There is a distinction between the pressure that comes from growing up in a "tiger family" and the consequences of growing up with the "smart" label, and I feel like the author is conflating the two. Personally, growing up with the label (but not the parental pressure) was one of the best things that could have happened for me and my education - the fact that others believed (whether true or not) that I was lightyears ahead of the class afforded me numerous opportunities - special classes, programs, etc. And more importantly, the fact that I believed it meant that I was able to operate free of insecurities or imposter syndrome that so many of my peers faced. Did it inflate my ego a bit as a kid? Sure - but I had good role models to look up to who helped me tamp that down a bit, and I had plenty of time to figure out that I wasn't the smartest kid in the world once I got to MIT (which I might not have gotten into had I not so fervently believed I would!).
I can't comment on what it's like to grow up with the extreme parental pressure the author describes - I didn't experience that, and I'm sorry she had to go through that. But I think that's an entirely separate issue from growing up with the "gifted" label.
> And more importantly, the fact that I believed it meant that I was able to operate free of insecurities or imposter syndrome that so many of my peers faced.
How the heck did you convince yourself to believe it? As a "gifted" kid, what I learned very quickly was that adults will happily exaggerate minor talents (which one acquires primarily through just spending time on them, a task made markedly easier when everybody else hates you) to absurdity- at one point I got an evaluation back from a summer program at Stanford telling me I might grow up to be "one of the best programmers of our age". What did I do to earn such acclaim? Got ahead of the rest of the class making a game, read the documentation for Flash, and used the extra time to add "voice controls" to my game (specifically, you'd shoot by yelling anything into your microphone, it was just triggered by levels.)
Seriously- how can you take that sort of praise seriously, and not just as a "look at the cute kid who knows more Adobe Flash than the rest of his age group"?
It's nice to hear I'm not the only one as a kid whose reflex was to get suspicious of/thought it was lazy when/ people would quickly decide "you're smart". It seemed to me just like a way to score cheap points. It also made me feel worse about not understanding things easily.. people were telling me I was smart, after all! :P
My sister, on the other hand, gets annoyed at my perspective - she finds it tiresome when people can't take the compliment. There's wisdom to both ways, I guess.
Someone once pointed out to me I had a tendency to momentarily scowl when complimented and then pretend I hadn't heard it.
Made sense because compliments made me feel weird, even though I freely gave them out.
Since then I've trained myself to smile, make eye-contact and say "Thank you, I accept your compliment with confidence," before returning to the matter at hand.
Maybe it reflects poorly on my character, but when I was a kid I and several other "gifted" kids turned receiving undue praise into a sport. We'd compete to find the laziest way (without lying) to receive praise specifically from the 'gifted instructor' meant to be supervising us. I think I won when I printed off a picture taken from the mandrelbot set (I did not write the renderer, I just screenshotted it) and hung the printout on the blackboard with the word "Fractal" written underneath it. The response to that was as though I had invented fractals (which of course I never claimed.)
It was a dumb game, but it taught me an important life lesson about how adults will believe what they want to believe. You don't even have to lie to people if they're willing to lie to themselves.
As an afterthought, the one thing I do actually find to help with my self-esteem is finding security bugs in places I know others have already looked. There, it's objective- you did something nobody else could. That... that's believable.
If you are consistently more successful than your peers at school while doing less work, it's pretty easy for a kid to believe they're gifted when everyone is telling them that they are.
I still remember eighth grade and the teacher who used the 'smart' kids of the advanced math classes as an excuse to not actually bother teaching anything and make it all 'self study'. My math grade went from a solid A to a D in the course of one semester because I couldn't just figure it out myself from the book.
“Look at Tim, he’s 16 and already 6’ tall. Why can’t the rest of you actually try to be tall, like Tim. You’re just slacking, sitting there at only 5’4”.”
Yes. Only more like "I'm such an amazing teacher, that's why he's so tall. But you slackers aren't even trying and it's making me look bad!"
I was the youngest kid at home and I learned to read at age four because my long-suffering, doting older sister reread me the same book a jillion times at my insistence. The poor woman could still quote the book in her forties.
Most of what I knew had nothing whatsoever to do with school.
Plus, it winds up being code for "You should all beat him up in the bathroom every chance you get!"
Gee, thanks.
