Daily Archives: 2009-05-26

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, continuing my quest to take advantage of having some time to read and culture myself. Like all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, it is very nifty, but also frustratingly lacking in rigor. The really, really irritating part of this one (to me) is the shifty metrics he uses for success; he poses that somewhere around an IQ of 130, the competitive advantage flattens out, which I actually am not disinclined to believe. The proposed reason for this cutoff is that somewhere around the quoted 130 IQ, individuals’ increasingly weakened ability to relate to the world catches up to their intellectual advantage; this seems entirely reasonable. The problem is that this conclusion is based almost exclusively financial metrics for success; my observation has always been that the very bright tend to have a pretty strong predisposition for taking positions that are more personally than financially rewarding (he does admit to the problem. He just doesn’t do anything about it). Conversely, the best part of Outliers for me is contemplating the group of gifted kids I grew up with as samples for the described phenomena; we so match.
Sadly, one of the better matching points is the “gifted kids have trouble relating to others” portion. I’ve been feeling it more than usual lately, I blame seeing the dwindling collection of old (GT) friends passing through as the summer begins for starting it. Now it’s mostly exhibiting as frequent bouts of the “alone in a crowd” sensation most times I’ve been out of late (with one surprising exception…hurray cute smart girls, boo deeply ingrained shyness). I’ve actually heard similar remarks from a few of said old friends as well. This probably also relates fairly directly to both my failure to post anything for over a week, and my recent urge to watch through Buffy. Theres nothing quite like watching a show based around metaphors which gratuitously translate personal issues into genuine otherworldly (stabable) daemons to soothe the soul….