There’s that joke about wearing regular clothes on Halloween to go as the “gifted kid”, and when people ask what you’re supposed to be you sigh and say you were supposed to be a lot of things.
“I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”
Was this from Dexter? I feel like this is from Dexter.
I am good with knowing my deficiencies. What sucks is being told that they are my fault because I should be “smart enough to overcome them”.
Agreed 100%, being a specialist in something always has led to someone taking a pot shot at your deficiencies.
Or being a jack of all trades and getting potshots for not being an expert in everything just because you pick up the basics quickly.
It’s actually insane how many teachers and other education professionals waved me off with ‘you’re smart enough, just try harder’ while I was obviously suicidally depressed and extremely dysfunctional. Having undiagnosed autism because I was a teenage girl in the '00s was fun.
Girls, undiagnosed autism, and suicidal tendencies? Name me a more iconic trio!
Ah, the ol’ “here’s the test here’s exactly what you need to do to be successful” followed by “lol that was never the real test.”
People who say that are just trying to be a dick to you. Say something soul-searing to them in response and they’ll stop.
Most people just don’t understand that being really good at something doesn’t mean you can’t be terrible at something else. Like, I can problem solve a wide variety of things, but there are a few things that I just have no success at even if I know the problem and the likely solution.
The most infuriating one for me is that if I can’t see something then I cannot line it up right. A screw or bolt out of view means I have a 50/50 chance of ever getting it started even though I know how I can move it to fit in. Like I know to tilt and whatever, but without a visual frame it becomes impossible. A ton of people just yell me I am not trying hard enough, even though attempting to learn for decades hasn’t worked out for me.
But with even the slightest view I can get it started no problem. Being told I am not trying hard enough is infuriating when I am just being honest that it is my limitation.
I don’t mind being aware of everything, but I do mind that nobody else is
As you get older, you sort of get used to the fact that the majority of your fellow passengers are oblivious to the fact we’re on a bus speeding towards a cliff, driven by depravity and delusions of grandeur. And you realize short of a miracle, nothing is going to change it. It’s either that or you go mad. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Ah, I see the stereotype of everyone thinking of themselves as “lazy genius” is something we’ve carried over from Reddit. We’re all above average intelligent and could really achieve something if we just bothered to work hard and apply ourselves!
lol
Yeah, one of the most important epiphanies I’ve ever had is realizing I’m not a lazy genius, I’m just lazy. It was a rude awakening to realize that I need to work twice as hard to keep up. But it was probably the best thing to happen to me!
I’m in this picture and it makes me keenly aware of what I could accomplish if I didn’t just coast by
Go with what makes you happiest, most often more effort can lead to less rewards. Ultimately you have to find your comfort zone.
wise words. I started just playing to my strengths a few years ago, instead of overachieving for the nebulous award of being “the best”, and my life has gotten immensely more fulfilling.
my current employer isn’t asking me to be the best in my field, just good at what I do, and that feels great. I get shit done, and don’t feel the need to constantly reinvent the wheel. or feel the stress of failure when something is over my head.
Gifted kids aren’t necessarily smarter than anyone else. They just develop their adult levels of intelligence faster than normal. So there is no guarantee that the amount they will be able to maintain that performance gap going forward. Indeed, they are likely to do worse as they never had to develop the skills to do well in school. So once school gets hard enough for them to need those skills they don’t have them.
Let’s be honest, most of us think we’re in the blue zone, when we are probably in the red zone
No, people in the red zone think they’re in the green zone.
And everyone believing they’re in the blue zone is statistically speaking very likely in the yellow zone.
I had to do an official test along with a psychological examination for reasons when I was almost 18 years old, so I know at some point I was in the blue zone or above, but it doesn’t really fucking matter when you have autism, a mood disorder and have been neglected by your parents so you never learned things like determination or frustration tolerance. I think I shaved a solid 10 IQ points off anyway from almost a decade of substance abuse issues, so now I’m just autistic and dysfunctional without the gifted part.
Serious question: what kind of drug abuse does it take to shave off 10 IQ points? I’ve done my fair share and would prefer not to have that happen to me - if it hasn’t already.
A ton of amphetamines and other stimulant research chemicals and a fuckton of alcohol. I think probably the latter is mostly to blame.