(No, I was not literally beaten up in the bathroom.)
you overestimate what it takes to be one of the best programmers. they are not geniuses. they just work harder. that makes a big difference. what you did does set you apart, and if you keep it up, it is exactly what will make you a great programmer. it makes you the kind of person i want to hire.
and from different perspective, the feeling that this came easy to you is exactly what would make you gifted. you are not impressed by your own achievements, but they are achievements. this is what gifted means. what's hard for someone else is easy for you.
that doesn't make it a good idea to call people gifted, because that has a tendency to make them lazy. it seems you saw through that though.
The difference is subtle. The difference is that you were called "smart" in the areas you showed interest in. That propelled you to improve further and always be ahead of your contemporaries. In her case (and many in China and India - where I come from) society has certain expectations from you. It doesn't matter if you are interested in something else entirely. Maybe you have a liking for arts. Or for music. These are considered "secondary". There are certain core subjects that you have to compulsorily master else you won't have any "value" in society. Now when you get labelled "smart" for something you have no interest in but you have to do because you have no choice that label doesn't really give you any satisfaction. It just so happens that you did it because the society wants you to. Not because you want to. And then you have to live up to the label now that everyone knows you are "smart". It is a vicious cycle that is hard to get out of.
That doesn't mean the society discourages you from learning arts, music or anything else. You have to make room for it in your spare time.
Also, examinations to get into prestigious universities are brutal compared to the West. Around a million students (10.43 lakhs in 2018) take up the IIT JEE exam and only around 10,000 qualify. You can take a look at how tough the exam is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h_x13xHjVs
To prepare for this, you would have to spend countless hours solving and sleepless nights studying. And even after all that, your chance at success is 1%. I am not even considering Medical (NEET), MBA (CAT) or Civil Services (UPSC) which is equally hard.
> Around a million students (10.43 lakhs in 2018) take up the IIT JEE exam and only around 10,000 qualify.
> To prepare for this, you would have to spend countless hours solving and sleepless nights studying. And even after all that, your chance at success is 0.01%.
Your numbers suggest 1%, not 0.01%. 0.01% of a million examinees would be 100 passing scores.
A more niche question: how does that biased 1% figure translate into selectivity at the level of the general population?
For example, if every eligible student takes the test and 1% of examinees pass, then the threshold for passing the test is being in the top 1% of the eligible population. If 30% of the eligible population at random take the exam, and 1% pass, then the threshold for passing the test is a little more lenient than the 1% figure makes it appear. But if some people identify beforehand that they are unlikely to pass, and don't bother -- say that the top 30% of eligible students all take the test, and the bottom 70% all don't -- then the threshold is much more strict then it appears; in the example, if 1% of examinees pass, then the passing threshold would actually be top 0.3%, not top 1%.
Yes you are right in a way. Lets put it into perspective: The total number of students who gave their 12th final board exams was 1.43 crore in 2017 (https://www.india.com/education/board-examinations-2017-over...). That is roughly 14.3 million students. This is an aggregation across all boards: ICSE, CBSE and various State Boards. Let us assume that the same number of students gave their board exams in 2018 as well (I am sure the number is higher but I can't find stats for it).
Now not all of these 14.3 million students appear for IIT JEE. Only 7% of these (1 million) appear for JEE. But since you talk about "eligible student", all the 14.3 million are eligible. But many don't even bother to take it because (as you mentioned) they know they don't stand a chance. Many of them are not interested in Engineering and are interested in Medical. These students take up NEET (which is equally tough). The remaining move on to do Arts, Commerce or any other stream with an aim to either do an MBA (through CAT), become a CA, LLB (for law) or pursue Civil Services (UPSC - as tough or some say even tougher than IIT JEE). The outliers are those that do not follow any of these well trodden paths: these are few and far between. So in reality only 7% of those eligible students appear for IIT JEE and then 1% of those appearing get selected.
The other fact you need to consider is that the Government of India expanded the number of IITs from the earlier 7 (as of 2001) to now 23 (as of 2018) and increased the total number of seats from 4500 to 12000. So an approx 3x jump in the number of seats keeping in mind the total number of aspirants taking the exam. So the pass percentage remains roughly the same year-on-year. I am sure if you now take 30% of the total eligible population (from your example), viz. 4.29 million students appearing for the exam, the percentage that pass will further decrease (from 1% to 0.28%). Because students are ranked and IIT seats that are fixed (around 12000) are filled rank-wise.
I'm glad the label worked for you but it did not work at all for me. It kind of shoehorned me in to a personality type and limited my social options.
In all honesty I look back at my "smartness" as a kind of attention-seeking behavior where all I really wanted was the attention you got from getting the highest grade in the class or being the only one from your school to go to the ivy league.
To me, the smart label just means you are willing to sacrifice more than others to study/learn/build. Everything I have learned about people since starting college has told me that this is a net negative.
