Comment by atian
6 years ago
Many school gifted programs follow Mensa requirement of top 2 percentile. I'm not sure the % score was mapped directly to the questions answered correctly.
6 years ago
Many school gifted programs follow Mensa requirement of top 2 percentile. I'm not sure the % score was mapped directly to the questions answered correctly.
There are somewhat few notable people from MENSA... It is not a great standard for giftedness, more of a smart people club. People who do things are more often than not either too busy to join this club or see no point in it.
What I'm reading from your comment is that you have a strong, implicit association between "giftedness" and "notability" - perhaps the latter taking the form of socially recognizable achievement.
Speaking as someone who was in a gifted program in my youth (and who knew others in more advanced programs), I would like to caution against this perspective. My achievements are not notable, and I would not use that as a heuristic for determining whether or not a particular program/standard is successful or useful. Yet I found my experience to be very positive. Despite the fact that not all programs are created equal, I would generally recommend a suitable one to any parent with a gifted child.
I understand MENSA is a bit loaded since it can come across as pretentious, so let me reframe the example for you. Take a look at past winners of the Putnam exam. Most of them are not nearly as notable as cperciva[1], but they're all demonstrably gifted.
Giftedness is not about being entrepreneurial or about how you apply your intelligence in a notable way. Programs designed for gifted people are not trying to create a class of people who are more impressive. In general, they try to foster natural talent in a way that cannot typically be accommodated in the modal classroom setting.
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1. For those unaware I'm referring to Colin Percival, an HN user who designed scrypt and developed Tarsnap. He won the Putnam.
I guess that means what you mean by 'gifted' or 'notable'. Being very creative, having the confidence to express this creativity and most importantly, being both capable and _willing_ to have a high workload over time is probably correlated to having high IQ, but I strongly doubt that they follow in lockstep. Perseverence and hard work seems to be more correlated to "success" than IQ.
IMHO there's a lot of smart people that compromise their health and well-being by forcing themselves to work too hard at being notable, and in itself I don't think these are the best objectives to strive for in life.