What a waste of silicon. Shouldn’t she be buried as hazardous waste? The news coverage of her death only showed where the American mind’s priorities lie. Retards more interested in sensationalism and cult of personality, not to mention sex, sex, and sex, than anything that affects their lives.
I'm pretty wrapped up in establishing a cult right now. I've got a charisma score of like 16, so I think I can do it. Shit son, you ever see what a high charisma score under the hood looks like? It's like, *this big*. You sodomites would eat it up.
If you know you are smart, you don't have to depend on the IQ test, or on "outsmarting" people. If you want to outsmart people, play a game, or go on a gameshow. If you are smart, focus on applying it in ways which benefit you instead of just using it to show off. High IQ societies should invest their mental powers into betterment in their lives. http://www.universalimmortalism.org/
Well, I took a test out of curiosity. Apparently I could join the high IQ society if I paid a certain amount of money. Well, no. Why would I pay just for the privlege of talking to smart people? Even worse, why would I pay just for the privlege of talking to people who would pay for the privledge of talking to smart people? What type of person would? I can see two types of people there. People who don't have any social skills and thefore never get to talk to peers, or egotistical pricks who need to be secure in the knoweledge that they are elite. Well, I decided not to join, especially some other IQ site in another tab let viewers look at the forums. How utterly mundane and boring they seemed. Now I know I generalize, and that in general is bad practice Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! , but it is never as bad when applied to a group as oppossed to an individual. Anyways, I was in a gifted program when I was young. It was worthless, but I think that was because they didn't know what to do with us. I've heard of other people who had great experiances in these gifted programs. Of course, I was even a rogue among gifted students. I had (and still have) a problem with focusing. I am utterly inefficient. Someone gives me a math problem and about half way through I take a left turn and start thinking about the problem itself rather then the solution, and then it leads me to some other interesting thoughts, and sooner or later I realize that I ought to get back to the problem. If there was no outside pressure, I wouldn't get back to it for a good amount of time, since my thoughts are so much more interesting then the math problem. Anyways, I don't really know how this applies to what I was just saying, but to continue this tangent (isn't it interesting how so many of our common words are derived from mathematics?), how would you measure that? I am positive that if there was a way to directly moniter my thoughts as oppossed to the application of my thoughts to irrelevant problems, my IQ would be a good amount higher, as would many other people's. So, I don't like IQ tests. It seems to me that intellegence can be several different things. One is the power of ones thoughts, one is the application of those thoughts to g-loaded problems, and one could be the application of these thoughts to problems requiring crystallized intellegence. And of course, those can be broken down. What problems? Mabye intellegence applies better to some problems then others. A math genius could be a literary failure. Finally, just one more thought. No matter how intellegent a person is, people tend to not realize their own faults. I remember reading a staphan hawkings book when I was young. He worded a page horribly and I completly misunderstood the theory of relativity. It took a science teacher forever to reteach. FInally he said to forget what I read and just think about what he was saying. As soon as I did that, I understood it. What I am getting at is that it seems like stephen hawking, this scientific genius, presumed to know how to explain stuff to the layperson. He obviously didn't. Now, I bet that if Stepen had studied the topic of simplifcation and education and whatnot, he could have thought of a better way to word it. I bet he just wrote a book and assumed that he knew how to present his stuff to make everyone understand it. In reality, the field of education is vast. Anyways, I just failed too, since that was a horrible example. But there are tons more examples. Like all those intellectuals who completly fail to see the other side. Some people can have a set belief, and focus all of their intellegence towards vindicating that belief. That is no way to think. True intellegence is holding several oppossing ideas in your head at the same time and giving then equal consideration.
