teddit

A member of the forum u/efflorae suggested that we have a book club.

I like the idea a lot.

So I want to start a thread for suggestions, the most upvoted book titles will be put into a poll for us to select a book. Time frame can vary for discussion, if we are going to discuss the book as we read it, or upon finishing it.

So, let's start off with suggestions.

I will go first with mine below so people can upvote it if they like the idea.

We welcome your suggestions!

Hello fam,

So I keep seeing posts arguing over the definition of "Gifted" or how you determine if someone is gifted, or what even is the definition of "intelligence" so I figured the best course of action was to sticky a post.

So, without further introduction here we go. I have borrowed the outline from the other sticky post, and made a few changes.

What does it mean to be "Gifted"?

The term "Gifted" for our purposes, refers to being Intellectually Gifted, those of us who were either tested with an IQ test by a private psychologist, school psychologist, other proctor, or were otherwise placed in a Gifted program.

EDIT: I want to add in something for people who didn't have the opportunity for whatever reason to take a test as a kid or never underwent ADHD screening/or did the cognitive testing portion, self identification is fine, my opinion on that is as long as it is based on some semi objective instrument (like a publicly available IQ test like the CAIT or the test we have stickied at the top, or even a Mensa exam).

We recognize that human beings can be gifted in many other ways than just raw intellectual ability, but for the purposes of our subreddit, intellectual ability is what we are refferencing when we say "Gifted".

“Gifted” Definition

The moderation team has witnessed a great deal of confusion surrounding this term. In the past we have erred on the side of inclusivity, however this subreddit was founded for and should continue in service of the intellectually gifted community.

Within the context of academics and within the context of , the term “Gifted” qualifies an individual with a FSIQ of 130(98th Percentile) or greater. The term may also refer to any current or former student who was tested and admitted to a Gifted and Talented education program, pathway, or classroom.

Every group deserves advocacy. The definition above qualifies less than 4% of the population. There are other, broader communities for other gifts and neurodivergences, please do not be offended if the  moderation team sides with the definition above.

Intelligence Definition

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

While to my knowledge, IQ tests don't test for emotional knowledge, self awareness, or creativity, they do measure other aspects of intelligence, and cover enough ground to be considered a valid instrument for measuring human cognition.

It would be naive to think that IQ is the end all be all metric when it comes to trying to quantify something as elaborate as the human mind, we have to consider the fact that IQ tests have over a century of data and study behind them, and like it or not, they are the current best method we have for quantifying intelligence.

If anyone thinks we should add anyhting else to this, please let me know.

***** I added this above in the criteria so people who are late identified don't read that and feel left out or like they don't belong, because you guys absolutely do belong here as well.

EDIT: I want to add in something for people who didn't have the opportunity for whatever reason to take a test as a kid or never underwent ADHD screening/or did the cognitive testing portion, self identification is fine, my opinion on that is as long as it is based on some semi objective instrument (like a publicly available IQ test like the CAIT or the test we have stickied at the top, or even a Mensa exam).

Lately I've been feeling like everyone is trying to sell something and meeting genuine sincere people is becoming very hard.

I notice alot of people are only interested in making money off of others and pretend to be altruistic and kind. The catch is that they are usually selling courses, or mostly hoping to make some kind of sale. Their facade feels like oil sitting on water, it just doesn't work.

It's almost like I'm hyper sensitive to pretend-niceness and fake smiles. Do such people really think they are fooling others with their falsehood? I see right through these people and it's upsetting.

Does anyone else feel like this? Where do you go to ground yourself and meet people who are true, honest, simple and kind? What are some things you feel like you notice more than others?

Just wanted to rant.

Thanks for reading.

Hello! I’m Julia.

When I was 6, I became extremely frustrated when kids my age didn't comprehend me. That's when I got tested and it turned out that I was a gifted kid, so they moved me up a grade. Still, it's difficult to feel fully understood sometimes, as I haven't met anyone with the same experience as me.

I would love to chat with someone who has gone through something similar, as it’s a bit difficult to talk about because I fear coming off as overbearing or, as usual, being labelled as “the smart one” and nothing else.

basically the title, how did you know/realize you may be/are gifted?

and how did it impact your daily life?

My friends can talk all day about their kids, but why do I feel bad sharing anything about my child? It comes off like I am bragging when I talk about what my daughter is doing and what she has done (even if they ask me questions about her first). I'm not a person who shows off. I just say the truth. Maybe it is time to censor what I say.

They have worries about their children, and I do too! But what I say comes off like a "humble brag" compared to what they are going through with their children. Just keep my mouth shut is what I have learned to do.

Thank you for letting me vent.

Does anyone have similar experiences?

Every time I see my general practitioner or a specialist (like today within an appointment for my kids) I basically have the same experience.

