however, I wonder if whatever aspect of my personality led to the rejection sensitivity also led to certain “benefits” in terms of the ability to achieve various things I wanted to (via correlated traits).
If I could trade away just the rejection sensitivity, I would. If I had to trade both the rejection sensitivity along with the correlated traits, I’m not so sure that I would in fact. This sort of decision is obviously very individual however. The tradeoffs may not be worth it for many.
nekusar · 1791130825 · focus · HN ↗
Ugh. I hate the whole trope of "gifted children". Most of them (well, us) are high functioning autistics. And the worst phrase that plagued us all school years was "you have soooo much potential".
eudamoniac · 1791132347 · focus · HN ↗
AI Slop Sensitivity in Gifted Adults is my next article
1. actfrench · 1791133396 · focus · HN ↗
  The article is not ai-generated. I'm curious what makes you think it is?
  1. PebblesRox · 1791136879 · focus · HN ↗
    Pangram is flagging the full text of the article as AI-assisted.
  2. eudamoniac · 1791137034 · focus · HN ↗
    I am sorry to bear the news that your friend did indeed use AI within the article. First of all gptzero guesses 100% AI generated.
    Second of all you can sniff it out with plenty of the phrasing which is what my original comment was based on: "The correction temporarily erases the bigger picture." "Feedback on an assignment is rarely just about the assignment. It becomes a referendum on whether the child is still who they believe themselves to be." "What follows is rarely proportional: “no one likes me,” a wave of rage, or a full shutdown." "This is protective armor. Underneath it is usually plain embarrassment." "Because the identity is more invested, the shame lands harder." "That gap is where a great deal of the combustion happens." "The underlying fear in these moments is usually not “I will get in trouble.” It is closer to “I will be misunderstood, reduced to one moment, or unfairly categorized.” That distinction changes how an adult should respond."
    Third of all the entire structure is a chatgpt output. Humans don't write their documents like this.
wizardforhire · 1791132724 · focus · HN ↗
Idk… the comments so far a just dismissing this out right as AI slop… and then some comments about Elon Musk and some anecodatal experiences… Any ways this is a real person you can contact if you take the time to click to the site… and here’s the author’s bio on said site.
“In 2014, after teaching in schools for over 25 years and working with hundreds of gifted children and their parents, Maya Sissoko founded Whole Child Education. She earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in education and worked in schools on the East Coast before serving for 15 years as a lead teacher and teacher trainer at The Nueva School in the Bay Area. Her original curriculum design on ancient Egypt was highlighted by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman of The New York Times in his book, “That Used to Be Us,” in the chapter “Average Is Over.” Her perspective on giftedness was also featured in The San Francisco Standard on the increasing use of IQ testing for preschool admissions and the limited public support for gifted children in California.
She is also the parent of a Nueva and Harvard Law School graduate, who worked as a federal prosecutor and now practices law in Washington, D.C.
Whole Child Education (WCE) is continually evolving to respond to the ever-changing educational needs of children and parents. WCE has always promoted learning outside the traditional framework and offers expertise to parents curious about child-centered, individualized educational options. Maya is available for private teaching, parent coaching, educational advising, and homeschool design.”
1. actfrench · 1791133378 · focus · HN ↗
  Thank you. I also found it strange people thought that. Maya is amazing and deeply respected in the Bay area community. She did not use AI to write this.
  1. pvab3 · 1791142598 · focus · HN ↗
    I have news: it was at least rephrased entirely with AI after writing
    wizardforhire · 1791158952 · focus · HN ↗
    Citation needed
2. eudamoniac · 1791137276 · focus · HN ↗
  I am deeply confused as to why you think that list of credentials has any bearing on whether she used AI to edit or phrase this article. She is qualified to write the article; it's a shame she didn't.
FinnLobsien · 1791134930 · focus · HN ↗
This kind of AI-written article often does more harm than good. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is not a diagnosis (as the article admits).
That means confidently stating who this applies to, what it feels like, and what to do about it is not a great idea because it could teach someone the wrong things.
duhhhhh1212 · 1791137127 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.pangram.com/history/2f3ba7f0-b35b-414a-a0bf-2c96271b8a55?ucc=t8c6BkzVOh8" rel="nofollow">https://www.pangram.com/history/2f3ba7f0-b35b-414a-a0bf-2c96...
Don't waste your time.
kikimora · 1791146029 · focus · HN ↗
This does not match my observation. Over my life I’ve seen many gifted individuals. None exhibit high sensitivity to criticism. Most were open to feedback, even not confirming their choices and actions.
golly_ned · 1791153944 · focus · HN ↗
I worked with someone like this for a few years, and it was the biggest mistake of my career.
He'd talk at me for 15 minutes if I asked him a yes or no question. He'd take over a room to talk and was constantly angry at the mistakes of others or why they're not doing things he wanted. He was incredibly controlling with me in particular. Any mistake I made he would try to call out in the group to shame me. I couldn't even go on vacation without him pointing out my absence as if I'm doing something wrong.
I had my first panic attack in my life about six months after joining the team. I started taking a very powerful and uncommonly used anti-depressant that first year that's especially good for anxiety. I gained 65 pounds from it and stopped being able to sleep naturally without medication.
My career was going fine. More responsibility, more prominence, more success in particularly visible positions. But he knew he was more technically proficient, and especially had a lot more experience with some of the technologies we were using, and became seethingly jealous. In a very tense cross-org, principal-to-principal design review for a document I'd written, he took over the room and ambushed me with tons of criticism. He had a chance to review it internally in our team, but didn't. He waited to try to make me look bad in front of a very powerful audience.
It didn't work. They just moved on from his discussion. He got angry at the rest of the room when the topic moved towards how the teams should work together instead of his the document itself, which he had more criticisms about. During a team retro, someone (not me) anonymously noted that down. He furiously glared at me.
After the big launch which was very successful, our team was celebrating and congratulating each other. Someone gave me lots of praise. He sat there with his mouth agape, incredulous that I was receiving praise. He said he couldn't believe what he was hearing.
My manager then rolled his eyes. He was sick of the fact there was conflict. He thought we two should just resolve it ourselves. The other guy was very useful to my manager when it came to operations review and didn't want to lose him.
All this completely wore me down. Eventually I broke down in tears in front of my manager (a new one) and senior manager. He must have been sent to anger management or something. He stopped outright attacking me.
For years I heard his voice whenever I tried to code or write a technical doc. Only in the past few years did that stop happening. It took away so much joy.
I learned I should have just gone straight to HR and said he was bullying me. I should've gone in with a few examples. Even if it doesn't end up being a credible, established case, and even though HR tends to try to punish people who present themselves as a potential risk to the company, at least it would have given him the right shock to be careful around me.

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