Thread

Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children

102 points · 79 comments · actfrench

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searched and found an interesting recent paper arguing that ‘gifted’ is problematic and attached to science that is no longer valid, and should be improved or replaced.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 at a high pace, and in fact it might cause them to become more engaged.
  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.
    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 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 · 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 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.

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