This is purely anecdotal but for where I went to school it depends on what classes were available under each designation. For example Algebra, Science and Geometry were only offered standard and honors. English and Social Studies were offered standard, honors, and gifted. It seemed if you qualified for both gifted trumped advanced.
Personally I took gifted classes where offered and advanced otherwise even though my grades were quite often sub-par due to growing up very poor. For example, we couldn’t afford pencil and paper quite often. Thankfully, my teachers were relatively enlightened and I was cut some slack.
With regards to growing up very poor. In some ways it’s been a severe handicap. In other ways I’ve been exposed to things that my own kids will never experience and those things I believe have had a net positive effect though very easily could have had a bad negative effect as well. Lots of risk being poor. Growing up surrounded by poverty such as people, including myself, having no power for weeks or months at a time. Having water cut off for a week until a charity can pay for it. Requiring food stamps and charity medical care, etc. These experiences shape one as well as the observation of the way people live in order to be destitute. In America a lot of poverty is partially self inflicted. This has shaped me politically and influences my thinking on how a system should be set up so that the people living in that system respond to the incentives.
And by that definition, and by most people’s understanding of my income (*), my success this year will be about half what it was last year or the year before. I’m living better, though…
note that most people would count things such as “expenses paid by my customers” as part of my income; my Treasury or those of my customers do not, but most people do. And due to % differentials and other stuff, my after-taxes income will actually be pretty close for the three years.
Ambiguous sentence, it can be interpreted as saying that there are puppies who have never heard of Mensa in the demographic, but not that they are the most of any demographic.
I have a number of friends with a high skillset for academic sorts of topics whose social skillset would meet a definition of borderline retarded.
In some ways, the world simply looks different to the highly intelligent (“why isn’t this elevator button more precise in its meaning!”), so they have trouble interacting with it. But in other ways, they are just genuinely stupid for basic social skills.
Society favors people who have a deep competitive streak over those with innate talent. It’s fine if you have developed the best chocolate chip cookie recipe in the world. But if you lack the drive to go out there and hustle your ass, you aren’t going to be a successful cookie maker–if you define “success” as raking in the big bucks and being a household name.
It could be that the uber smart tend to be more prone to low ambition than the “regular” smart. Maybe when one gets to a certain point of intelligence, they tend to be more risk averse. Kind of like how a six-year-old isn’t afraid to rush out into the street for a ball, but an adult knows better. Or how a person has dreams and aspirations as a teenager, but they become more level-headed as an adult. Indeed, it appears that anxiety is correlated with intelligence. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Dunning-Kruger effect is more likely to occur in the not-so-smart than in the smart. As unfortunate as the D-K effect is, I think a little self-delusion is necessary to make it through the rat race. Perhaps the hyper intelligent tend to lack this ability.
I think one of the factors the high IQ, gifted student faces is coming to understand how his/her abilities compare to the average. Lack of such understanding can result in a disconnect that leads to social issues others have touched on.
I qualified for gifted and talented track in school… but our county really had little to offer. So I sat in regular class and became bored in no small part because I simply did not comprehend that other students were not picking up on the material as quickly as I was. I think this was a factor in my relative social isolation and lack of developing some social skills while I was school age.
Tested at 144 in school. In grade school, it was the gifted program. We left class, I think, two times a week for an hour or so for gifted class. We did a lot of creative type projects as I remember.
In middle and high school, gifted transformed into humanities which took the place of English class. I could still do AP courses for my other subjects, however.
In humanities, I remember doing some creative projects. One that stands out in my mind was creating a fictional governmental system and hierarchy, then discussing the pros and cons of our systems. Mostly, however, it was high level reading and discussion. For instance, I remember reading Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth, and Hamlet in 7th grade which is probably a bit earlier than the other students.
I work in legal and read a ton, so my grammar is better than most. However, I probably did miss out on some English stuff. I still have no idea what a gerund is other than it has something to do with -ing words.
I had a very good friend in high school like that. He hated school, meaning the class’s part, since he was so bored but participated in everything else.