Believe me, it’s much worse being considered not intelligent instead. I knew so many people growing up that were orders of magnitude more intelligent and accomplished than me (and I still do).
Growing up with the "smart" label was the worst thing that happened for me and my education. It made me lazy and I almost never got challenged. If I had grown up in a challenging environment I could've easily progressed years faster (in areas like math and programming) than I did. I didn't have any parental pressure, or pressure of any kind either.
It wasn't until middle of the University I learned that I actually had to work and study to understanding something.
You weren't challenged because the school system regards every child who gets an A as a success, full stop. That they put no effort into doing so or were capable of learning the requisite material three years before is immaterial. The smart label is irrelevant compared to the incentives teachers and administrators labour under and they get nothing for helping children fulfil their potential. They’re judged by average achievement on tests set for average children.
Seems to me that having the label gives you confidence that if you think you understand something then you are probably correct. You can then build on that to learn the next thing quicker.
If you're really smart, you won't need someone to tell you that. It will be evident.
Once you realize you're playing a level up, you won't need encouragement from authority figures. You'll be trying to reach and surpass the greats, all on your own.
I grew up similarly but with very different results because I’m not intelligent - the proof is in me not getting into MIT. I think you’re the odd one out here.
Being a new dad, this is something I've begun thinking a lot about. Reading about CBT (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy) has shed some light on this issue for me. I think the core problem is when a child is taught that their value to the family and to society is based on extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors.
If you are made to believe that you are valuable as a human because you are x, y, or z subjective determination (smart, beautiful, athletic, etc.) and not simply because you are you, then you're likely to be driven and motivated to maximize this 'edge', but you'll also be mostly unhappy regardless of what you achieve, because there will always be others who make your achievements along that axis seem like nothing in comparison. And even if you are the absolute best in the world at something, you will always feel chased and hunted, like the thing that makes your life worthwhile is constantly hanging by a thread.
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to do great things or encourage our children to do the same if they're inspired to. But before that, we need to learn to be satisfied with a simple life just existing in the world as ourselves without any extraordinary achievements.
You will resonate with Aktie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting which cites a lot of research confirming the long term futility and harm of extrinsic pressures encoded in common parenting practices and educational institutions.
> This doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to do great things or encourage our children to do the same if they're inspired to. But before that, we need to learn to be satisfied with a simple life just existing in the world as ourselves without any extraordinary achievements.
Amazingly put. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, I’m of two minds on this) I’m convinced this is a feature rather than a bug of American society. Deriving self worth from accomplishments is force fed culturally in every direction, including places where I wouldn’t necessarily expect it like politics (see Trumps Ivy League name dropping and Buttigiegs support relying heavily on his Harvard credentials).
Of course, would society be better off otherwise? I’m not sure.
It's a complex question to be sure, but I do think we'd be better off without this unhealthy form of motivation. I think whatever we might lose in sheer GDP output, we'd gain many times more in quality of life and reduction of negative externalities.
I have suffered from this personally. I was a "smart" kid. I was always top of my class till 10th standard. Everybody called me smart and intelligent. The schoolwork till 10th never challenged me. But when the complexity increase with pre college courses and STEM I was lost because I never had tackled this kind of difficulty before. I went into depression for couple of years. I was saved by Hamming's "You and Your research" and Learning how to learn. I restarted believing and learning again with growth mindset.
Same kind of thing here. I coasted almost all the way through high school, got given endless slack in my last year of high school because everyone knew I was 'smart', and instantly ran into major trouble in college.
I was called “smart” growing up. Looking back I believe it was a huge disservice. School was generally easy for me, but I was afraid to ask questions to risk appearing “not smart.” I learned a hard lesson in college. Smart isn’t something you are, it’s something you can become, through perseverance, dedication, and grit. Luckily I posses those qualities.
We don’t use the S word around our kids. And when strangers tell me our young children are smart, while they are in earshot, I say, “Thank you. They work hard and practice a lot.”
I think that's a function of the school system. I had access to "honors" classes and so forth, but they weren't that advanced or challenging, so there was a pretty low ceiling on what you could accomplish in school. Since kids couldn't distinguish themselves by accomplishing more or harder things, and there was nothing glamorous about grinding out a 99 versus a 98, the "smartest" kids were the ones who didn't have to work hard or answer questions. I remember sometimes I would pull out a blank sheet when the teacher started collecting assignments and try to finish it in before she got to my desk, because there was no other way for it to be an accomplishment. With the level of accomplishment fixed at a low level, the only way to prove you were more capable was by being flamboyantly undisciplined.
