Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion A plea from a gifted adult.

Well people try drastic things after the doctors say there's no hope. I had a friend die of brain cancer. After the doctors said they could not do anything more for him he tried some kind of mistletoe remedy. I'm sorry. This hits close to home if you're worried about your father. Speaking of which, sorry. It's um. Try to get your house in order, mentally. It's possible to throw away your future in a time of shock and despair. Not now, but when (if) they pass on while you're trying to finish college. I had a friend who's parents died when she was in her 20s and she left school and lost it for a while. If you're parents are trying to prepare you maybe it's really happening. I keep reading here that there are psychologists that specialize in gifted therapy. I mean, I don't know you. But if you think your parents are going to die while you're so young and trying to finish college I hope you would consider enlisting a counselor to help you hold it togeather. Especially since your best friend is over seas.
I'm really glad you came back to talk.
You can hang out and be a virtual auntie to the kids we're trying to raise here.

I don't think there's going to be a problem regarding anyone dying in undergrad, and were one of my parents going to die any time soon I'd probably enlist the help of a therapist (and regardless I'm the sort of person who sticks with what they need to do even in the event of tragedy).

Although bizarrely my parents talk a lot these days about wills and it unsettles me.

I was just a little worried with the talk of wills and your dad's health and stuff. Even people who are usually salt of the earth granite crack sometimes when it gets traumatic.
On a lighter note I'm pleasantly surprised by all the groups listed in this thread. I might google them later.

I don't think this is the case, fortunately.

While I swear most of my classmates have the brains of a slime mold (and I unfortunately just insulted slime molds), I think they're there, as far as I've gathered, to learn and grow, which is what I believe college's primary purpose is and should be for, if you haven't figured that fact out already. I value my studies, especially in biology - which I consider more than just a 'career'; it is what I have devoted my life to and what I have made my purpose, and I value everything I know, and I value learning, period. I am very lucky that I was born into a family that has graduate degrees - otherwise I'd probably be so despondent about life I'd have killed myself.

This generation is, I'd say, more alright than its parents - a lot of their folks seem to look at college as a place to learn and grow. Perhaps some of them either don't remember their college years or are somehow resentful of their children's experiences.

ACh, after reading this thread and your previous one, I had the following impressions:

1. You seem a little full of yourself, in the sense of being smug about your intelligence. I fell into the same trap long ago, although I am much better now. Such a sense of superiority may come from low self esteem, and in my case it did. My advice: most people, including the cowy masses at your school, should appreciate your intelligence if you're nice and not pushy about it; but the inverse is also pretty much true, with some differences (e.g. some capable people might cut an obviously capable though pushy person some slack). Some of your classmates have probably picked up on your attitude towards them, unless you've hid it extremely well.

2. You seem to be too eager to impress others with your intelligence. Your writing style comes off as a bit flighty or nervous, but I think this is mostly because your word, phrasing and sentence-structure choices are designed with the total message in mind: you want us to know that you are quirky, have a decent vocabulary, etc. My advice: relax. You don't have to work to make people like you, and trying too hard to appear intelligent generally isn't the right way if you do decide to work at it. You also don't have to worry about convincing anyone here that you're smart.

3. People are not worthless or beneath you simply because they are less intelligent. Intelligence has a flexible definition in the first place, as you must know. You have surely enjoyed some products of people who would have scored well below you on intelligence tests; this might include books, movies, food, and a thousand other fruits of human labor. A good number of those people would actually perform better than you on at least some real-world tasks. Some of them would also score higher than you on one test or another; that doesn't make you a lesser being either.

4. If you are really having trouble coping with lesser ability in others, or different viewpoints (which often include some sort of prejudice or another), I suggest changing so that you are a less irritable person. It sounds to me like simply making a conscious choice to adopt a different attitude for a while might work fine; other options might include therapy to address some of these issues. You'll have a happier life if you can appreciate the good in others, instead of focusing on what you perceive to be bad; you might even notice a lot of good that way that you would have missed otherwise.

ETA: I think no5no5's dogs-and-silverware comment is a good one. I would add that if you've ever liked a dog, or any other being that's less smart than you, you can eventually see your way clear to liking some people who are less smart than you.

Actually, I don't even say a word to them most of the time. I just keep to myself and get my stuff done. If asked for help, I help. 'Pushy' is about the opposite of what I am.


In part, this is pretty unconscious for me, sentence-structure-wise. I'm not sure where you see the flighty or nervous, though. I really don't like the idea of consciously making myself sound dumber or less confident or less straightforward about what I'm saying.


But the dog's a dog. The dog's not a human being. One has standards for human beings.

My mother and my father have both scored a bit below me on intelligence tests. Does this mean I don't respect them? No. Likewise with many others in my life who have done so as well but who continue to teach me many things.

It's a little more nuanced than this. My beef is largely with the more average whose combination of illogic and various other mental gymnastics they do makes them do things that it would take actual conscious effort for me to screw up.

... take, for example, people who deny their children medical treatment for various reasons, people who perpetrate or perpetuate genocides and other violence (a great example of how bad it gets in some places is chronicled in the blog Other Things Amanzi - http://other-things-amanzi.blogspot.com/ - where this kind of crud is commonplace, people who use religion as a justification for various human rights abuses - or really anything else, including their own homophobia or racism or sexism or anything else, people whose own willful ignorance digs them into financial holes, people who are simply too unable to learn to dig themselves out of things, and other people who hurt others either directly or indirectly due to their own lack of brains. The list of iniquities visited upon humanity is long and being continually written and it grates.

I'm honestly not sure what you're looking for here. You seem to have made up your mind --- instead of question marks in your posts, I'm seeing a lot of judgmental statements.

So are you just looking for an audience --- rather than the opinions of others and possibly a new perspective?

Val

Do you do anything fun beside school?

You can always have non-academics fun with your ND classmates.

An anthropologist does not try to change the objects of their observation or bring in extraneous topics.


Anyone can develop and test hypotheses and then build a library of hypotheses that have been tested not been falsified.

Accordingly, IQ has little to do with the ability to think clearly and logically. People of humble origins and means develop some amazing knowledge and use it in amazing ways.

And on the contrary, smart people just come up with more imaginative ways to fool themselves and others.

I do value the feedback and have actually taken a good bit of time to think about it, but some of it I take and some of it I leave.


Honestly, I spend a lot of my fun time of ANY sort alone and I don't mind that at all. It's how I recharge.