alt Hacker NewsNo.
My friend's child is profoundly gifted (160+ IQ). He is 12 years old and finishing Calculus and next year will be taking college math courses. His friends are a year younger than him and have qualified for AIME since they were 8 years old.
Giftedness is very real, and it's not just "maturity". Their brains are different. Seeing them squabble over math problems, it's like watching people talk a different language.
Replies
drivebyhooting • today at 7:31 AM
What do you see as their edge? Is it how easily they memorize things?
I took an IQ test about twelve years ago and I also got 160 on the Stanford–Binet [1], so if we are going to use that as the metric I was a “prodigy” as well (though no one ever called me that). I didn’t take calc when I was twelve though, that would have been cool. I had to wait until I was fifteen.
Anyway, if that’s the scale, it still can fit with the “doesn’t lead to exceptional outcomes”. I am a perfectly competent software person, and maybe I even understand some of the mathematics behind it better than the average programmer, but I am still basically just an “adequate” worker, and honestly I am afraid that I have more or less peaked career-wise. I am sure that some prodigies do great but the article seems to indicate that they’re rarely exceptional at adulthood.
[1] honestly I think that IQ is stupid and that it’s dumb to try and distill something as complicated and multi-faceted as intelligence to a single dimension or even a couple dimensions is pretty reductive.