Reminds me of my high school experience. The kids in the top of the class worked hard to appear as if they didn’t work hard. I among them. I was relieved to find students at my university genuinely cared and worked hard on their academics. And the ones who didn’t failed.
My kids future high school has a reputation for being academically difficult. I’m thrilled by that. I don’t care if they’re C students, I just want them to be challenged.
I felt being called "smart" was a disservice to me as well. I think it depends on the attitude of the child though.
For me, when I heard it, it felt like a license to be lazy. Don't need to work hard, teacher already thinks I'm smart. I wasn't bothered by poor grades because I believed I was smart (that's my natural inclination anyway).
On the other hand, I think if people had told me they were worried about me failing, or that I was nth in the class, that would've been a powerful motivator for me and I'm confident I would've worked harder at school.
The complicated thing is that different strategies will do different things for different kids. Some kids might lack self confidence and need encouragement, while others (like me) may have too much self confidence and need push back or a wake up call. The problem is delivering encouragement to the over confident and a challenge to the under confident.
You're generalizing from 1 example. I don't remember being called smart, but I definitely was smart (comparatively, always in the top of achievement except sports through my schooling including Oxford university). I wasn't afraid to ask questions and was happy to risk looking like a fool in order to ask a question about a complex topic (which, given it was complex for me, it was also likely complex for other people).
If you weren't called smart, your anecdote fails to actually contradict theirs. Theirs is also supported by the research, which says generally that it's harmful to children to praise them for being smart. It's better to praise them for effort and results.
> Critics point to the fact that Dweck's research does not appear to be replicable—a key requirement to prove its validity.
> If your effect is so fragile that it can only be reproduced [under strictly controlled conditions], then why do you think it can be reproduced by schoolteachers?
Your style of argument fundamentally doesn't work. This comment is no better than your earlier one.
1. Dismissing someone else's personal anecdote because you have a different personal anecdote is basically broken on the face of it.
2. Saying "Being called smart doesn't hurt anyone, I know because of my personal anecdote wherein I was not called smart" is just not any kind of solid logic whatsoever.
3. Dismissing their anecdote as a single instance with your single instance when there are actually other anecdotes here in this very discussion that agree with theirs and it's the essential point of the article under discussion is not a reasonable claim in the slightest.
4. All research has its critics. Rebutting my comment with "your research has critics" while ignoring the myriad other flaws in your initial position amounts to cherry picking.
If you want to debate this further, let me suggest you address the other points I have made and also go find research that actually agrees with your world view as stronger arguments than your current one. Otherwise, it's most likely really not worth engaging.
A camp I worked at had a 11 year old genius as a camper. The real kind, the one that could list all of the elements on the periodic table from memory and discuss them with a clear understanding of their properties.
I asked to have him in my bunk; I am not a genius and will readily admit to be his inferior - so no need for competition there (I might even learn from him!). On the other hand, he had clear social deficiencies and was not very sportive, so there are plenty of things he could learn from me. He needed to be grown and changed from an egotistical insecure kid to a insightful intelligent young adult.
Instead the camp gave him to the charge of a counselor who was also a genius, and as expected they spent the whole summer each trying to prove they were smarter than the other. The kid usually won, but I can't imagine the summer contributed to a growing experience.
Remember that genius doesn't make a person. Don't let it blindside your treatment of them if you are charged with raising them. They need adults to teach them about life, even if the adults can't do math as fast as they could.
adding to that. my friend is a straight up genius, can do calculations in his head faster than you can type them into wolfram alpha. people in my highschool used to ask him to do questions like a monkey
the only friends he had were people that talked to him like a normal person, shot the shit and went to parties together instead of asking him for homework help
In principle I agree that "it is up to the child to choose his or her destiny. It is never up to the parent." However, the following thought comes to mind:
The best musicians in the world, as well as the best figure skaters, the best gymnasts, the best tennis players, etc. seem to have been "pushed" into it by their parents, or at the very least heavily influenced.
If parents didn't push their kids in this way, would we have the same caliber of performers/champions/etc that dominate their respective disciplines?
Yes, I think we actually would because I don’t see much evidence that the number of talented kids who were pushed into it because of their obvious talents is greater than the number of kids who were talented but lacked the opportunities or support to actually do it.
