ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
Pezar, good point. In some cases, IQ is more for vanity's sake. Let's face it, some people aren't going to be happy waiting tables. If everyone were happy waiting tables very few people would get their dream job, right? So, it's actually good there's a variety of skills. You can be happy if you find what you enjoy doing and get positive feedback from the people around you when you are doing it.
I've been reading all the articles linked to on the homepage of the Davidson Academy of Nevada, a school for those whose IQs are in the top 0.1% of humans, and it got me thinking, thus this thread. I believe the Academy's homepage is at
http://www.davidsonacademy.unr.edu/ . The school's benefactor pioneered educational computer software and got VERY rich, and decided he was gonna play Medici and be a patron to geniuses as the merchant princes had funded artists and composers, thus this school. If you comb through the articles in the "press room", the thing that stands out is how uniform "genius" is.
1) A genius is an autodidact, he talks a LOT about intricate details of what he knows, as opposed to "rambling".
2) He thinks "out of the box", consistently.
3) He hates authority, sees the structures that give normals meaning as useless regimentation holding him back.
4) He has a broad AND deep base of knowledge. He not only knows a lot, but knows a lot about a lot.
There may be a few others that I can't think of off the top of my head. While aspies tend to be autodidacts, they talk obsessively about a single subject, as opposed to ranging from classical music to medieval history in one chat, AND knowing a lot about those and everything in between. Aspie hatred of authority seems to me to be more based on our mistreatment at the hands of those who have no business being in authority yet inexplicably are, including parents and teachers and psychiatrists, than on being too regimented. In fact, the aspie LOVES regimentation, and is usually lost without it. A genius will view a strict schedule as being for little people. Thomas Edison repeatedly expressed this sentiment. People with AS seem to be no more prone to out of the box thinking than regular NTs, as seen in some of the posts on this board.
The thing is, the parents will just KNOW their kid is a genius, and eventually other people see that there IS something different about the kid. Today, people who work with kids are jaded to parent claims of exceptionalism, every parent thinks their kid is Einstein. In one interview the school founder said that most high schools see ONE genius kid every TWENTY YEARS! Some of the small towns where some students come from have NEVER seen it, in the whole history of the town, which usually dates back more than 100 years.
Parents of truly genius kids have to deal with the legions of educators trying to shake them back to "normalcy", screaming YOU'RE NUTS, THE KID IS JUST A KID! Everybody insists that a kid is a kid, and eventually the parent is liable to agree, since when you're the only one who sees the genius, you start to think that maybe you ARE nuts. Americans tend to hate intellectual exceptions. Music or painting is fine. But true intelligence is to be feared.
This may be the inner witch hunter in every American, in a country which has repeatedly experienced purges or attempted purges of people who were seen as just slightly off kilter, because they were thought to be possessed by demons or because of unusual political or religious belief, usually. Americans are a God Fearing people, and tend to see the influence of evil everywhere. The mentally ill are possessed. Autistics are possessed. Communists are doing the work of the devil.
Maybe deep down there is a suspicion that the genius has sold his soul to the devil for his intellectual gifts. Periodically, an exceptional person will have this claim made about him. It was made about Bill Gates in the 1990s. An exceptional blues musician during the Depression (whose name I can't remember) had it made about him, and he tried to play on it, refusing to confirm or deny it, and inserting references to Southern witch lore in his songs-he once sang "there's a hell hound on my trail", folklore talks of Satan taking the shape of a black dog. I once read a book on paranormal mysteries that took these claims deadly seriously, especially the blues musician.
Sometimes I wonder how a country like America ever became a world power-some places here are more like Africa where you have spells to invoke or ward off magic and people carrying around amulets to ward off evil, some places have a custom of putting those little feng shui mirrors over doorways, in a corruption of true Chinese belief.
15 Mar 2009, 7:35 pm
