I failed maths, but I'm great at logic, which I consider to be the more important proficiency for programming.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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The amount of human ingenuity that's wasted on shit like figuring out how to make more intrusive ads, that could've instead been used to advance humanity is one of the biggest tragedies of capitalism.
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It me
Might be an unpopular take but.. maybe being good at high school math tests is not really such an important gift in the real world.
I memorized all 151 pokemon before the second generation came out.
I also write Jira tickets.
I'd say the real world doesn't reward being actually gifted.
School rewards obedience and memorization. If you're aggressively mediocre, but sufficiently agreeable and willing/able to memorize a bunch of bullshit, chances are, you'll get pretty good grades. I know several people with very good grades who are simply not very intelligent.
Universities also reward memorization. If you're good at learning facts and writing bullshit like the prof wants to read it, chances are, you'll get good grades in at least some areas (business, psychology , medicine, and as a CS graduate, even CS to a frighteningly high degree).
If you're gifted (like I'm actually certified to be, whatever that means), you're often bored at school, you won't learn because you don't really need to, and you don't really want to play ball with all the bullshit. You can see through it, and especially for teenagers, that's extremely frustrating.
In the "real world" being gifted isn't really a huge benefit either. I'm good at what I'm doing and what's the result? I'm now de facto managing other people at doing what I'm good at. I can't complain, cushy job, very good pay. But a literal monkey could do 70% of my tasks. I'm inside a corporate cage, that I realistically can't escape from.
And I think that's where many of the "gifted, but neither genius nor psychopath" people are at. Overqualified for what they're doing, but caught in a system where they can't really excel in the ways they could.
As someone also measured as gifted and put in gifted classes, there was an interesting discussion that I had with one of the teachers about how the views for approaching gifted education was changing.
For a lot of schools, the "gifted" students are gifts; you don't have to spend time on their education and they may end up helping the classes they are in. So, it is ok to treat them like normal kids and they won't become a problem.
However, studies have shown that to be really bad for the "gifted" students. You get a lot of underperforming students who don't engage with the material as it is mentally underwhelming. Soft skills that they were supposed to learn were never developed because they never had to. You even had issues with developing social skills as the distance in standard deviations between gifted and normal children are the same as between a normal kid and a "special education" kid.
The findings were showing you had to treat the "gifted" students with the same care as those in "special education" as the common teaching techniques don't work, issues are much more varied between children, and being able to lean on talent in some cases leads to skills not being learned because they never needed to be.
Sounds like you were kept with the normal kids.
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"the real world" isn't a thing.
There's no such monolith. Different jobs reward different gifts. The challenge is finding one for your own.
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I don't know how it is in other countries, but Spanish high school math competitions are designed to test both logic and creativity. They'll require you to use the material from your current year, but the way in which you have to apply that math isn't obvious if your only competency in math is specifically passing high school tests. You don't get a good score by being a proficient human calculator, but by applying good abstract analysis, which you should be able to apply in other areas of your life.
I wonder if Spanish people write more interesting Jira tickets.
By "high school math competitions" I mean provincial or regional competitions where different schools send their best students. The average Spaniard has as much trouble in math as people from all other places, and high school math is very much the same.
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It usually means that their logical thing is pretty good because discrete math is pretty much all that.
You learn a concept, then you modify it to apply to different contexts for different applications.
The math competitions is a good training for that.
Bring able to do those sorts of problems isn't important.
Having the logic solving ability to do those sorts of problems is.
Plagiarizing my autobiography, I see
That’s not true.
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