My baby brother was a very good soccer player and was able to go to a selective high school in Sweden which uses very competitive try outs. Some of his classmates played in the highest league in Sweden and made more money than their own parents. My brother was a hopeful for the top league, until he broke his knee. He recovered and invested months of training to get back into shape, better shape than he ever was, to make the top teams see beyond his past injury and be so good they can’t ignore him. Then he broke the other knee and was damaged goods. The third highest league was as far as he could get and soccer stayed a hobby until he had to work and study at the same time at 20.
On the other hand, my brother had classmates who really wanted to postpone college and go all in playing on the elite level, and their parents refused. These parents were often highly educated themselves and just couldn’t see how such a high risk career as athletics could be a sound investment of one’s time.
I think if youths got to make their own career choices we would still have the same caliber of artists, athletes and what not because even the children who were pushed into it had to find some meaning behind what they did. Training for five hours straight is one thing, actually being receptive to what you need to learn while training for five hours is hard for anyone who doesn’t really care.
I can understand what she means when she talks about expectations. This is too common in China and India. It is difficult to explain to those who have never gone through what she is describing. Luckily I have parents who do not pressure me to do the stuff she talks about. But I have seen my fair share to know what it is like.
An underrated part of this is the impact it has if they dont end up being accomplished. I was in an AG program K-8 but ended up getting mediocre SATs and living a pretty average life.
I’m personally very skeptical of the utility of similar programs now. I’m beginning to think keeping consistent expectations for everyone and letting those with differing interests or aptitudes enrich themselves is more egalitarian, especially for people who aren’t intellectually gifted (like me).
I struggle with this. On one hand I want my children to be who they want and not be burnt out when they are 20,on the other hand too many children are never challenged and give up too easy.
I went to a college prep high school and graduated in the middle of the pack, but it was quite challenging and I didn't enjoy it.
But, in college there were quite a few valedictorians who clearly just coasted through high school, they mostly went to under funded public high schools. I feel these children were done a disservice.
Does anyone have any advice on how to teach self discipline without having your child resent it?
I homeschooled. My oldest was accepted to college at age 13, but didn't attend (long story omitted). I was briefly Director of Community Life for The TAG project, a gifted support organization I was involved in to support my homeschooling efforts.
Chores serve the same function as homework in terms of teaching kids responsibility. They have the added benefit of being a real world task, not "make work."
When my kids couldn't focus on their schoolwork because of video games, I locked up the controllers until school work was done. It wasn't punishment. They got them back as soon as their work was done.
When I got tired of one son blowing off household chores because he wanted to see his TV show, so he would ask if it could wait for a commercial, but then he never remembered during the commercial, I began telling him "No, this needs to be done when I ask because I'm spending hours begging you to do it and it's an unreasonable burden on me." After a few times of having his TV shows interrupted, he began taking out the trash voluntarily before his shows started and asking if there were any other chores he needed to do so he could block out uninterrupted TV viewing time.
There's NOT a single parent on earth that doesn't comfort and encourage it's kid unless he/she is some kind of a toxic psycho. Every parent think the best of their kid, either it's beauty or smartness.
I notice that I intentionally try to avoid portraying myself as "smart" these days because it frees me from having to work to prove it externally. I've also started working on hobbies that others don't consider meaningful, but which I notice challenge me as much as anything else I've been called smart for.
The upshot is that a lot of people in the workplace /do/ judge you anyways, and people seem to assume that you (like them) are doing your darnedest to appear as impressive as possible. Then again, I am working in high finance.
i somewhat had this problem when I was younger. i would hear it from basically everyone and it always sorta confused me because i certainly have never really felt intelligent per se, more just passionate about trying to understand why things work the way they do. if anything i more identify as ignorant in most regards, because by assuming that i absolutely know something, i think im doing myself a disservice and potentially blinding myself from seeing other aspects of it that I haven't yet considered. i did the whole advanced placement thing for a little while but I never really stayed in those classes, mostly because i just didn't have any interest in doing the work in them. i never really struggled with any of them, i can't think of any reason why anyone should given that there's a textbook with everything in it and an internets for everything else, but I suppose i understand that some people learn differently than others, and even more people tend to disparage their own ability to learn (unknowingly often to their detriment as it causes them to reject valid conclusions that they might come to because of a lack of confidence in said ability).
Intelligence/smart is the default condition of all children at the time of birth. It’s the non-intelligent parents who drive the intelligence out of them by their own behavior and ignorance
This author seems to be believing in the myth that there is such a thing as intrinsic smartness (being smart without effort). She perpetuates the misconception, without realizing the point she herself is making. Nobody is smart. It just doesn't exist. You just missed all the effort that went into becoming smart.
