How do you nurture the ultra-intelligent?

Today I was with an 8yo autistic boy who I will be spending a few hours a week with. He has autism and the usual companions, plus mild sleep epilepsy and some motor skill issues. But his intelligence was off the charts. During our car-trip, we started with riddles which he knew the answers to all my favourites. I then asked him what weighs more, a kilo of rocks or a kilo of feathers. He spent a little time rationalising it then said they are both equal.

Ok. I asked him if there was no air at all, and you went to the top of building and dropped a bowling ball and a feather, which would hit the ground first. Again, he thought about it and said they would hit the ground together because without air the feather would fall straight down. Just like a piece of paper would. Holy smokes. 8 years old. We talked about Galileo and the Sun and planets how they all thought everything revolved around the Earth.

I needed to up my game. So I asked him to add up all the numbers between 1 and 100 without actually adding 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus... I gave it to him as homework because Carl Gauss did this as a youngster when his teacher got frustrated because of the genius of Gauss. I'm sure he will come back to me with the answer.

Later I talked to his mother and he was evaluated at 99.9% in the cognitive tests.

How does one nurture a kid like this?

We live in an authoritarian state

We live in an authoritarian state. The police who we feel protect us do not. They serve the people that make the rules. I had my house broken-into. The cops came and dusted the doors/etc and then they told me that chances of finding the perpetrators is basically zero.

Ok. But there is a deterrent for criminals that they will be caught and end-up in prison. No. Only 2% of the charges result in imprisonment. So police can't help us pre-crime and then the post-crime statistics are even worse. So how are they useful? They aren't.

No, what the police do is to concentrate their efforts on the general public. They issue their speeding fines, and random alcohol/drug tests, the body searches of young people at festivals (the pieces of shit), or the poor sucker who didn't declare something on his taxes as the rich get away with billions. In other words, they concentrate on the easy low hanging fruit as the real criminals, the real shit of society are left to destroy lives with impunity.

The Cold Reality

Reading this article, I found this paragraph deeply troubling.

https://www.cbhs.com.au/mind-and-body/blog/leading-cause-of-death-for-men-in-Australia

"Depression and anxiety are not uncommon in men. Statistics show that suicide is the leading cause of death in Australian men aged between 15 and 44."

Not because of the statistic that suicide is the leading cause of death for men here because I had heard this elsewhere. But because of the first sentence. Because it shows a complete ignorance and an almost dismissal that men suffer. The paragraph starts with a trivialisation of men's mental health issues before, straight away, giving us the cold reality that men in their prime kill themselves more than any other cause of death.

It's like this first sentence was worthy of adding into the article to educate the reader. Oh, by the way, did you know that depression and anxiety was not uncommon in suicidal men?

It's all about luck

 So this is the millionth article on the 'luck' of Earth being habitable. Yes. We get it. All of us have won the cosmic lottery of being born on a planet that is a) conducive to life, and b) hasn't had a gamma-ray burst targeted at it or a life-ending event like the Yellowstone caldera exploding or a million other events that could wipe-out life.

Yes. It's all luck. We are living on this heaven of a planet because for the last few million years nothing dramatic has happened to us.

But the dinosaurs would have a different view. Their world came to an end when the Earth was hit with something big enough to destroy the big species of that time and the little insignificant animals called mammals, these inconsequential animals suddenly became top dog.

Exactly the same that I am the son of a father that crossed the Atlantic Ocean dozens of times in World War 2 ship convoys and managed to escape alive unlike many thousands of his peers. The fact that some German U-boat captain decided to target some other ship besides my father's ship is the reason that I am here.

https://www.sciencealert.com/are-we-just-lucky-that-earth-has-stayed-habitable-for-billions-of-years

At the trial of God

 “At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?” ― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

The autistic and 'reading others'

One generalisation of the autistic is that they have trouble 'reading' others, ie. that they miss the facial gestures, voice inflections, body mannerisms, etc necessary to fully understand what this other person is really communicating. As the NTs are purported to be able to do.

But I think this is very inaccurate. What the issue is, I think, is that during conversations the autist can be primarily introspective; they are thinking about themselves, possibly past history/insecurities, and most probably, an unwillingness to even try.

And I think this can be unfair to oneself because some of the common attributes of an autist: single-mindedness, logical reasoning, out-of-the-box thinking could be invaluable in the reading of others.

So try this next time you have an important conversation with someone; turn your focus outward to use the full-range of your attributes to see if you can read this person and to see 'in-between the lines' as to what they are really communicating to you. I think it would be a interesting experiment for autists and it could lead to a greater understanding of not only others but yourself.

Money is free for the government

 "They didn’t have to finance the tax cuts. They just made a political decision. They can do the same with building an economy from the ground up. Healthcare as a right. Housing and education for all. The right to a job. And they can start with making sure no one is going hungry."

This is a post about the fact that the only legislative thing Trump did in his 4 years was to sign a tax-cut for the wealthy. And this poster is exactly right. The government has the ability to create debt in its own dollars. Well if it is in it's own dollars... is it really debt? No. How can a govt be indebted with its own dollars? It can't.

The only problem is inflation. By printing money our dollar may be increasingly worthless. But what happens if the govt borrows money for infrastructure, or science, or healthcare for the disabled? Do you think that the financial markets would have an issue with that? Not in your lifetime.

If I can take all of macro-economics into a single sentence I would say: money is free for the govt.