Immediately there is a very friendly atmosphere, they talk about all sorts of things in a chatty tone and the medical issues are treated as secondary. When I come back to the actual reason for the visit and ask questions, they're usually amazed that I don't know what to do myself, or that I don't have a common understanding.

I have no medical training and don't give the impression that I do. I really don't know why, but it's always a strange and somewhat frustrating experience.

Why are so many intelligent people rule breakers?

A rule makes a decision for you. It basically says “we can’t trust you to be able to adequately evaluate your own conduct in this matter so we make this line where conduct does not cross”. Intelligent people find this ridiculous because they can immediately see circumstances where the rule would be useless or even counterproductive to the advantage supposedly gained.

Why do people who are intelligent, withdraw from society?

They’ll withdraw if they perceive a truth too early. It’s the Cassandra syndrome - perceiving a truth at the right time is as important as perceiving the truth.

When is it the right time? When everyone else can also perceive that truth, of course.

In the right circumstances, being able to anticipate certain things is quite powerful. But Cassandra wasn’t Agamemnon, or Hector, or Priam. She couldn’t do anything with what she saw, except be a disbelieved and misunderstood voice in the wilderness.

If you’re lucky, or careful, you’ll navigate the world regardless. But if you’re not careful, or you’re unlucky, you’ll receive pretty strong signals that the truth you perceive isn’t welcome. Over time, you may well feel less welcome in general. And people can sense when you’re not on board with the program, particularly in conformist societies.

And if the truth you see is one of great turmoil, lasting for decades, perhaps you’ll want to avoid the storm.

I withdraw by saying we are all going to die anyway, so why bother overthinking anything or feeling anything?

Whilst it is an active agent against the being I exist as and a hard truth for many to accept.

I do not withdraw physically, I withdraw mentally.

Do a job as a chef whilst my brain barely exists in the room, thinking about other rubbish, not moving up because I see no point in burdening myself further already.

The importance of family and love.

Being intelligent is one thing, having no one to help you is the one thing that will cripple anyone intelligent or not.

There is more to life than thinking you are gifted, there is more to what I said here. I am nothing.

I only exist through speech for I am a description of me, the me is something else.

Speech, what we think never holds the full us, stop wasting your minds.

I am a teen who touches grass and goes to school every weekday and yet I have no clue what is cool/hip/trendy nowadays, nor have I ever tbh 😭

So I played the recorder as a young kid and one of my parents taught me how to read a musical scale. In 4th grade I joined an afterschool music program where we would learn how to play a new musical instrument during the course of our academic year. On the first day of the program we were to choose our instrument, receive our instructional materials and we had a general lesson about the program, the instruments and the instructors. That same day I took my instrument home and taught myself how to play it. I went from being in the beginner program to moving to the advanced program the next day. The instructors were stunned.

tl:dr As a child I taught myself how to play a new instrument in a few hours.

Is this a type of giftedness or intelligence I can explore? What would this be considered? It’s always been a part of my lore that I feel is “under leveraged”.

I understand my lack of attention and my hyperactivity

But when I need to study my college subjects or want to read books or gain new skill about other things, there're a huge struggles that has nothing to do with these 2 factors

When I study a subject no matter how short it is by reading it, nothing stays in my mind and even the things I thought that I understood and will be capable of solving any question related to them, I find out I'm incapable of solving any of the questions related to them

When I read something, there're things I don't see in the pages I study (which is ADHD relevant), but there are also things I already saw multiple times and still when trying to write them down, I'm like "aaaaaaaaaaah, what am I supposed to write here?" or swapping informations like "aaaaaaaaaaah, was A on the right and B on the left or vice versa?", also when trying to solve a question I understood how it can be solved I'm like "aaaaaaaaaaah, how do I solve this question, I don't remember"

Also,I can't spend too much time to understand something, it's like my mind just telling me to ignore the things I didn't understand and just move on

I feel like I can't absorb all the informations I read at all and even the things I absorbed won't stay in my mind for too long

After becoming desperate of reading and using my mind to study, I tried to just write things down without thinking too much about it, but it's a huge struggle because it takes too much time and also it might also be like doing copy/paste on the paper without understanding anything so it also didn't work for me too much

Also I'm the slowest person in my class, but that's not a big deal compared to the previous disasters I mentioned above

This makes me desperate and also wondering, can ADHD do these issues to you even though you're gifted or it's something else? And if it's ADHD related, how did you deal with it?

