Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children
Thread
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
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searched and found an interesting recent paper arguing that ‘gifted’ is problematic and attached to science that is no longer valid, and should be improved or replaced.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/
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
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 at a high pace, and in fact it might cause them to become more engaged.
eudamoniac · · focus · HN ↗
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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. I don't think those are things that have traditionally been associated with intelligence. The things that g correlates with are the things that people have associated with intelligence for thousands of years; we all have an intuitive sense of what it is generally referring to.
> 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. Also if you've ever spent any time around kids/students, especially tutoring them, it's pretty incredibly obvious that the gaps in ability are vast. It's really not a matter of inches here, it's a matter of literal years of schooling being wasted by putting gifted children through standard public school tracks.
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.
The term "gifted" is useful for helping and classifying children. Maybe you are saying to replace it with more granular words, like "gifted in math, standard in english" or something? That's fine and generally what happens in practice, but it's just going to be a recursive debate: "How can we really say you're gifted in math? Math contains a lot of subjects..." We have enough problems already trying to get modern school districts to understand differences in ability exist at all.
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
Whether intelligence is innate or trained, and what the absolute scale is, matter tremendously for national 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 · · focus · HN ↗
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 the 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 (from a human perspective). 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.
I do agree though that LLMs have great potential to be personal tutors and allow each person to reach their own ceiling.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
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 by the ranking metric we’re using.
High intelligence does exist, I completely agree. What “high” actually means is debatable. 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 · · focus · HN ↗
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 e.g. 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 · · focus · HN ↗
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?