He spent his high school years conspiring how to get out of classes. He was in classes his freshman year but after that we not see him much during the school day. Our sophomore year he was a page in the State Legislature about an hour away.
His junior year he came to school the Monday after the 1st weekend and handed in the complete math homework for the semester. Every chapter, every problem. Told them everything was right and he wanted an A for the class and to be excused to take courses at the State University also about an hour away. That is what he did and his mother drove him back and forth. The thing is he set it up so that he basically was gone for the class day, but returned in time for soccer practice and everything else.
Sure, a really high IQ would present some difficulties, such as frustration dealing with mediocrity, lack of services/opportunities that max one’s abilities, etc. But, by virtue of being intelligent, the smart person has considerable resources which allow them to deal with things. The intellectually disabled individual certainly does not have a similar ability to adapt to the world populated by and styled for “average” people.
Now, if the high IQ person also has a mental or emotional impairment which prohibits them from working within the normal system, or from identifying opportunities or work-arounds, I view that as a different issue from mere intelligence. In fact, I would be interested to see if there were certain psychological pathologies that seemed to be associated with various IQ levels. For example, are more high IQ folk exhibit personality disorders than average IQs?
I did basically the same when I transferred school systems and my records had not caught up with me at the new school.
I was put in a general math class. Finished the book and asked to go to the library. Teacher sent be to the principal for being a smart alec.
Next Monday came and I had completed the pre-Algebra book. That got me sent to the Guidance Counselor’s office and some assessments scheduled.
Next Monday and I was through with Algebra I. All told this played out in the course of about two weeks. They didn’t know what to do with me. I sat in Algebra class and took tests when they were handed out. Ended up spending a lot of time in the library reading whatever I liked.
And I did not understand, could not understand, that picking up math like that was not something everyone could do at my age. I ended up rather depressed from the boredom of it all.
IQ is an ordinal measure, not a cardinal measure. I.e., you can’t compare different IQs like that. Think of it as ranking runners in a race. One runner may have come in 5th place and another runner may have come in 10th place, but you can’t then assume that the 5th place runner ran twice as fast as the 10th place runner.
A better example might be considering we gave a class a test. We then lined up all the test takers by test score, took the middle guy and gave him 100 points. Then then next guy to score higher than him gets +5 pts, and the next guy to score lower than him gets -5 pts. So for example, if you had 5 students take a test and their scores were: 97, 96, 96, 93, 50, you would then assign them “IQ” points of 110, 105, 100, 95, 90. The guy with the 110 IQ only scored 1% higher than the guy with the 100 “IQ”, but his IQ score is 10% higher.
Same with IQ. A person with a 120 IQ has an IQ score 20% higher than a person with a 100 IQ, but that in no way implies that they’re “20% smarter”.
As I heard here recently, “If you’re always the smartest person in the room, get a better room.” Meaning, as an adult you have choices, and if you choose to hang out with a bunch of idiots that’s up to you. You could have done something challenging, but you didn’t, so either get used to it, or change.
Understood that as a kid you might not have that option. But you have a library card, right? Holy crap, there’s the internet today. MIT puts their courses online. The world is literally at your fingertips.
As a kid I sometimes felt like the smartest person in the room. As a working adult I never feel that.
I’ve got tons of patience and even more tons of focus. I just suck at chess.
Is higher intelligence better than lower intelligence, all other things being equal?
We can compare it to lots of stuff - not just what you have, but also looks, public speaking skill, charisma, athletic ability.
Now anyone who thinks you can rank order IQs and say anything about the relative intelligence of people whose scores are 5 points apart doesn’t understand the test or statistics. But 30 points apart is another matter.
And, by the way, intelligence does not make you unhappy. In fact by making it more likely that you have enough money, and thus reducing a cause for argument, it can help. Doesn’t mean that smart people won’t piss their money away, of course.
Obviously because you made good job choices.
I know some people who put their PhD on their business cards. Almost all work at places where they are the only person with one, and they damn well want other people to know it. (These are engineers, not psychologist say for whom a doctorate has direct relevance to customers.) People at places where there are lots of PhDs do this rarely, and no one ever calls anyone else doctor anything.