Most likely most of us would be in the yellow zone
Look at the mathematician here
In order to bother with something like lemmy, you’re probably above average intelligence (specifically to do with computers)
You can be good with computers but dumb everywhere else, plenty of people like that exist
Fun fact: programs for gifted kids have historically been far more underfunded than programs for other exceptional students.
By the way, the euphemism of “exceptional children” pleases my autistic brain way more than any other word for Special Education students. It has all the compliment-sounding qualities of “Special Needs” but is even more literal than any previous euphemism. It literally means “kids that teachers need to make exceptions for”
“Gifted” programs royally screwed my education. I had huge gaps in my knowledge because they decided that being top percentile in reading/writing (and being the weird kid) meant I could just skip out on classes for special little weird classes or sit with higher grade classes. I just had ADHD btw and really liked to read. Anyway, I would LOVE to know wtf they thought they were doing moving a kid around that much in 3rd-5th. I suffered the hardest with math. I was missing bits and pieces, which is pretty gd important in math, and I’d still somehow get the answers right but talked to about my overly complicated or ✨creative✨ solutions lol. Even now I hide my work if I need to solve something because I’m probably doing it weird… Then later it was really fun finding out that I couldn’t really live up to being “gifted”. 0/10 being special made me less educated.
For what it’s worth, math can be taught very linearly, but I think it can be explored and approached many different ways. I did the same thing, the teachers would say “I don’t know how, but you got the right answer”.
I kind of wish we leaned more into the way individual kids intuitions of math worked, I think you could teach the foundations much faster that way.
3-5 is mostly arithmetic and intro to word problems anyway, I’m awful at arithmetic but it doesn’t affect doing any of the important parts of math.
Skipping classes as a “gifted” kid always seemed like a very weird concept to me, you’re making the child lose a lot of interaction with their peers for dubious reasons. It seems to me like it should only be reserved for the most bulging hyperwrinkled brains, like those kids that finish college by the time they’re 16 or whatever that would obviously be extremely understimulated when going the normal pace. Even then you could argue the gigabrain kid would probably benefit greatly from socializing with their peers, I mean where’s the rush really? They’re young, they can always learn more later.
those kids that finish college by 16 usually just have parents that pay a fuckton of money to skip their kids through the honestly very simple and bleak public schooling experience. has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with not dragging out units for ages and paying a small fortune to get private tutors and certified testing done.
The red band is where the real geniuses are. Apparently.
Only the very stable ones.
I still suffer from this. Promising early start, intense self-confidence issues and depression by the end.
on the topic of iq, i have a lot of problems with the way people seem to interact with the concept. there’s a bunch of assumptions all baked into it:
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iq is a variable that actually exists in nature
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people’s iq is static and follows a standard distribution
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iq tests are capable of objectively measuring or at least approximating this variable
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this variable is a good stand-in or even synonymous with cognitive ability
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cognitive ability is univariate or single-faceted, able to be described with a single number
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cognitive ability equates to or correlates with usefulness, happiness, sociability, success, whatever
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finally, that any of this really matters, like in a materially impactful way, or is something that we should focus on
it’s not that each of these statements is 100% wrong, it’s that each shouldn’t be assumed to be true. but the way i usually see iq invoked kinda just uncritically runs with all of them, contained within a neat little ideological package.
also a pet theory i like (that isn’t actually true or provable) is that gifted programs are meant to remove children deemed smarter from their communities and funnel them into middle management and academia, so they don’t become agitators for change in their communities and workplaces
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Awareness of your own weaknesses is the first step to make them your strengths.
Yes, this is funny, but anyone worth knowing in a PhD program will quote Hawkings at you if you take the green part too seriously.
“Only losers brag about their IQ.”
Or Thomas Edison (and yes, he was actually a decent engineer before he realized how much easier it is to just own a company)
“Great accomplishments depend not so much on ingenuity as on hard work.”
I reject uniform distribution theory and only recognize the graph that looks like a pair of torpedo titties.
I can’t unsee it now.
The first 3 are the flag of Romania :) 🇹🇩
Edit: (but reversed)
The creator of this comic is a self-described pro-sweatshop neoliberal, which explains the “woe is me, I’m too smart for my own good” delusions.
Sure, because something so egregious would definitely show up in a Google search for “Zach Weinersmith sweatshop”, right?
Unless…you’re exaggerating on the Internet to stir up outrage?
