I see this interesting article from Canada in 2015 was submitted while I was catching up on sleep after my third son applied the previous evening to a summer science research program for high school students. Most of my employment, research, writing, and parenting for the last decade or more has been related to the concerns of third-party-identified highly gifted children, for example children who are part of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development Young Scholars program[1] or the long-term, longitudinal Study of Exceptional Talent (SET).[2] For practical knowledge for my own challenges in daily life, in teaching, and in parenting, I have taken care to read thoroughly in the published literature on Lewis Terman's long-term longitudinal study of gifted children.[3]

The Hacker News participant who kindly shared the article that opens this thread is a user whose user name I recognize from the many good articles he submits for discussion here. That said, permit me to not entirely agree with the opinion expressed by the Canadian teacher profiled in the article that "our most brilliant children are among our most vulnerable." That is actually not what the research shows. I agree with the several comments posted before this comment that say that age-segregated, lockstep curriculum school[4] is a particularly toxic environment for gifted learners, and not a good environment for any learner. But I learned, after majoring in Chinese language in university and living in east Asia after graduation, that there are varying cultural perspectives on how a smart person fits into human society. Growing up in the United States, in junior high I read a story by Philip K. Dick, which I have tried to find again but have not yet found in his collected writings, in which he expressed the opinion that the higher one's IQ is above the population median, the fewer true friends one can have, an opinion expressed in a top comment in this thread. I fully agreed with that opinion when I was a child, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I isolated myself from "average" people in my school and neighborhood environment. But when I lived in east Asia, I learned that Confucius said, 三人行，必有我師焉 ("wherever three persons are walking, my teacher is surely among them"). The east Asian Confucian philosophers were very clear than human beings vary in how smart they are, but they also deeply believed that any human being can learn from any other human being. The job of a smart person is to use brainpower to understand other people and make society better. As soon as I adopted those east Asian perspectives, I found it much easier to make friends. Now I proactively tell my four children and the gifted young people I teach in my supplemental mathematics program that they can find rapport with anyone, if they are willing to listen. And I spread this same message internationally among parent email lists and social media groups for parents of gifted children.

To sum up, the article makes strong claims that high IQ is strongly associate with social maladjustment and psychological disturbance. That is not an invariant property of high IQ, and I know many exceptions. All research on the topic confirms that many high-IQ people do fine in social interaction with other human beings, and some who do not start out that way can learn better social adjustment. School has a lot of toxic features for most learners,[5] but gifted children need not fear being social misfits for life.

[1] http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/

[2] http://cty.jhu.edu/set/

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Termans-Kids-Groundbreaking-Study-Gift...

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic...

[4] http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

[5] http://www.johnholtgws.com/

http://learninfreedom.org/system.html