PDD-NOS/AS vs. Giftedness?

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Just an interesting article and perspective RE "intelligence"

http://answers.learninginfo.org/iq-scores.htm

I find it interesting that there are so many people saying they are "gifted" and also "low functioning" This article talks about being careful to pin too much weight on the IQ scores alone.

My psychologist used my job title/role, hobbies, my salary/net worth, my accomplishment and other factors in determining my IQ and subsequently my "gifted" label. He says that is the way he does it for court cases as well. IQ is MUCH more than just the test scores.

Another post by mistake, sorry

I agree with all the posts saying being gifted or uber smart can be mostly about ego. I've seen plenty of people claim they are geniuses, but, as Wendy once asked, where's the beef?

I'd rather be shown the beef patty than told about it.

Um, since when did "high functioning autism" become in between the "autistic brain" and the "normal brain"???? "High functioning autism" is still simply diagnosed as "autistic disorder" same as any other made-up functioning label. (I hate functioning labels.)

My IQ was in the gifted range when tested at an age where most people don't know how to read, and I had hyperlexia (and this despite massive deficits in other areas, many of which I have a tape of the tester saying she outright ignored because of my high scores in a few areas). By the time I was 22 I was at the edge of some current definitions of the borderline range. (And what used to be MR before they moved it down a few notches in IQ.) In between there, it was.. well.. in between those ranges. It only tested in the gifted range once in my life, and never has again. (And it wasn't on the lower edge of it either.) It's quite possible that now that I'm 30 it's gone down even further. I haven't had a mandatory testing since then so I don't know, but the trend throughout my life is such that an acquaintance started joking about wanting me to live long enough for it to "go negative". (Yes, I know that won't happen.)

I strongly dislike IQ tests, and categories that are determined by them. And I can't stand the intellectual elitism promoted by many "gifted" programs. My areas of weakness meant that I struggled to keep up with even the typical kids, let alone the advanced ones, in many areas, but was pushed ahead and ahead and ahead (they thought I was underachieving from "boredom", and I lacked the language comprehension to do anything but repeat what they said to me) until I finally cracked and attempted suicide. I was nothing like the other kids in the gifted programs, except for a few who were probably autistic, and even they lacked some of the extreme deficits I had, especially in the area of language comprehension which has always been one of my weakest points despite my ability to "fake it" through rote memorization and finding sensory patterns to match my replies to.

(Note that even many people with very severe receptive aphasia have been said to be able to fake comprehension so well that few people, even some trained professionals, would recognize a problem. I'm usually able to see through such things, including with a staff person at the local DD agency who had Alzheimer's and was hiding it from the company he worked for. When I told them he had a severe receptive language impairment as well as other severe cognitive impairments and begged them to test him before sending him out to dispense medication to people (he'd made a mistake that would have killed me if nobody had been there to stop him), they thought I was insulting him. A year later they found out the truth. I can often spot it because I used and often continue to use all the same tricks. And other people who use those tricks can still spot it in me even though my receptive language has improved to the point where my expressive language actually means something a lot of the time.)

And certainly none of them lived in the universe I seemed to live in, where words and ideas and stuff just sort of soared by overhead and the world was about sensory experience and pattern. I'm starting to think it must be somewhat rare for autistic people like me who still live in that world past early childhood, to gain this ability to climb out of it long enough to explain things about it. Because the ones I meet online are few and far between, yet among other autistic people in other situations I've met more of them, usually without having had that "click" moment that allowed them to use language for something. (Some of those who can't use language for something can pass as being able to, as I did, and others don't seem to use language expressively much at all.)

I suspect that's one reason that I've always (whether currently considered "gifted" or not) found it easier to relate to people labeled "ret*d" than people labeled "gifted" overall -- there's more of them that live in that same realm that I live in, than there are people who were labeled "gifted" who live in same. (Despite the fact that there are plenty of us who got labeled gifted, there are just way way way more who got labeled "ret*d" or close to it. And then there's plenty like me who got labeled "gifted" once and never again, often due to a single skill or set of skills that looked really impressive at a young age, and then developed much more slowly than most people who have to work to get there develop, and then eventually get surpassed... etc.)

Another thing I hate: People telling me "That's not your real IQ." As if IQ is something inside a person's mind. Like a real attribute like height or weight. IQ just means how you performed on your last IQ test. It doesn't mean something inside you. It doesn't mean what you're good at or bad at in real life. And when people say I'm "smarter than that" it seems like an insult. Like people with an IQ below a certain amount can't be smart, whatever smart means to that person. Someone on here once said that they were not surprised that I once tested gifted, because I... made sense, or something like that. I found that really insulting too. I know lots of people who make lots of sense who have always tested "ret*d" or "borderline". Some of them have multiple degrees, jobs, books written, etc. which is more than I can say for myself. To say that they are "really gifted" then seems really insulting, like saying "If you really got the score you got then you'd never have been able to achieve..." Just yuck.

Then again, many of the people who say things like that are the same ones who think they can't possibly have an "intelligent" conversation with anyone of even average IQ, let alone below average. They probably talk to lots of people with average or below IQs all the time and just never think to notice because they're so sure they can't communicate with such people. Just like people who think they've never met a gay person, or an autistic person, because they just assume everyone is straight or nonautistic until proven otherwise. There are people with IQs in the 40s who can pass as nondisabled, hello!?! (As well as people with IQs from 130-170 who can pass as being in the severe/profound range due to how they look.)