# Are You A Gifted? In My Humble Opinion, I would Like To Fight Ignorance **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 10, 2011, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859 "2011-09-10T22:10:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e8c25b/32.png) [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THE_REAL_GIFTED)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/1 "2011-09-10T22:10:04Z")
An Intellectually Gifted Individual? Just to be a bit more formal. I’m talking about Gifted, Intellectually Gifted, Intellectual Giftedness. Smart, curious, eccentric, multi-talented etc etc to name a few common characteristics. And probably have some sort of other issues, maybe a twice-exceptional issue, but also including the issue with the Gifted label & stigma. As a point of reference about what I’m trying to discuss here, Google [Gifted - Google Search](http://www.google.ca/search?q=Gifted) or Wikipedia [Intellectual giftedness - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness) are solid bases for the subject. With that posted, there isn’t exactly a wide variety of works that address the topic of Intellectual Giftedness. Even here on the Straight Dope Boards, it isn’t addressed as bluntly as I think this post is trying to be. We’re just trying to get a feel out there at who is willing to respond or lurk at this initial post, and maybe even admit to it. So we’ll throw some self-questions out there: \*\*\* Are you multi-talented? \*\*\* Do you have so many interests and abilities that it is hard to focus your energies on developing any of them to your satisfaction? \*\*\* Do you continue to believe in yourself and your vision, even when no one else does? \*\*\* Do you talk compulsively? \*\*\* Are you adventurous where new sensory experiences are concerned (food, music, erotic experimentation, different environmental settings, for example)? \*\*\* Do you love to explore a wide variety of theories and ideas? \*\*\* Are you excruciatingly sensitive, with intense emotions? \*\*\* Are you an independent thinker, individualistic, and mentally self-sufficient? \*\*\* Are you determined to make a meaningful contribution during your life? \*\*\* Are you hard to get to know, more involved with your internal world than you are with others, and have only a few close friends that know you well? \*\*\* Are you driven to achieve “what could be” when you think of “what is?” That’s just a general self questionnaire, and there’s more where that came from. Sound familiar? And just to address some specific posts, ‘‘Gifted Children’’ - Where Are You Now? is a good one, but maybe some Gifted Adults were lucky / unlucky enough to have been identified as a child, so they share drastically different experiences and perspectives about Gifted. As well, the majority of Gifted Adults were probably not identified as Gifted in their youth. Gifted Programs are definitely not the be all end all of defined Giftedness. While they are a popular, solid indication, A number of conflicts may interfere with the purpose of Gifted Programs - From Parenthood politics, to social economics, to even having kids so smartass they manipulate the system and avoid Gifted programs by either dropping out, dumbing down, chance, or altogether. Then there is the popular excuse / joke that “I was Gifted” & “I’m not Gifted anymore”. In fact, as the saying goes, once you’re Gifted, YOU’RE GIFTED FOR LIFE. So Gifted Children don’t develop into butterflies, they develop into Gifted Adults. Even though I know "former Gifted or “ex-Gifted kids” or “ex-cons” try to drink or smoke away the Giftedness without knowing what Gifted is, it is a fact that Giftedness doesn’t have an expiration date. Or The problem of giftedness Which actually just addresses The problem of gifted programs and education. And more points of reference where I can pinpoint and have browsed through Straight Dope posts that I can associate with Giftedness What is your IQ How do you deal with a slacker kid? - I’ll add more as I browse through the board. Anyways, just wondering who out there associates with the Gifted label & stigma. Or maybe Gifted + ADD? ADHD? Bi-polar? OCD? Oppositional Defiance? etc etc etc ---
**Author:** ![Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/96bed5/32.png) [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patty_O_Furniture)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/2 "2011-09-10T22:14:08Z")
> [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](#): > > \*\*\* Are you multi-talented? > \*\*\* Do you have so many interests and abilities that it is hard to focus your energies on developing any of them to your satisfaction? > \*\*\* Do you continue to believe in yourself and your vision, even when no one else does? > \*\*\* Do you talk compulsively? > \*\*\* Are you adventurous where new sensory experiences are concerned (food, music, erotic experimentation, different environmental settings, for example)? > \*\*\* Do you love to explore a wide variety of theories and ideas? > \*\*\* Are you excruciatingly sensitive, with intense emotions? > \*\*\* Are you an independent thinker, individualistic, and mentally self-sufficient? > \*\*\* Are you determined to make a meaningful contribution during your life? > \*\*\* Are you hard to get to know, more involved with your internal world than you are with others, and have only a few close friends that know you well? > \*\*\* Are you driven to achieve “what could be” when you think of “what is?” > > That’s just a general self questionnaire, and there’s more where that came from. > > Sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds like an attempt at cold reading. ---
