hot take: most of you weren't "gifted"

oh yea and if you claim to have a high IQ whilst having only taken an online test, you already lose your credibility.

First of all, the people here were labeled as such by the education system at a young age and probably sorted into some state-funded gifted class by the criterion of being formally evaluated by a psychologist / psychometrician. Meaning, the group here doesn't need to take worthless ego-inflating tests when the point is recovering from the wrong-headed imposition of those labels -- formally, in the actual schooling.

But my main point is to take a moment to consider your own statistics.

being (academically) gifted that would mean that they make up of 2-2.5% of the population, seriously? do you really think you're all that special?

Now I have to add the exact criterium for someone to be considered gifted, and that is to have an IQ 130 or higher.

Mensa, for example, operates by this same cut-off, and many consider that crowd a complete joke appealing to the sense of superiority you describe because of how non-selective it is. (Importantly, this subreddit has the opposite ethos: helping people realize how warping to one's own sense of efficacy, self-concept, and way of relating to the world this narcissistic sorting and privilege is to instill in kids at an early age in the education system.) But my point with the Mensa group -- where no one is let in unless they fit your standard of 99.5th percentile or within the standard deviation range of ~130 that you give -- is that there are so many members that it's literally just a bloated subtly egotistical social club that is not a signal in any way of selectivity or exceptional giftedness that the members perhaps would like.

Because even with your cut-off that is still a huge amount of fucking people. This subreddit has ~30K subscribers. You can do the math yourself, but you should figure in your head how many Americans pass through the public school system every year who consistently take standardized tests and find that they have done better than 99.5% of their peers. People who you should find at a rate of 1 in 200. Which is still a huge pile of students and graduates. How common do you think it is for this group to be failed by (and set up to fail by), disappointed by, or just jilted and ill-handled in some way as outliers by the school system, which as an institution has the foremost economic goal of passing as many subjects through the 12 graded wheels of the machine as possible?

/r/aftergifted Thread