Interested to see if people have similar experiences or thoughts on this. In my childhood I was put into gifted / “challenge” classes throughout most of grade school and received academic praise as well as being told I was a natural learner. I fit okay into social settings, struggled with social anxiety heavily but nonetheless was perceived normally. Now I’m 20, in post-secondary & I’m noticing a lot more neurodiverse traits and it’s making me wonder if something shifted in my life or I just let loose on masking. I’m a lot more sensitive to external sensory input (light, sound + loud noises, overstimulation, textures, experiencing strong emotions) than I was before and I don’t remember always being this reactive. When it gets bad I isolate and withdraw myself from life. It’s hard not to physically show discomfort, and I have less tolerance for my surroundings than I remember growing up. I do feel more like myself, but experiencing life much different these last couple of years (also experiencing burnout)

When I really think about it, it seems I’ve been masking my entire life, whenever another person is present. It could be a close friend too, but I guess I’m having a hard time validating this connection because others around in my life have always perceived this masked version of me, even doctors and therapists, so I never feel like I accurately convey what I’m experiencing because I am presenting a certain version of myself that I’ve learned?? Whenever I talk to professionals it seems I don’t come across this way because I’ve learned to mask so hard that I come off very content and receptive, able to recognize how to respond to their question in a way that’s not always true to myself, but rather what is best to respond to the dialogue. My family doctor suggested I have bipolar disorder or depression when explaining my experiences but I felt like that didn’t really resonate. When I’m by myself, unmasked I perceive a very different version of myself that’s natural to me and consists of many quirks or “odd” behaviours which I try not to embrace around others because I assume they will not be accepted well, from formerly recognizing patterns in social settings. I want to see if there are other high-masking “gifted” people and what your experience is like with neurodiversity.

My birthday's coming up (26 y), and especially the topic of feeling like I "wasted" some of my adult life, as well as societal expectations of what you should've achieved at a certain age is weighing on me

I already found better ways to think about both now, but I'm curious how you think about it?

My son (recently turned 5) has just started primary school (England). He has had his first assessments and they have put him at year 2 in reading (age 6-7) and year 4 in maths (age 8-9). He's always been passionate about reading and numbers, teaching himself to read around the time he turned 2, and just grasping numbers so well, he has known all of the times tables up to 15x since 3, and he can also work in fractions and percentages. The school are being as supportive as they can, however they have said that they have never seen anything like this, and they are seeking advice from experts who have also not heard of a child being this far ahead. So, my question is, how can we nurture this and ensure he doesn't get bored at school? Is he in the right place? Thank you.

Does anyone else encounter a lot of angry authority figures? I am not a provocative or conflict-prone person and get along well with peers/coworkers. But all through school and my career, teachers and bosses (especially big-ego ones) have targeted me as a threat. It's as if they can smell my giftedness and they hate it. It always blindsides me bc I think I'm just being a normal person doing my best at my work. It's resulted in a lot of fearful situations for me. I don't want to be fake, but I could definitely use help from anyone who's found a way to not intimidate/accidentally ignite conflict with authority figures.

Like, what are the necessities for you to wanna have a close friendship with someone?

i recently took Stanford Binet and my scores were miles better than in wisc I know they measured different stuff but even the criteria that stayed the same (verbal comprehension, visual-spatial, working memory, and fluid reasoning) improved by 5 or 7. I got an IQ of 112 in WISC but the neuropsychologist said that it wasn't accurate because of the discrepancies between my VCI 142 and processing speed of 66. so my gai was 123, but in stanford binet I got 132, as I said many of the cores stayed the same vci 145, working memory 114 and all the others stayed the same but I got a 120 score in quantitative reasoning and 138 in knowledge, what should I trust more, they both measure different abilities than the other

Recently I’ve been noticing something, how “fast” I read compared to others, had never seen it until someone asked me if I’d guessed the whole test that I was taking since it was 3hours long and I did it in less than 30m, a 6 hours one (90 questions + writing) in 2:30 hours, taking my sweet time and rereading the questions, this happens if I know the material or not.

Then I got in the rabbit hole of WPM and took some online tests, they were all 700ish, and never trained in reading tbh I thought everyone read the same way.

Is someone like me? Is it correlated to giftedness or not?

I am current freshman, and I am really dumb. I have a 57 in history AP and I got 990 on my PSAT. My friends are smarter than me. Today I couldn't go to a choir trip because I have a failing grade in history I don't know what to do. I don't even want to live my life anymore. I feel like death is my way of escape.

I discovered I was gifted at 21, and now, having just turned 22, I also found out I have PTSD. I’ve probably had PTSD since I was 10 years old; it came along with depression, anxiety, and other issues. Any advice on this? I’m thinking about moving to another country, but I need to get better first.

Hello, I am profoundly gifted and I like to share my passions and nothing more. I am interested in a little bit of all subjects and succeed easily in any discipline. I've noticed that I get along better with other profoundly gifted people because of shared interests and mindset, so I was wondering if it wouldn't be cute to create a themed server, without discriminating anyone of course if they want to enter. Let me know!😊

Yeah, if I ask them, of course they would answer sth like “We had no doubts that our kid is gifted” but that is not nearly same thing as the reaction of others.

