I think one thing that hurt me, in particular, is that I repeatedly got told "you're really going to go places some day!". And, so I waited for things to happen.
It took me way too long to realize I had to make things happen.
If you're reading this and you're young and gifted, you need to make things happen. You'll have people help you along the way, but odds are, you will never be discovered and have riches lavished upon you.
By high school, I was a 1.4 GPA student who was also on the Academic Decathlon team winning state-level medals. My upbringing was extremely abusive, which definitely contributed to the academic problems, but what I really needed was someone in my corner pushing me to explore and actually try. Being told I was smart wasn’t just useless, it was actively harmful. I became afraid to try and leaned on what came naturally (hence doing well on Decathlon tests) while consistently failing to finish things (no homework, no papers... and the GPA shows it).
What would have made a huge difference for me was being explicitly taught how and why to study, how to take and review notes, and how to manage my time. And just as importantly, someone consistently emphasizing that effort matters a lot more than being "smart."
Even now, I’m honestly surprised by how many people I work with in tech equate being "smart" with being good at math, algorithms, or pattern recognition, while seeming almost oblivious to some pretty big gaps in other areas. That mindset isn’t doing anyone any favors.
No, there's not, and they do do great. And this goes back to Terman: there's a handful of highly selected examples (eg the Australian kids recruited from child psychologist referrals, the self-selected self-diagnosed Mensa adult survey), furious anecdotes, and then every systematic prospective sample like Terman or population registers or SMPY shows the opposite.
And while Tao is, of course, exceptional, the results for accelerated gifted kids are generally great. And Tao was part of SMPY (note the URL path, supporting documentation for https://gwern.net/smpy ) and helped demonstrate this in practice.
I'm viewing on chrome from an Android device.
I'm trying to figure out what your certainty on smpy is.
Also thank you for your site. I read your n back analysis some years ago and found it to be very interesting.
The fact that 'certainty' ratings don't make sense for pages like that is part of why these days, I wouldn't have a page like that at all. An annotated bibliography is not an 'essay' and shouldn't be shoehorned into my framework meant for that kind of opinionated writing. I realized that if I was going to 'annotate' a paper, I would either have to go without, or copy-paste it all around indefinitely and it'd violate DRY and be a nightmare. Long story short, https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/smpy/index is closer to what that page should be, but it's a lot of work to sit down and convert the legacy page over to pure annotations, so, it is what it is. Maybe a LLM can do it for me soon - it seems within the ability of Claude Code.
1: https://t3x.org/files/vidya_324-325_NH_reprint.pdf (on HN 2015, 170 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145853)
I think it was very beneficial to have to work hard to catch up with more advanced classes. I feel flexibility around this is something parents and schools should take seriously.
(Tbf I was also super lucky to find a very accepting group of nerdy friends in the new year that would tolerate someone younger.)
It’s a lie many start believing, that they don’t put in effort.
It would be much better for the gifted children to attend schools where their effort is visible since the beginning. That is, schools with other gifted children.
For example, in math, my kids didn't learn anything new during their first three years of the elementary school, because they already knew numbers and addition at kindergarten age. Yet they were forced to sit there for three years. It would have been better to give them a book to read, or a collection of interesting problems to solve.
No, you do well because you put in the effort. Even trivial effort is still effort. Sometimes it's all that's genuinely needed (quite often in fact!) and it's important to realize this - but not always, and that's important to realize as well.
> my kids didn't learn anything new during their first three years
I think it's almost always possible to revise even these 'trivial' subjects in more depth. Granted, it's hard to do this in elementary math without some kind of outside involvement - someone to explicitly introduce the nuances. Other subjects this is quite a bit easier.
Debating something is, as my grandmother said "the ultimate concession", you only ever really debate something if you feel that there is a chance you are wrong. If there is an impasse, and you are confident in your response, there is usually no reason to continue, especially when there's a teacher-student asymmetry, they take it personal, and you gain nothing but make an enemy out of your teacher and spend your "question" points.
There's only so many times you can interrupt a professor, and spending your question points on correcting them isn't very useful to a student. And that the student believe that on one ocassion they know more than the professor, does not mean that there is nothing to learn from the professor.
Both of these mistakes (overextending a challenge and conflating a specific dominance over a general dominance) I think often come together under a personality trait that is generally identified as "arrogance". I do think there's a middle ground between believing one is superior and dropping all contentions of giftedness, but it's a thin line, and I think it's especially notable when the difference in talents (between the student and teacher, or between the gifted child and the average) is very marginal anyway, if it's undisputable then most tensions dissipate with the clarity.
I got suspended for three days, and also the enmity of his best friend the advanced social studies teacher. Yet, somehow I didn't get kicked off the basketball team. And I actually got a girlfriend, who punched me at the wrestling match, then we kissed behind the school during the dance.
I learned a valuable lesson that day.