**Author:** ![Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/96bed5/32.png) [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patty_O_Furniture)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/3 "2011-09-10T22:18:32Z")
Oh, I see you already posted this same OP last month. Does this count as re-gifting? ---
**Author:** ![THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e8c25b/32.png) [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THE_REAL_GIFTED)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/4 "2011-09-10T22:19:29Z")
How about - Sensitivity - Remembering insults forever - Doing three things at once - Doing the outwardly foolish thing, taking up lost causes - Psychic - Interest in life and death - Driven to comprehend, complexity of understanding - Wanting to know the reasons and origins of things - Asks, “What is my purpose?” - Naive - Recognition of falsity, no “trophy friends” - Complexifying solutions - Finding non-conventional solutions, originality - Not motivated by extrinsic awards, discomfort with praise - Passionate - Undeterred by conventional expectations - Self taught, non-sequential learning - Need for precision - Recognition of unfairness, strong sense of justice - Making intuitive leaps, making logical projections - Noticing what no one else does - Manipulation and bargaining - Make and follow their own plans, less teachable - Devise practical experiments to see “What if?” - Saying, “Actually” - Large vocabulary, love of big words - Delayed in toilet training, difficulty in separating from mom - Early sense of responsibility - Not wanting to grow up and face the world - Less physical risk-taking - Zipping through Piagetian stages - Friends of both genders, later sexual interests - Abstract thinkers before having the emotional ability to handle it - Symbolic thinkers - Can animate their fears, powerful emotional imagination ---
**Author:** ![THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e8c25b/32.png) [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THE_REAL_GIFTED)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/5 "2011-09-10T22:21:04Z")
> [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](#): > > Yeah, it sounds like an attempt at cold reading. I assure you it isn’t sir. Just trying to illustrate a point. > [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](#): > > Oh, I see you already posted this same OP last month. Does this count as re-gifting? Well I was in the middle of a response to that post right before it got closed. I figured the thread title was a problem, so I started a new one. I hope that there is still space left on this bored for me to that? ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/6 "2011-09-10T22:21:24Z")
This isn’t how it works. When someone shuts down your post for being pointless arrogant drivel, you don’t get to start an identical replacement. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/7 "2011-09-10T22:21:36Z")
Not this again. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![Ximenean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/aca169/32.png) [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/8 "2011-09-10T22:22:08Z")
> [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](#): > > How about > > - Zipping through Piagetian stages Oh come on, everybody does that. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/9 "2011-09-10T22:22:27Z")
> [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](#): > > I figured the thread title was a problem, so I started a new one. Not very “gifted” after all, then. The thread title was only the tip of the iceberg. ---
**Author:** ![THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e8c25b/32.png) [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THE_REAL_GIFTED)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/10 "2011-09-10T22:24:08Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > This isn’t how it works. When someone shuts down your post for being pointless arrogant drivel, you don’t get to start an identical replacement. Except it wasn’t pointless arrogant drivel at all. Actually, I believe it was you that I was responding to with a well thought out response right before my the thread got closed and my response got deleted? Like the thread title now suggests, In My Humble Opinion, I would Like To Fight Ignorance. Although I felt that when I initially started, I feel the need to point it out. > [@Huerta88](#): > > Not very “gifted” after all, then. The thread title was only the tip of the iceberg. Fallacy, and that statement that this was in response to wasn’t meant to be taken literally. ---
**Author:** ![Cazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cazzle/32/75_2.png) [@Cazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cazzle)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/11 "2011-09-10T22:29:06Z")
You’d think A Gifted [sup]TM[/sup] would have figured out that you can use spaces in your user name. ---
