Scott Barry Kaufman

You know, I think that these tests can be useful for certain people.

And for some students who grow up in very impoverished areas and don't have many ways of displaying their intelligence, these tests can be a ticket out for them.

There can be a way out.

for them to advance and to for others to see wow they do have potential so we have to be careful we don't throw the baby out with the bath water my point is that we can use these tools in various valuable ways while at the same time not using them to limit potential

So I think the idea of a gifted underachiever is incorrect.

I don't think there's any such thing.

Because if you've gifted underachievers, that means you have ungifted overachievers who just got there through sheer hard work, I guess, is the idea.

I think what we need to recognize is that if you show and apply whatever attributes to solve something,

You've brought your intelligence to the table to solve that thing.

I think it is insulting and demeaning to a human to kind of try to explain it away by something else.

While at the same time, I think that it's a great thing to be a hard worker as well.

So we should still pat ourselves on the back for working hard.

But I hope my point was made.

Yeah, and maybe there are cultures where hard work is more valued than intelligence, so that telling a student, maybe the reverse would happen in a different culture, where you tell a student, you're just smart, you didn't work hard, and that would upset them.

So a lot of it comes down to what do we value in our culture?

Overvalue, perhaps.

Because I had a high IQ, I was able to get into large positions of responsibility at work.

But anyway, I was just interested in whether or not that's something that's been examined about how when you're considered smart, you know, the downsides of that and how that might affect the rest of your life.

There's this idea because you're gifted, you're expected to act a certain way and achieve a certain outcome in life.

And that's a big problem with equating giftedness with achievement potential, as opposed to just treating it as, well, these students have advanced needs or have certain needs in their school system that are valuable needs.