“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina… “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” … __ SciAm

The US adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s were the smartest of the smart, with mathematical and verbal-reasoning skills within the top 1% of the population. __ http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-genetics-of-genius-1.12985

Societies Neglect Their High Intelligence Children at Their Own Risk

In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion. England decided in 2010 to scrap the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, and redirected funds towards an effort to get more poor students into leading universities. __ Raising a Genius

For the past 45 years, a US research study has been tracking the life and career trajectories of “supersmart” children — those who tested in the top 0.5% on the spatial ability portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in the US. The researchers have discovered that these small cohorts of youth have — over time — achieved career results far out of proportion to their numbers.

In 1976, [Julian] Stanley started to test … a sample of 563 13-year-olds who scored in the top 0.5% on the SAT … on spatial ability—the capacity to understand and remember spatial relationships between objects. Tests for spatial ability might include matching objects that are seen from different perspectives, determining which cross-section will result when an object is cut in certain ways, or estimating water levels on tilted bottles of various shapes. … Follow-up surveys—at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48—backed up his hunch. A 2013 analysis found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% of the variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%. The findings, which dovetail with those of other recent studies, suggest that spatial ability plays a major part in creativity and technical innovation. “I think it may be the largest known untapped source of human potential,” says Lubinski, who adds that students who are only marginally impressive in mathematics or verbal ability but high in spatial ability often make exceptional engineers, architects and surgeons . “And yet, no admissions directors I know of are looking at this, and it’s generally overlooked in school-based assessments.” __ Mathematically Precocious Youth Control Future

Intelligence and spatial abilities are crucial factors in high level success, but there is much more involved, including many of the pre-frontal executive functions:

“We don’t know why, even at the high end, some people will do well and others won’t,” says Douglas Detterman, a psychologist who studies cognitive ability at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “Intelligence won’t account for all the differences between people; motivation, personality factors, how hard you work and other things are important.” … The Munich Longitudinal Study of Giftedness, which started tracking 26,000 gifted students in the mid-1980s, found that cognitive factors were the most predictive, but that some personal traits—such as motivation, curiosity and ability to cope with stress—had a limited influence on performance. Environmental factors, such as family, school and peers, also had an impact. __ 45 Years of Mathematically Premature Youth

Most of these factors are either controlled or highly influenced by the child’s genes. Family environment is of course closely related to genetic factors, but choice of school and close peers is also closely controlled by the child’s genes and the genes of the child’s family.

Even in the US, the Establishment Favours Spending Most Resources on Low Achievers

“The education community is still resistant to this message,” says David Geary, a cognitive developmental psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who specializes in mathematical learning. “There’s a general belief that kids who have advantages, cognitive or otherwise, shouldn’t be given extra encouragement; that we should focus more on lower-performing kids.” __ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-raise-a-genius-lessons-from-a-45-year-study-of-supersmart-children/

The modern tendency to devote most of society’s resources to persons of low potential — rather than spending small but important quantities of resources to help persons develop their innate high potential — is self-defeating, if not suicidal. This misallocation of resources is a leftist conceit of powerful elitists, who wish to spend “other people’s money” on ideological crusades, rather than to allow “other people” to learn to spend their own money to build better futures for themselves and their own families.

A forward thinking society of vision would allow more resources to be devoted to developing the innate abilities of children who have the potential to build a more expansive and abundant future:

… these gifted students, the ‘mathletes’ of the world, can shape the future. “When you look at the issues facing society now—whether it’s health care, climate change, terrorism, energy—these are the kids who have the most potential to solve these problems,” says Lubinski. “These are the kids we’d do well to bet on.” __ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-raise-a-genius-lessons-from-a-45-year-study-of-supersmart-children/

Innately gifted children tend to become mentally stunted over time, if their learning options are forcefully limited to “the lowest common denominator,” or to the levels of less gifted and ambitious children.

Project to identify links between genes and intelligence uses DNA samples from SMPY participants

Boys are substantially over-represented among the mathematically and spatially precocious, compared to girls. At the very highest levels of aptitude, there are no girls at all.

Special note:

The title of this post is meant to be provocative and hyperbolic. In reality, supersmart people do not “control” the future, they tend to help provide a general “shape” within which the future evolves. If supersmart people are enmeshed within a dysfunctional system, their output is likely to perpetuate the dysfunction of the system.

The future is subject to large numbers of unpredictable events and “under the radar trends.” A new and unforeseen ice age of widespread glaciation, for example, could render most of the world’s temperate breadbaskets non-arable in just a decade or two. In such an event, most humans would die, because the world’s elites had been focusing on crusades of social justice rather than working out ways of making human societies more resilient and resistant to the inevitable cataclysms that have always come along.

Everything you think you know, just ain’t so. That tends to be the case for most supersmart people as well as all others. Avoid ideology. Avoid crusades. Avoid grand conspiracies and steamrolling bandwagons. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Dangerous Children are always in short supply.