**Author:** ![THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e8c25b/32.png) [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THE_REAL_GIFTED)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/12 "2011-09-10T22:30:11Z")
OK I admit, I know this thread will be closed for no reason when power ranger comes back around, but I truly meant “In My Humble Opinion” “I would Like To Fight Ignorance” when I started [“You A Gifted”.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=621596) But this is the stigma of our lives, and I understand the status quo about it. Hopefully this topic of niche interests appeals to those who feel the same lonely way, and they understand that they aren’t alone. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/13 "2011-09-10T22:33:07Z")
I know it’s pointless, but on the remote chance that this poster is capable of learning from his/her mistakes, I thought I’d try to sneak this in under the wire before, uh, the opportunity passes and the OP has to take his/her obsessive act on to another forum: This forum periodically receives visits from first-time posters who have some pet issue in which they are obsessively (in the clinically aberrant sense) interested and want to gain validation for after their friends, family, and other (more appropriate) fora have banned them for their monomania. We had one nutcase going on recently about purebred designations for some kind of terrier. Problem is, no one here is remotely interested in these obsessions and repeating something a million billion times doesn’t make it the slightest bit truer. People here tolerate a wide range of opinions but do not take kindly to being used as a dumping ground for irrelevant raving just because no one else will listen to you. Think of that the next time you (inevitably) go to yet another website that isn’t interested in your incoherent, self-aggrandizing theories. ---
**Author:** ![THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e8c25b/32.png) [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/THE_REAL_GIFTED)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/14 "2011-09-10T22:35:20Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > I know it’s pointless, but on the remote chance that this poster is capable of learning from his/her mistakes, I thought I’d try to sneak this in under the wire You once called me out on a sarcastic fallacy, yet you continue to response with fallacies and put downs of your own. Yeah, you’re right, no one wants to talk about it. [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/search.php?searchid=7048697](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/search.php?searchid=7048697) [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=537806&highlight=Gifted](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=537806&highlight=Gifted) [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=568851&highlight=Gifted](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=568851&highlight=Gifted) [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=617372&highlight=Gifted](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=617372&highlight=Gifted) [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=615929&highlight=Gifted](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=615929&highlight=Gifted) [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=614505&highlight=Gifted](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=614505&highlight=Gifted) /sarcasm Well, at least as not as straight up as I am. I’ll try to sugar coat it next time. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/15 "2011-09-10T22:37:15Z")
> [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](#): > > OK I admit, I know this thread will be closed for no reason when power ranger comes back around, but I truly meant “In My Humble Opinion” “I would Like To Fight Ignorance” when I started [“You A Gifted”.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=621596) > > But this is the stigma of our lives, and I understand the status quo about it. Hopefully this topic of niche interests appeals to those who feel the same lonely way, and they understand that they aren’t alone. You are receiving an infraction for reposting a closed thread. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/16 "2011-09-10T22:38:12Z")
> [@THE\_REAL\_GIFTED](#): > > You once called me out on a sarcastic fallacy, yet you continue to response with fallacies of your own. > > Yeah, your right, no one wants to talk about it. > > [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/search.php?searchid=7048697](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/search.php?searchid=7048697) > > /sarcasm My right what? I can see that you’re going to play to type. If your condition is one that allows for lucid intervals, write a sticky to this effect: giving in to the crazy voices is what’s causing my problems. Try to fight them. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2011, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-a-gifted-in-my-humble-opinion-i-would-like-to-fight-ignorance/595859/17 "2011-09-10T22:39:47Z")
Thread closed.