black_son_of_gray wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 7:34 pm
*I haven't read up in this field, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort of "critical period" window during childhood that really sets the tone/flips the switch on maladjustment. That would be consistent with the somewhat binary framing of difference in kind at 150 that the article makes. Also, the timing of IQ development makes for interesting variability. E.g. A person could be precocious very early on, then somewhat regress as peers catch up later, or there could be the "late bloomer" who had a relatively normal childhood but just slowly outpaces their social sphere over time. Perhaps the worst would be to be precocious, and then also outpace peers over time. In other words, if 150 is actually some bizarrely specific line in the sand, it might matter greatly
when you hit 150. Unless I'm misunderstanding IQ (likely), a 150 eight year old != a 150 eighteen year old.
@jacob, were you by any chance accelerated in school? I was offered skipped grades/special programs, but never took up the offers. In fact, one of the lovely quirks of the American K-12 system is that when I moved in high school, the new school system I entered had a slightly different progression for coursework, which meant I was stuck a grade behind for a while in some areas due to how they chopped up the material. For some reason, I didn't really care, the other students didn't really care that I was a year older, and the teachers on the whole didn't really care if I just doodled for most of the class given my test scores. I suppose if I were any smarter the "comfortable ease" could have turned into "disruptive boredom" pretty easily. That being said, it was probably a good thing that I wasn't skipped up the grades faster. Bullet dodged.
I don't think there's a magic cut-off number in terms of adjusted and not adjusted. (Also see guitarplayer's plot above.) Rather, it's all a matter of statistical distribution with individuals differing. Samples with higher means have a correspondingly and increasingly much higher incidence of the not-adjusted at the tails of the distribution. Compare to climate change and how an increase of a few degrees of average temperature leads to a much higher incidence of adverse extreme temperature events than the relatively small shift of the mean implies.
I do think that there's a "critical period" or perhaps critical periods that don't necessarily only happen during childhood. In particular, the adjustment problem is not a distribution over absolute IQ. Rather, it is a distribution relative to the environment of the given individual. Surely other aspects of the person like personality and temperament also plays a role. The "twice exceptional" or "twice outlier" issue as noted by mF.
Childhood IQs tend to have a much higher range given they're age adjusted. E.g. if a child at age 6 scores the same as a child of age 12, then the 6yo has twice the IQ of the 12yo. Basically, the young one is just ahead of his years. This is also what's behind the idea of skipping grades. As the kid grows up many end up having their IQ score drop due to losing the age-adjustment bonus. IOW, having an IQ of 180 as a child is not as impressive as it sounds---it may well turn into 130 as an adult.
It's also worthwhile to consider the difference between fluid intelligence, which is what researchers generally try to measure, and crystallized intelligence, which is how that fluid intelligence has been applied to grow the neural wiring (e.g. chunking), which again depends on personality. For example, two persons with equal fluid intelligence will end up with very different kinds of crystallized intelligence if the former is an ESTP who is an athlete and the latter is an INTJ who reads a lot of esoteric books.
To answer your question, I was not accelerated in school, because the Danish education philosophy at the time was that socialization and "working together" (SD:Green through and through) was more important than intellectual stimulation. (Fortunately things are changing! Over the past 5-10 years there's been an increasing recognition that gifted children also have "special" needs and that while making them help out the dumb kids might take a load of the teacher, it does no favors to the gifted kid.) As such I was thrown in with the general population. Initially I was hungry for learning. My parents have told me how I eagerly asked the teacher for some homework on the first day of real school. (In preschool, I was mostly sitting by myself drawing and typing numbers... not smashing toys together like most other kids.) She told me to go home and write the alphabet. Which I did. The class then spent the entire school year learning how to "draw" the letters at a rate of about one week per letter (AAAAAAAAAAA, next week BBBBB, ...ZZZZ... aaaaa...). By the third grade, I was thoroughly bored with school and checked out mentally. A recurring theme from the teachers was that "little Jacob should engage more and put his hand up when I know he knows the answer". I didn't see the point of sitting with my hand up all the time---also that would attract unwanted (
tall poppy) attention from the other kids. Some teachers are oblivious to this aspect.
I'm some 30-45 points above the rest of the family, who all hail from
Church's labor ladder. If I didn't look so much like them, one might speculate I might have been mixed up with another baby at the hospital. As far as I have been able to find out, there's no one in my genetic line who is anything like me. Despite that they helped me as much as they could, taking me to the library when I asked, etc. but they also couldn't direct me or understand why I found school so incredibly boring or why I claimed that I wasn't learning anything. Around the 7th grade, I was ahead of them in terms of what we could talk about. After finishing the 9th grade, I seriously considered leaving school forever, which in an option in the Danish school system. However, having no other plans, I went on to high school. Part of the polymathic interests likely came about because I was randomly casting around for something mentally stimulating. I spent a lot of time in the library and on the computer (back when home computers were rare; fortunately my parents were very supportive of this activity and didn't insist that "I go play with the other kids"). Note that the school system actively frowned upon reading ahead of class. The system was essentially anti-acceleration. You were supposed to keep pace with the rest of the class. As such interests had to be found elsewhere, like computing.
I got online in 1989 or so. This was the first time I met people with high horsepower brains. (Back then getting online was its own intelligence test.) I started hanging out on the forums of the that time (fidonet). My teachers noted how my essays suddenly became much better. I was learning how to argue a point, not from school or at home, but arguing online with people like myself.
A co-factor to the marginal strategy is likely also that I grew up with a labor perspective on how the world worked. "As long as you do your job, you will be rewarded // Hard work is its own reward." This is stark contrast to the higher Gentry who actively networks and strategizes about their career. While I was being bored out of a my mind in the 7th grade solving 2x+4=0 in class, some of my future university friends were already solving differential equations (normally not encountered in school before grade 12) courtesy of having parents who happened to be engineers or STEM professors. This is a similar to the problem in the US where underprivileged kids get a free ride to a prestigious university yet fail to translate that into career success because while they know how to work hard and get good grades, they are oblivious to the game of networking with the professors/alumni/etc. because nobody told them how that is even more important than grades.
When I was 15, now slacking off in high school, I met a guy online who was only a year older but way ahead of me in math. I decided to break the verboten rule about not reading ahead in class and headed to the HS library to pick up some college books on math and physics. This eventually lead to the phd and 5 years of postdoc'ing. However, to me it eventually still felt more like "pointless homework" than a career. I was just publishing paper after paper and slowly losing interest. I suspect having multiple interests had rendered my perspective incompatible with a career in academia. I noticed how my peers would generally only have two interests in their life. Their profession and one other thing, like architecture or playing the piano, that they had been practicing for 20-30 years. Whereas I was all over the map in terms of my interests because I was in the habit of finding my own stimulation rather than having my cravings directed in the direction of a specific career path.
In conclusion: Marginally adjusted. Once you go polymath, it's very hard to go back to being a committed monomath. Indeed, I think it would require too much brain rewiring. My mind is way more lateral and synthetic than the typical professional's. Doing the same kind of analysis over and over reminds me too much of the school system.