Are you talking about Mensa? That used to be just a preliminary test to see if you should bother applying. The real test was proctored, or you had to provide results of a proctored exam that they recognized as legitimate. People with 86 IQ are barely able to read and write. Their level of literacy is enough to get them mail-room jobs because they can read names and addresses. Your ability to toss out hyperbole is the mark of intelligence. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! You need to review the definition of "creativity": "Unless you're God, creating something means discovering a new and useful way to combine two or more things that already exist." I think I heard that from James Burke on "Connections" but I doubt that he was the first to say it. That would have been out of character for him. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The ability to abstract is rare, as we can see by the number of people on SciForums who post entire articles instead of bothering to summarize them for us. To assimilate the "collective knowledge of generations of academics" and extract something new out of it is not "standing on their shoulders." This is something I do routinely--not generations of academics because I'm not in academia, but I correlate bits out of things I've read over the past fifty years and come up with my own connections and hypotheses. People think I'm brilliant but all I do is read the newspaper and the magazines in my dentist's office, and follow intriguing URLs here and on other sites. To me it's just a leisure activity. I guess it's the same phenomenon I experienced during the Space Race. Everyone realizes that they need nerds to survive in the Information Age, so they have to treat them with a modicum of respect or there won't be anybody to find their lost files. And of course the nerds perpetuate this by continuing to standardize the so-called Information Infrastructure around the PC architecture and Windows. A Windows box is a little Science Fair project that plagues you for the rest of your life. The average person would be incapable of getting a computer to work for more than three or four days at a time without the help of his friendly nerds. Those of us in I.T. who have genuine empathy for the average people of the world envision an infrastructure built around the Macintosh: an appliance, you turn it on, push a button, and perfectly toasted data starts popping out. You need the services of a professional perhaps more often than you do on a toaster, but no more often than on your car, which is successfully marketed as a consumer appliance. Car mechanics are generally regarded as blue-collar trash despite their intelligence and manual dexterity that rivals a musician. Nerds hate Macs because they portend the end of the non-stop Science Fair In Every Home And Office. And their status as the salvation of a human race perpetually exasperated by Windows.
Ok, so what works? My son at about 10yrs old had an IQ test (demanded by the local school), his iq then was about 130, he had resoning and verbal skills of an 18+ yr old. How do I keep him interested in mundane math when he wants to learn algebra? I teach both kids to think, ask questions, and understand stuff rather than spew out memorized data, but how do I keep them interested?
Hm, that is a good question. I guess he has to be selfeducated, just get him books written for 13+ year olds. Also the more important thing is to have a DRIVE. If he has that he will look for more info what he is interested in by himself. I tend to think that to be successfull in life drive is more important than intelligence. Look at those 2 idiots mentioned in the other thread. They both ended up being bouncers with IQs of 150+.... Also to find a person who the kid can look up to and trying to reach what that person achieved could be good. A rolemodel...
Home schooling is a highly attractive option for gifted children. If you're a "stay at home" parent, you may want to look into it.
learning is the interesting part I find so it would be near impossible to be interested in learning something you already know or understand, I would think it be better to stay in school and stay with his classmates either way, I was thinking the other day about going back to school and I don't know how i will do it, it's been so long
I did homeschool for 2 yrs. To hard, i work full time shift work and single parent. Paid for private school too, for a year, but was too far away from home and we missed each other. Am trying to work within the public school system. Dont want to make him "grow up" too fast, but dont want him to quit cuz he is board.
I was that kid. Do him a favor and give him the dadgum algebra. My father taught me algebra when I was 11 and differential calculus the next year. I got an A in my first year of physics at CalTech (which is all algebra) without ever attending a class. I'm not visually oriented so my math skills were not all on par: I was only about a year ahead of my grade in geometry and trigonometry. I was also not good with my hands (although I eventually grew out of that and rebuilt a motorcycle engine) so I got C's and D's in all my university lab work. What I needed, and did not get, was to learn social skills. I was pushed from 5th grade to 7th, and became an outcast among all the kids who were already in puberty. To compensate, I developed a superior attitude toward all those "ordinary" kids and of course that just made it worse. When I began treating my teachers the same way I became alienated from everyone. My parents eventually paid out-of-district tuition and transfered me to a high school in the city where there were other bright kids and teachers who could keep up with us. In addition, I had the mixed blessing of the launch of Sputnik just as I entered the new high school. A blessing because suddenly geeks were heroes so the strange kid with the slide