You have the same myth in fighting sports. "Some people are just faster" sooner or later becomes someone's argument why they're not as good as others. They have the same nerves you do, and the ion cascade in their nerves is the exact same speed in theirs as it is in yours. It's just effort (in training, beforehand, not in the actual fight). Nothing more (aside from one thing: smaller people are in fact faster. Not because they think faster but because they have less torque to fight. A point that will be made in any karate tournament)
Doesn't it seem a bit convenient ? The "truly smart" examples she gives:
* a schizophrenic
One sign of schizophrenia is doing the same thing unceasingly for absurd periods of times - sometimes decades. How much effort did this guy put in ? Not for good reasons, perhaps, but ...
* a "female technology manager" ...
.. dedicated her whole life to work. Then, one day, her husband asked her for a divorce because she barely came home. After 18 years, her children realized that she wasn’t the one who raised them ...
* just truly "gifted" people
They often have no balance in their own mental well being. Once they have identified an intellectual need, they try to fulfill that need single-mindedly at all cost. These are the people who are truly “gifted”.
* Herself
My intellect was in fact much more average than anyone realized. It was my “work ethic” that made me seem like an “intellectually gifted” person.
I feel like it is very important to give kids (yes, through forcing them) the ability to focus and expend effort to achieve a goal. This is of course not to be pushed at the expense of everything else, but it very important.
It's very important to not say three things to kids:
- "You're my favorite" - this is incredibly corrosive to relationships between siblings, and lasts forever.
- "You're so smart"- when you say this, you're telling the child that they have an intrinsic gift that replaces having to work hard. Just say, "Good job." or "How can you improve it next time?"
- "You's so pretty." - when you say this, you're telling the child that they have an intrinsic gift, and are above working hard on relationships or a career.
but they don't have an intrinsic gift. every child is capable of being smart, and every child is beautiful.
using these labels has to be done with care foe the desired effect. if a child thinks they are dumb, then calling them smart, and showing them hat makes them smart may be helpful to raise their self-esteem. but otherwise it may backfire.
same goes for beauty. it can have a positive effect, but it can also make the child care more about outward appearances.
It's hard to identify the thesis here. Is the thesis that intelligence is a myth? If so, the post provides precious little evidence in support.
Is it that smart children are overburdened by expectations and anxiety? If so, the "evidence" is a set of personal anecdotes and hyperbolic generalizations. It is, quite simply, not factual that teenagers are made to study 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. If that occurred, the teenager would die.
> by junwuwriter 28 minutes ago
> WRITTEN BY Jun Wu Single Mom Writer, Technologist, Poet: Tech, AI, Data Science, Psych, Parenting, Edu, Life, Work,Poetry etc. Find Me: https://junwuwriter.com
I skimmed it. It's not a particularly compelling piece, but research supports the idea that praising kids for "being smart" is inherently problematic.
Furthermore, she's a woman in a man's world. Women tend to spend a great deal of their time performing unpaid labor in the form of raising children and running the household -- aka "women's work." This creates myriad problems in them trying to establish a public reputation.
I was a military wife and homeschooling mom for a lot of years. I've really struggled to create some kind of public reputation that will lead to adequate financial compensation, so it's a problem space I know a lot about. Women are constantly put in a double bind when it comes to trying to claim their competence, establish a public life, etc.
>unpaid labor in the form of raising children and running the household
What a backwards society we increasingly live in, where putting time and effort into one of the most rewarding aspects of life, tending to the success and well-being of your offspring, is dismissed as "unpaid labor."
>Women are constantly put in a double bind when it comes to trying to claim their competence, establish a public life, etc.
Maybe that's because they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. The choice to leave the breadwinning to the male and become the primary caregiver is ultimately a male one in today's heavily pro-female corporate climate.
I was full-time wife and mom supporting my husband's demanding military career for two decades. Post divorce, I've struggled to make ends meet the entire time, in spite of having six years of college and still receiving alimony to this day, more than a decade later. This includes a stint of nearly six years of homelessness.
I also have a serious medical condition, so you can't blame it entirely on my gender. But I'm quite confident my gender is a significant factor in my intractable poverty.
My sons are incredibly loyal to me. They still live with me and tell me every single day "You're an awesome mom and I'm so glad you raised me."
I certainly don't regret raising them. But I'm extremely tired of being poor and also tired of listening to bullshit about how it's somehow not actually due to sexism.
Being told I'm being dismissive of the value of the work I lovingly devoted myself to for leaving a supportive comment about some other woman's writing is ...wow. I don't even have the words for this.