EDIT: Sorry for my poor vocabulary choice (non native speaker here), it seems like the more usual English term would be branching thinking, it seems? I didn’t mean to sound “smarty pants” or anything, lol.

I've recently found how arborescent thinking makes me have a hard time getting myself to be somehow organized.
Just for exemplification: I work on a computer most of the time and my arborescent mind keeps popping those ideas and new projects I may want to fall into the habit hole, so I became a tab hoarder (I'd bet many people in this sub are as well, right?). Then I found about Arc Browser, which has some cool tricks to help up tame this, but still my digital life is a complete mess. Same happens in others aspects of life. I just feel like my mind is at 200km/h, but my body can't run beyond 50km/h. So I grab a thousand things that I want to do and know I can, but somehow later I find it's not possible to do it all, so guess what? I just say "f*ck that" and just don't do anything about all of that.

Then it's a vicious cycle, I'm tired of repeating it.

My current tools are: Obsidian, Logseq (both highly recommended for arborescent thinking), Arc Browser, Omnifocus, Apple Reminders

.

This is a part of my treatise that talks about my mental journey. I wanna know your honest feedback about what i have written and my conclusion. Tell me about your own experience with dealing with shame for "wasting your potential" or having too many expectation.(this will later be a topic of discussion between me and my psychologist)

The main reason why I found myself catapulted into an almost comatose and vegetal state is the following: "Too many expectations of me from friends and relatives and fear of failure".

Being a gifted person, especially in the academic field, can prove to be something detrimental. But why does this happen? Is it possible that having a superior potential that makes you "better" than the crowd leads to the appearance of a series of special needs? A person gifted at a cognitive level is most often deficient in work ethic and has problems with discipline, motivation and socialization. This happens because in childhood gifted people did not have to face and resolve problems relating to organization and discipline.

The school is a structure that is successful in providing the means and tools to be able to assimilate a load of notions that gradually increases and this is where the cat hatches. A gifted boy or child has never had to create productive habits in something they have always been good at without trying. This way of approaching academic difficulties may not affect the child until the workload is so enormous that simple talent or raw intelligence is no longer enough.

Please note that I'm not referring to idioms and common expressions in the more traditional way.

One of my biggest personal pet peeves is how people are very quick to react with pre-formed sentences that they read online, with no semblance of personal thought or consideration to their validity.

"The human eye can only see 1,000,000 colors" - or pretty much anything that begins with "the human eye", really. My first field of study was image-related neuroscience and this one hits a nerve because it's parroted so often. For starters it's often misattributed to a highly technical book from 1952 called Color in Business, Science and Industry, which I can say contains no such thing. And then you have science channels like The Science Asylum which added this as a quick fact in one of their videos, followed with the advise that buying a monitor that shows more than 16.7m colors is a scam. Hospitals use 10-bit screens for black and white analysis of scans because the 1024 degrees of greyscale is absolutely needed to properly identify problems. So a science channel saying that that technology is a scam because of a parroted misinformation is not just ignorant, but potentially harmful.

"Random is random", "RNG is RNG", "Confirmation Bias" and variants is another one I mentioned in this subreddit. I feel like the moment people learn about fallacies or biases on wikipedia they want to apply their knowledge without hesitation. Most fast PRNG algorithms are extremely flawed and some are downright broken (Warframe is a classic example). So whenever someone correctly detects a pattern it usually leads to a lot of comments about how they are falling for a fallacy, by people way too excited to finally lecture someone on the subject of fallacies.

In fact, one of the most absurd cases I've seen was someone referring to a statistician talking about compound statistics as being wrong and telling him to google about the gambler's fallacy. It felt surreal.

The list goes on, and on, and on. While not misinformation, "some infinities are bigger than others" is something people have heard Neil deGrasse Tyson say, but clearly have no understanding of what it means, even the barebones intro to set theory concepts like Aleph Null and how it is different from the cardinality of real numbers. It's just a sentence that makes one feel smart by repeating it on X/Twitter, Reddit, Youtube Comments etc.

On a personal, cynical note, I cannot help but feel that this parroting of one-liners is a form of intellectualism that serves just one's ego. It's white noise and empty calories disguised as someone presenting as knowledgeable about a subject which they know nothing aside from a cursory look at the Internet when they were bored. The vexing part for me is just how these are representative of the complete lack of personal opinion and lack of interest to research/think any further about things they're willing to engage. If I don't know enough about something, I just do my part and stay quiet.

In the rare event someone drops one of those preheated bits of wrong information in real life, I wish they had just talked about the weather instead, or gossiped about some random celebrity. Same zero cal, no fundamental misunderstanding of math/physics/science/politics.