I'm really liking the talk about real research, but can't add anything asside from yeah, I read that one, and it was interesting
But, I've been thinking about early IDing, b/c of my DS1yr. To put it plainly, I think he's smart. I am very aware I could be wrong. Best predictor might be the PG father and ?MG+? mother. But he had a run of VERY early milestones across the board (now is a little behind average -- yes that means we had a long period of no movement on milestone charts), and he had/has the "intensity" people talk about in a serious way. And _those_ are the two things that made me start thinking that the way to get him to STOP CRYING might be to treat him like he's really really bloody smart. It worked. If it was the right decision for the wrong reasons, I'd like to know about it, though.
Here's where I've gotten to so far: I think noticing milestones was at best a right thing/wrong reason. I think he may have hit those milestones early because he was smart and trying to cause change in the universe early -- but if so, I think his success was luck and maybe supportive parenting. The intensity thing, I think, is more about personality than intellegence, but personality has a role to play in intellegence, so whatever.
Anyway, I think (I want to think, perhaps) that you can see smarts in a very very young kid, even a baby, but I'm drifting towards the idea that it's not a milestone checkoff, but a range and texture that's worth looking at. I've heard it described that truly PG people have an experience of life that is catagorically different from neurotypical because of the degree to which they are taking in and manipulating ideas and data. I tend to agree, because even being not so smart as THAT, I'm pretty sure I have a categorically different experience from neurotypical, and for that reason.
Outside my groups of mostly really smart friends, I have a huge problem communicating, because people just can't concieve that I might be saying something as fine-graied or specific or whatever as I am. Dealing with DH can be spectacular, since he's a mathematician and I'm basically an artist, so we're both having our intense fine-grained experiences, and although we can keep up with each other in conversation and make things comprehensible, in our heads we're just like two different species. We end up talking for four hours about how to percieve the distinction between air and water, in order to compose a mutually comprehensible versinon of something very simple like "oh, when you added the soap it affected the surface tension." That different experience, almost by definition, must start well before birth, and, well, if it's there there should be a way to see it, right? IF you find the right way to look... and it *should* be different for different types of smarts, right? So the overall picture is going to be complex. And it might be easier to ID by "gut feeling" than trying to come up with any kind of ruberic.
How's that for some woolly-headed exploration to add to an otherwise intellegent thread?