Like I said, women are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And I hope other people here see your reply as evidence of the kind of uphill battle I'm talking about.
It's quite the rarity these days for an American woman of my age who is college educated to have spent two decades as a homemaker. If I can't comment on the pitfalls involved in that without being attacked as disrespecting women, who the hell can?
Oh, I know: no one. Because the entire point is to make it impossible to escape the trap. The entire point of societal sexism is to keep women "barefoot and pregnant."
don't take this the wrong way. I believe a man would also face significant hurdles to try and get hired after not being in the field for two decades. Honestly on paper such a person has less to offer then a cheaper, younger person who is fresh out of college. I mean If you don't do something for two decades you have forgotten most of it.
To attribute your predicament to you being a women seems shortsighted to me. But this is only from the information I gained from reading your post and I don't actually know what experiences you went through.
I'm guessing you are not a parent. I have a toddler and a one month old. It is rewarding in many ways, but it is also crushingly boring, repetitive work. It's also overwhelmingly placed on women; men simply don't do as much child care by a factor of probably ten. I'm pretty sure no woman is trying to have her cake here, and every single one would choose to have help so they could do anything else on occasion.
before we had children my dream was to work part time so i could spend a lot of time with my children. when we had children, i got that opportunity, because my wife got a good paying job and i was a struggling freelancer.
and i hated it. it was boring, unfulfilling, and i didn't feel that i got enough time to work (which was where i'd seek that fulfillment)
when working, my wife often talks about how she'd like to stay home to take care of the kids, but since i work from home i know that she also feels unfulfilled if she is not at work.
we are fortunate that we live in a country where having a nanny is common and socially acceptable (means, it's not considered a rich peoples privilege), (most often it's a relative like the kids grandparents).
i eventually developed a theory that men are really privileged to live in a society where it is acceptable for them to leave this work to their partner.
In my experience, people who grew up under pressure to perform and with frequent external validation of their intelligence tend to humble brag a lot. I wonder if it's simply because they're mirroring what people have done to them. I grew up with something much different and find the bragging repulsive, but perhaps that's an expression of my own insecurity or jealousy to a degree.
Just for argument’s sake, my opinion is that intelligence is a kind of social construct. What we view as “intelligence” is the manifestation of traits that are important for our current society to function. i.e, we value bridges, so the traits of bridge builders are viewed as positive traits, which we call “intelligence”. In other environments these traits might not be seen as intelligent. For example, from what I’ve gleaned from reading books written a hundred or so years ago, “intelligence” could only be possessed by members of the upper classes, so even if you could build bridges, if you weren’t born into a certain class you were seen as mentally inferior. So our definition of intelligence shifts over time based on whatever society deems as important.
Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills. Your example of equating intelligence with wealth or bridge building is not even close to how intelligence is measured. It will be measured in dimensions like long term memory, working memory, pattern recognition, rotation of visual space, strategy/problem solving. And these abilities invariably dictate how people will be able to learn or perform at things like bridge building or software engineering. You will never be an exceptional software engineer if you cannot keep a suitably sized problem space in working memory.
It's so frustrating to me that we keep regressing our political conversations with assertions of this nature, that intelligence is a social construction, when in doing so we are literally turning a blind eye to what is arguably one of the greatest injustices our society faces. Intelligence is not a social construction, and it's not distributed equitably, and that isn't fair. It's the single greatest psychological signifier for material success. I'd much rather accept reality as it is, and spend resources attempting to ameliorate objective injustices, rather than making assertions that intelligence is a social construction because it gives some opening for a utopian alternative that can simply dispense with our "oppressive conceptions of competence."
Our definition of intelligence comes from a set of measures which were calibrated to correlate with measures of success. Success is by definition a measure of societal “fit” and so the whole program is by definition socially constructed.
Doesn’t mean it’s not “real”. But I also would not say it’s “abstract” in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not derived from first principles, nor do we have any kind of theoretical model of intelligence that’s good enough to construct measures around.
I agree with you, believe it or not, what I was referring to was “our definition of intelligence” (edit: ie, the collection of traits we see as “ingelligent”), not the underlying traits.
The fact that intelligent people were seen as mentally inferior doesn't negate the existence of their intelligence. The upper classes relied on the expertise of engineers, scribes, musicians, mathematicians, and artists and supported them materially even as they debased them in other ways. Otherwise that intelligence wouldn't have been selected for and inherited by later generations.
This paper already assumes that success is a social construct, and so it is not evidence of the kind you’d need to substantiate your initial enormous claims.