rule could sit with the jocks, was not beaten up by the pachucos, and even got a girlfriend. A curse because I was steered into the science and math I was already good at and my education in English and history languished. To this day I can't fathom a single word of most "literature" and I was 30 before I began understanding how we got where we are. Then of course I went off to CalTech were all efforts at learning to be a member of the human race were suspended. There weren't even any girls there in those days. If I were in your shoes (and I'm not, I was bright enough to realize that I was not capable of being a parent until I was far too old to start that adventure) I would ensure that my bright child had access to the resources he needs to go as fast as he wants in his fields of interest. These days that's not hard because of the internet. I spent my life baffled by the high school geometry problem of drawing a regular pentagon with compass and straightedge, and when I thought to ask about it here, in less than a day two people sent me URLs to two different proofs. Make sure your kid has broadband, and send him to SciForums. Despite all the chatter about politics and religion, this place is crawling with precocious kids who get mentoring from real scientists and mathematicians. Let the silicon world take care of his A.P. work to the extent that you and his school cannot. The carbon world is where he has to learn about people. Don't make the mistake my parents did and let him shield himself from that. My life from age 11-24--including a doomed marriage to a perfectly nice girl--was an endless depression because I had never been assimilated into the real world. The way to keep him "interested" is to help him make friends. Encourage him to participate in social activities. Many bright kids love music, he might do very well in the school choir or the band and it's a good way to meet other kids who are have a passion for something and take it seriously. Go out of your way to let him invite over anyone he is able to socialize with who hasn't spent time in juvey, and to accept any invitations from them. Sit on your misgivings. Life is about taking risks and I'm pathetic testimony to my parents' attempts to shield me from all risk. Kids these days are slugs. All of us geeks hated compulsory P.E. but we all learned to play tennis (it was the easiest sport available) and it made it possible for us to talk about sports with the other guys at least minimally. He'll feel better if he gets a reasonable amount of physical exercise. Swimming is good too. Non-contact sports.
Fraggle's post is a true education. Screw your kids smartness and make sure he is happy and has friends. Most prodigies are not happy adults... A year ago I had a son of a friend staying with us. He was a GIANT geek and very smart, in a short of way. He had no social skills, and he couldn't solve PRACTICAL computing tasks that I gave him. He was all theory... His mental age was probably at least 2 years behind his real age (19). He criticized everything, but couldn't take criticism at all. He had a hard time to see when he was wrong, and boy, he was quite often very wrong. Just because he was smart in a limited range topics, he thought he was smart in everything. But his real interest was very limited, and he called everything stupid what didn't belong in that limited world of his. He was the biggest dissappointment in my life, I had high hopes when he arrived and couldn't wait until he left us. Don't make your kid like this boy....
Hark- do mine ears believe? I do believe that is the succulent sound of Nexus finally shutting the fuck up. Fraggle: I....doin't know what you're talking about. I'm merely a functional retard with a 64 eye signal. Remeber that. That said, and to close on this Most Interesting Topic, we can barely explain the infrastructure of memory or the complexities of one's brain processing language , yet we have standardized tests quantifying "Intelligence" as one single number assuming a generalized, representative role of how billions of human brains function. That's a like a nun or Satyr here writing sex columns. A Paiute Indian could chew boiled mistletoe to abort an unwanted pregnancy while the American went on to invent the partial abortion and salt poisoning- which one of the two is more "intellegent"? What standardized tests do is claim an absolute value for something as variable as the human approach to solving a problem thrust on him by a universe as mysterious as the very brain attempting to thrive in it. This is a statistical coup presuming to know, in its most elite terms, the worth of answers to questions that no one asks in exactly the same way let alone asks at all to begin with. That I grew up entranced by how mucus and shit looked through a microscope as opposed to Pondering the Nature of Evil- does that make me smarter or less so than Nietzche? Roman: Wasn’t it you that microwaved urine? If so, do it again but add charcoal.
Gendanken, Tis true. Tis true. So damned busy these days....... Whatever happened to the days when I would ramble for pages and pages and pages? Responsibility. If I didn't like it so much, I'd have to give it a 'bah!' I WILL get back here eventually however.
Thank you Fraggle Rocker. You will be happy to know he is a fairly well adjusted kid, and i pretty much let him flow to what intrests him. His is on student councel, ski's, swims, soccor and karate. I never wanted the focus of his education simply to be a series of tests. Thought maybe there was a trick to get him through the drudgery of some of the stuff. Thanks again for the help, and will talk to him about coming on here on my days off.
That was also around the time Van Cliburn won the first quadrennial Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition (1958). There was a sharp increase in the number of children in the Free World enrolled in music lessons!
