Other points:
- it’s not mutually exclusive with any other neurodivergence, in which case they’re “twice exceptional”;
- In an environment with unprepared people and professionals, they may be wrongly diagnosed as having some other neurodivergence.
- It’s not just a high IQ score;
- Gifted kids can be problem students and have low grades;
- Homework feels like torture (this is true to any child, tho);
- They’re very likely to question authorities and point out perceived hypocrisy (emphasis here on perceived, because pointing something and being right are different things);
- As kids, they may have weird quirks for executing tasks, such as wanting to hold pencils the “wrong” way, or wanting to press against a wall to do homework;
If you’re Brazilian or can understand Brazilian Portuguese, this is the podcast I listened to - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apnuIIePeeA
Aos brasileiros que acabarem encontrando esse post, o podcast que assisti é o que linkei acima
Unless you can give me an exact specific definition of what “intellectually gifted” means in this context then all of this is just meaningless bullshit.
Exactly. That’s all this is. That’s all ANYTHING is. Just a series of meaningless bullshit until we can get home from work/school for the day, and be naked for the next 6 hours. Freely letting our farts out without fear of judgement. Letting our man-titties and butt cheeks jiggle in the vibrations of the long fart. Then we can masturbate, and eat dorritos.
Everything else is just made up bullshit designed to waste our time.
When we do testing in schools to determine giftedness it is the top 95th percentile of different tests. It wasn’t just reading and math but also nonverbal tasks (like tangram type things). We used state testing and IQ scores as well. We tried to create a whole profile of a child and then determine which ones met the criteria of requiring gifted services (95th percentile and above). I don’t think there’s a federal guideline so each state (or even each district) sets their own parameters. The twice exceptional kids were the ones with ADHD or other diagnoses. But yes, it was possible that these kids were not the “smart, model student” though I’ve had plenty of those as well.
To me, being an intellectual doesn’t necessarily mean someone is exceptionally smart in the traditional sense. I’ve always taken it to mean a person who can take a few steps back and dispassionately, honestly evaluate things from a distance. It describes how they think, not what they think.
I listen to a lot of podcasts with guests/hosts I’d consider intellectuals, and I’ve often found that, given the same information, these people tend to land on the same or similar conclusions on unrelated topics. Another common trait of an intellectual is that their ideas don’t map neatly onto a political ideology. They don’t adopt ideas wholesale but instead form opinions on different subjects individually. Maybe I’m talking about intellectual honesty now, which might be slightly different, but that’s my take on it. I remember Sean Carroll defining intellectualism along these lines on an old podcast, and it resonated with me.
There have been two recent events that, in my view, serve as good tests of a person’s intellectual honesty. First was the Trump assassination attempt. One of the thinkers I admire most is also one of the most anti-Trump people I know, but I was confident they’d still condemn political violence like this, which they did. The second event was just a few days ago: the landing of the Starship 1st stage. If a person is so blinded by their hatred of Musk that they can’t admit how impressive that was, then I don’t consider them an intellectually honest thinker.
I like how vague some of these are. “ability to notice details”, “pattern recognition”
Not “heightened ability…” or “enhanced…” or any modifier. Does that mean average intelligence, neurotypical people can’t notice details or patterns?
I read it as being particularly good at it, since everybody does indeed do pattern matching and can spot details.
That format of presentation - especially when the choice was clearly made to go for more points rather than more depth per point - is unsuitable for precise, detailed explanations, so expecting otherwise isn’t exactly logic.
As somebody who, judging by everything else in there matches that particular part of the spectrum (though never formally diagnosed) I’ve always had an eye for details and am big at figuring things out via pattern matching (I.e. notice that certain combinations of things tend to go along with certain other combinations of things or outcomes) which is also what powers the “skip” thinking (you can jump directly to a list of possibly explanations by recognizing that it shares a pattern with something else whose explanation I already have and then work backwards from there to confirm if indeed one of those possible explanations is the correct one).
I’ve studied and worked in highly intellectual areas (Science and Technology) and have seldom come across others with a similar style of thinking so to me it makes sense that in that graph those things are there in the sense of more/better than most.
In my gifted class with three other students we were all diagnosed with ADHD later, just saying.
If it was 20, maybe even 10 years later, I might have been diagnosed with ADHD as a child. But I wasn’t disruptive and I scored extremely well on tests. In the 80s, that overruled pretty much everything else. And when I had trouble later, it was because I was “lazy.” This is why I dislike the narrative that “gifted means everything came easily until it didn’t and then they failed because they didn’t face hardship.” I didn’t have trouble because I wasn’t challenged. I had trouble because I had undiagnosed ADHD and autism, but got slapped with the lazy label early and often. Nothing I did was ever enough, and I was told my whole life that I just wasn’t trying hard enough. All because I learned to read before kindergarten and scored in the 99th percentile on standardized testing.
Meanwhile, the 5-6 people from my elementary gifted classes that graduated with me all kept excelling through school and into their careers. Which also contradicts the easy narrative that sprang up around “gifted.” Not sure how many of them had concurrent neurodivergencies… but I was the weird one even among the weird kids lol.
Look, I don’t want to nitpick much, or make you feel like I’m bashing you, that’s not my intent.
The post, however, is pretty far off of reality. “Gifted” is not the same kind of thing as other neurodivergence. It simply doesn’t have a well defined criteria. The only criteria that’s used in a majority of places that use the term is IQ or other testing scores.
Should it have the same kind of diagnostic criteria as other aspects of neurofunction? Maybe. Maybe not. There’s just not enough information on it all to tell if it really is a form of neurodivergence, or just part of neurotypical function with higher “intelligence”. I don’t speak Portuguese, so I can’t tell if that video is accurate in its information or not, but I can tell that “Gifted” as a term is not what you’ve presented in your post, not as of five years ago when my kid got placed into gifted classes and I went back looking into it and comparing it to what it was when I was a kid.
If there’s newer definitions and criteria, it would be nice if you put them into post instead of relying on a YouTube video at all, but that’s whatever.
I’m not saying I disagree. Every “Gifted” or “accelerated” kid I ever knew behaved differently than most people. It may well be a form of neurodivergence that isn’t just intelligence (which is a difficult thing to quantify properly in itself).
I’m just saying that the post here doesn’t really provide anything useful to someone coming across it. There’s no meat here.
but I can tell that “Gifted” as a term is not what you’ve presented in your post, not as of five years ago when my kid got placed into gifted classes and I went back looking into it and comparing it to what it was when I was a kid.
I blame the english language, then. The Venn diagram MelodiousFunk posted should hopefully help visualize what I meant somewhat
I’m just saying that the post here doesn’t really provide anything useful to someone coming across it. There’s no meat here.
Hard to distill almost 3 hours of talk into a lemmy post, but a valid point
Imo, it’s the human condition. Everyone is good at some things, average at most, bad at others.
Occasionally it happens that sone kids are great at academic achievement and they get labeled as “gifed” because that’s what’s superficially celebrated in our culture. I say superficially because after school it doesn’t matter much