From the very first part of the abstract: “[...] the literature has not fully explored distinctions between the ways leaders of these organizations socially construct success, [...]”
Claiming success is a social construct seems to me to be trivially true, not a staggering claim. Intelligence is less obvious since there is a vast literature around it, but, again, it is clearly a social construct; we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.
I'm also not sure what "scientific evidence" would look like here. You seem to have had some sort of allergic reaction to the assertion of social construction and retreated instinctively to familiar but hollow epistemic grounds.
>we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.
This makes everything a social construct, which negates any usefulness of the distinction. Having to agree to definitions cannot be a realistic definition of social construct, because it's a basic part of using language.
Yes? And? This is one of the most profound and basic observations of twentieth century philosophy. That is what social construction is, it underlies our basic notions of perception and reality.
What you've said is not profound. When you go around saying "the sky is blue" people aren't wrong to assume you meant something relevant, rather than just tossing out vague and trivial statements.
I'm not sure what to do with this remark. You said my definition of social construction was untenable because the implications were too broad and you seemed to find that frightening. I responded by saying that social construction IS a theory with broad implications and gave you a reference to read, since you seem to be unfamiliar with these concepts. Your response seems a non sequitur.
It doesn't seem to me that she has an understanding of how much more picky females are than males when it comes to sexual selection. Her son needs to compete hard in his life, whether she likes it or not.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
And yet study after study, not only in humans but in many animals describe the female sex to be the choosy one and the males to heavily compete (even in mortal combat) for a chance for sex.
You’re right that there are multiple factors, but you also can’t discount the role of phenotypic brain “firmware”.
Yes, science reveals inconvenient truths. It tells us that we’re responsible for climate change, and it also tells us that our brains come pre-loaded with a wealth of routines shaped by millennia of evolution.
Can’t just accept some results and pretend others aren’t also well-supported. Well-supported scientific findings are what they are.
Societal factors do exist, but are often overstated or don’t bear a scientific foundation. A lot of social sciences have done real harm to scientific progress and the field of evolutionary psychology.
Birth control and women's rights, and marrying for love[1] are fairly new (within the last 20-100 yrs) and limited to a handful of countries.
We just don't have data on how humans behave when such huge reprodutive variables change. Seeing how a single generation responds isn't a long enough time period, because children accumulate the social norms of their parents.
> How Intelligence Affects Fertility 30 Years On: Retherford and Sewell Revisited — With Polygenic Scores and Numbers of Grandchildren
> Using newly available polygenic scores for educational attainment and cognitive ability, this paper investigates the possible presence and causes of a negative association between IQ and fertility in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study sample, an issue that Retherford and Sewell first addressed 30 years ago. The effect of the polygenic score on the sample’s reproductive characteristics was indirect: a latent cognitive ability measure, comprised of both educational attainment and IQ, wholly mediated the relationship. Age at first birth mediated the negative effect of cognitive ability on sample fertility, which had a direct (positive) effect on the number of grandchildren. Significantly greater impacts of cognitive ability on the sample’s fertility characteristics were found among the female subsample. This indicates that, in this sample, having a genetic disposition toward higher cognitive ability does not directly reduce number of offspring; instead, higher cognitive ability is a risk factor for prolonging reproductive debut, which, especially for women, reduces the fertility window and, thus, the number of children and grandchildren that can be produced. By estimating the effect of the sample’s reproductive characteristics on the strength of polygenic selection, it was found that the genetic variance component of IQ should be declining at a rate between −.208 (95% CI [−.020, −.383]) and −.424 (95% CI [−.041, −.766]) points per decade, depending on whether GCTA-GREML or classical behavior genetic estimates of IQ heritability are used to correct for ‘missing’ heritability.
I don't really know about antelopes, but the human side is well documented on multiple fronts. Women have to be much more selective than men, just because they are biologically aren't capable of having as many babies as men.
Also you can just try a dating site using an average looking man and average looking woman and get similar results to this experiment:
The latest well-replicated scientific experiments and research findings show strong evidence for what you’re saying here about firmware differences between the two sexes.
Perhaps a further question, though, is: SHOULD it be this way? Should we actively try to rein in this tendency of our firmware, just as we try to rein in other tendencies like our quickness to anger?
The meat still matters, for sure, but I wonder if we should be trying harder to transcend its less helpful qualities.
Then again, perhaps the competitiveness you’re referring to could be viewed as a net positive...
I can't comment on what it's like to grow up with the extreme parental pressure the author describes - I didn't experience that, and I'm sorry she had to go through that. But I think that's an entirely separate issue from growing up with the "gifted" label.