I’ve withdrawn my downvote and updated towards the hypothesis that the sort of gifted children to which you are referring tend to have lower social competence than their peers. I didn’t follow the link to Towers’s The Outsiders because it is not a social norm for readers to follow all of the links in the articles here, and I assumed (rightfully, I think) that you were quoting everything relevant to your article.
When Jonah is talking about giftedness, he is not talking about the usual measure of IQ >=130 (some studies use IQ >=125). He is talking about IQ >= 155, 1 in 10,000; or at least those are the studies that he’s implicitly citing. On this interpretation of Jonah’s claim, there is evidence.
You have to indicate this! I feel like this is going to bring up the explaining vs. defending distinction again, but that is a huge, easily mentionable difference! And instead of or in addition to quoting Towers’s essay, which looks like pure conjecture out of context, you could have cited some of those numbers from Terman or Hollingworth.
Dauber & Benbow (1990) has a good bibliography if you know where to look. Austin & Draper (1981) looks like it’s probably a good review of this kind of research, if a bit dated, but I can’t find a non-paywalled link. Each of the studies that I’ve seen seem to have weaknesses, but there are quite a few and it seems that their individual weaknesses are different.
Considering all of that, I would ask how relevant that research is to you or the community. In earlier articles you talked about being amazed by children with that 1 in 10,000 sort of ability, which makes me think that you aren’t in that sort of range, and the LW average is 138 last time I checked. If social competence is really relevant to you and your audience, then we should be looking at the research I linked before for explanations.
The review I linked in my other comment talks about educational fit as a much greater factor in adjustment problems than giftedness in and of itself, and you even personally experienced this:
When I was in elementary school, I would often fall short of answering all questions correctly on timed arithmetic tests. Multiple teachers told me that I needed to work on making fewer “careless mistakes.” I was puzzled by the situation – I certainly didn’t feel as though I was being careless. In hindsight, I see that my teachers were mostly misguided on this point. I imagine that their thinking was:
“He knows how to do the problems, but he still misses some. This is unusual: students who know how to do the problems usually don’t miss any. When there’s a task that I know how to do and don’t do it correctly, it’s usually because I’m being careless. So he’s probably being careless.”
If so, their error was in assuming that I was like them. I wasn’t missing questions that I knew how to do because I was being careless. I was missing the questions because my processing speed and short-term memory are unusually low relative to my other abilities. With twice as much time, I would have been able to get all of the problems correctly, but it wasn’t physically possible for me to do all of the problems correctly within the time limit based on what I knew at the time. (The situation may have been different if I had had exposure to mental math techniques, which can substitute for innate speed and accuracy.)
That in tandem with personality factors seems like an equally plausible explanation for many people.
Thanks for the detailed comment. I omitted details in order to keep my post short, and get the main point across.
I believe that the IQ tests that Terman and Hollingworth were using were effectively scaled differently from modern IQ tests. They may have corresponded to “mental age” as opposed to “standard deviations. In particular, they discuss IQ scores of 180, and there definitely aren’t enough people who are 5+ SD above the mean to get reliable scores in that range.
Putting that aside, there are genetic factors other than IQ alone that play a role in intellectual and emotional development See my discussion of aesthetic discernment here: it hasn’t been established as a valid psychometric construct, but I have very high confidence that that’s simply because psychology researchers haven’t investigated it carefully. If one is 2.5+ SD above the mean in each of IQ and aesthetic discernment, one is going to be extremely isolated. I think that that’s what one is seeing with someone like Scott Alexander.
Relatedly, Benbow and collaborators also found that children who scored high on verbal and not math have greater social maladjustment than those who score high on math and not verbal (don’t have the references immediately on hand, can dig them up later if you want.)
I believe that the IQ tests that Terman and Hollingworth were using were effectively scaled differently from modern IQ tests. They may have corresponded to “mental age” as opposed to “standard deviations. In particular, they discuss IQ scores of 180, and there definitely aren’t enough people who are 5+ SD above the mean to get reliable scores in that range.
Thanks for pointing this out. Also, I think the important thing about the numbers was not that the modern and historical IQ scores be comparable, but that IQ correlated with maladjustment in Terman and Hollingworth.
See my discussion of aesthetic discernment here: it hasn’t been established as a valid psychometric construct, but I have very high confidence that that’s simply because psychology researchers investigated it carefully.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but do you mean ”...that that’s simply because psychology researchers haven’t investigated it carefully.”?
Relatedly, Benbow and collaborators also found that children who scored high on verbal and not math have greater social maladjustment than those who score high on math and not verbal (don’t have the references immediately on hand, can dig them up later if you want.)
There’s a link to that study in my comment that you just replied to.
I’ve withdrawn my downvote and updated towards the hypothesis that the sort of gifted children to which you are referring tend to have lower social competence than their peers. I didn’t follow the link to Towers’s The Outsiders because it is not a social norm for readers to follow all of the links in the articles here, and I assumed (rightfully, I think) that you were quoting everything relevant to your article.
When Jonah is talking about giftedness, he is not talking about the usual measure of IQ >=130 (some studies use IQ >=125). He is talking about IQ >= 155, 1 in 10,000; or at least those are the studies that he’s implicitly citing. On this interpretation of Jonah’s claim, there is evidence.
You have to indicate this! I feel like this is going to bring up the explaining vs. defending distinction again, but that is a huge, easily mentionable difference! And instead of or in addition to quoting Towers’s essay, which looks like pure conjecture out of context, you could have cited some of those numbers from Terman or Hollingworth.
Dauber & Benbow (1990) has a good bibliography if you know where to look. Austin & Draper (1981) looks like it’s probably a good review of this kind of research, if a bit dated, but I can’t find a non-paywalled link. Each of the studies that I’ve seen seem to have weaknesses, but there are quite a few and it seems that their individual weaknesses are different.
Considering all of that, I would ask how relevant that research is to you or the community. In earlier articles you talked about being amazed by children with that 1 in 10,000 sort of ability, which makes me think that you aren’t in that sort of range, and the LW average is 138 last time I checked. If social competence is really relevant to you and your audience, then we should be looking at the research I linked before for explanations.
The review I linked in my other comment talks about educational fit as a much greater factor in adjustment problems than giftedness in and of itself, and you even personally experienced this:
That in tandem with personality factors seems like an equally plausible explanation for many people.
Thanks for the detailed comment. I omitted details in order to keep my post short, and get the main point across.
I believe that the IQ tests that Terman and Hollingworth were using were effectively scaled differently from modern IQ tests. They may have corresponded to “mental age” as opposed to “standard deviations. In particular, they discuss IQ scores of 180, and there definitely aren’t enough people who are 5+ SD above the mean to get reliable scores in that range.
Putting that aside, there are genetic factors other than IQ alone that play a role in intellectual and emotional development See my discussion of aesthetic discernment here: it hasn’t been established as a valid psychometric construct, but I have very high confidence that that’s simply because psychology researchers haven’t investigated it carefully. If one is 2.5+ SD above the mean in each of IQ and aesthetic discernment, one is going to be extremely isolated. I think that that’s what one is seeing with someone like Scott Alexander.
Relatedly, Benbow and collaborators also found that children who scored high on verbal and not math have greater social maladjustment than those who score high on math and not verbal (don’t have the references immediately on hand, can dig them up later if you want.)
Thanks for pointing this out. Also, I think the important thing about the numbers was not that the modern and historical IQ scores be comparable, but that IQ correlated with maladjustment in Terman and Hollingworth.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but do you mean ”...that that’s simply because psychology researchers haven’t investigated it carefully.”?
There’s a link to that study in my comment that you just replied to.
Yes, thanks, fixed.