Terminology and myths

Thursday, June 9th, 2022

Note: I’ll attempt to describe the situation in France, at least how I’ve perceived it for the past few years.

The four main terms

Surdoué. Means something like over-gifted or hyper-gifted? It’s the most common term used in general for gifted adults. Although it’s been getting more unpopular, because, it seems, literally everyone hates it. Virtually everyone who starts discussing giftedness in France will start by stating how much they hate that one term.

EIP – Enfant Intellectuellement Précoce. Intellectually Precocious Child. The problem with this one is kind of obvious: precocious is a terrible word, it implies some advance in intellectual development, that can be caught up with. Besides, there’s “child” in the word. Would you call an 80-years-old “precocious”? what would that even mean? But the term is the one usually used by the French ministry of national education, and by schools in general.

Zèbre. Zebra. Coined by French psychologist Jeanne Siaud-Facchin (who I will henceforwarth refer to as JSF), in the early 2000s, for metaphorical reasons that don’t really make too much sense, but really because she needed a less controversial, less loaded euphemism (we all do). A cutesy word, often beloved by teenagers who struggle with the other ones, but kind of Problematic™ (seemingly it’s Appropriated from people with rare illnesses). A lot of resources about giftedness in France have ended up theming themselves after zebra patterns and the like.

HPI – Haut Potentiel Intellectuel. High Intellectual Potential. Yet another 3-letter acronym, yet another attempt to restart with a clean, non-loaded term. It didn’t last, of course, and this is by far the most popular term among those “in the know” in recent years (those not “in the know” use Surdoué). So it’s the term that’s been used for most of the recent discourse. And it’s also the term that’s been used as the title of TF1’s series (my current favorite series), featuring a highly gifted single mother who ends up working as a police consultant.

There have been many attempts to propose more words, but they didn’t take off.

The Myths.

Again, this is about the situation in France. I’ve decided to list four big categories in which I 

Myth one

I don’t feel like describing this one, because everyone knows about it. It’s a collection of the prejudices already embedded in society about smartasses, like the ones you get bullied for in school. There isn’t anything interesting to say about this one.

Myth two

The Hardlickses one, the things angry teachers near retirement age who think they’ve only seen one gifted kid in a 30-year career believe and say out loud. It’s, you know, people who rant about how “all gifted kids are just annoying ill-raised brats” (and I sure hope so, I hope they get annoyed), say the same about kids with ADHD and even more so about 2E both-gifted-and-ADHD kids (because you know, being *both* is such an aberration), more broadly it’s all the talking points exclusively used by adults, about children (2 doesn’t care for gifted adults), and all are extremely salty. It really comes off as if these adults’ egos were injured by the thought of a smart child. In fact, they hardly talk at all about the children themselves, and almost exclusively about their parents. 

No one here spends any real time debunking 2, despite its omnipresence in the media. It’s the angle main news outlets chose to cover every time. 2 is also really popular among psychanalysts (psychanalysis is still awfully popular in France), such as the very mediatized Caroline Goldman, who loves to quote people who debunk 3 on scientific grounds in order to advance 2. I believe the reason of that popularity among psychanalysts is also that whole focus on the parents. You know, Freudian ideas are what they are.

Myth three

This one, on the other hand, focuses on gifted adults, and underlies the French giftedness self-help book craze. It’s generally agreed to have been kickstarted by JSF’s 2008 book (2008? That late? I was surprised learning this) Trop intelligent pour être heureux? (TIPÊH, Too smart to be happy?) (Come on, even I noticed the question mark).

JSF herself didn’t take or originate most of the positions that are typical of 3 nowadays, and when I listen to her on the subject, she seems to be a really reasoned person. (Didn’t finish listening to her intervention on the intensément podcast, but nothing she said there shocked me. Most notably, she never tried to redefine giftedness.) But every then and now I hear that she’s diagnosed people with smart after seeing them in a singing contest on TV, or that she uses really weird methods to evaluate people. I’m not sure what stance to take, really. At least she’s not a psychanalyst.

Either way, TIPÊH is generally agreed to be filled with Barnum-effect texts, that is, sufficiently vague and general that anyone can identify with them, but sufficiently specific that you’ll feel like they’re tailored to you specifically. As a result, a lot of people ended up thinking they were gifted after reading it, which kickstarted the self-help boom I’ve mentioned. 

Core tenets of the milder form of myth 3 include the hypersensitivity and inherent emotional goodness of gifted people, a complete qualitative otherness of their way of thinking due to arborescent thought (come on guys even then I got that arborescent thought was a metaphor at the time), and a view of giftedness as a curse, a disorder even that could prevent one from reaching happiness (I’ve never heard anyone who believed that last part to be true though, but people focus a lot on it).

In its more intense form, you get RH (I won’t write her full name ‘cause she has an history of suing people for defamation, but basically she’s a youtube coach)’s new-agey claims, according to which, gifted people can be separated into 3 groups: IQs (yes, the IQ people), very smart but not really gifted because they have a “violent intelligence” and are basically toxic and dangerous; HPIs, also high IQ people but emotionally repressed (because you can’t have both thoughts and feelings!), who need to feed themselves a lot intellectually, and are set to implode emotionally after high school; and HPEs (who have a high Emotional quotient), who are soft poets and are directly connected to spirits! Source: BLOG Les Tribulations d'un Petit Zèbre » Surdoués HPI, HPE… d’inquiétantes dérives (les-tribulations-dun-petit-zebre.com)

Myth four

This one is a very recent phenomenon, I can’t find any trace of the underlying ideas prior to 2018. 2 lives in the printed press, and 3 lives on facebook; 4 lives on twitter. Specifically, among the picrew profile pictures.

4’s popularity was kickstarted by French youtuber Alistair H. Paradoxæ’s 2019 video on the subject. Alistair himself doesn’t take most of the most extreme positions typical of 4, he never claimed all gifted people were secretly autistic for example. Overall, my stance on him is more or less the same as my stance on JSF: you don’t have to exemplify a movement to start it. 

In its milder form, 4 is a mild, lukewarm, social-media-friendly deconstruction of the concept of giftedness. It came from kids my age (or younger!) who weren’t too immersed in what they’re trying to debunk, and it shows. In its more extreme form, 4 is downright conspiratorial, and claims that gifted kids/adults were invented to erase autism, and that every gifted person is actually not gifted, autistic, and in denial. 4-centrists believe gifted people can also have ADHD, in which case they’re none of the other things (because you can’t be two of those things, don’t you know?). A core talking point of 4 is that “HPI” is not in the DSM-5, but why expect it to be there?! It’s not a disorder!

Is the milder form of 4 even worth criticizing? I’d say yes, be it only because most of the kids passing 4 around are 2E. Twice exceptional. Both gifted and neurodivergent. (I don’t group giftedness into neurodivergences, even though some do, because neurodivergence to me is a really specific term about a specific set of disorders). Twice-exceptionality is a tricky subject, and I’m probably not the best qualified person to discuss it, but basically, twice-exceptional people can be hard to diagnose because the two things that they are kind of compensate, for a while, as seen from the outside. If you’re interested in that look up “twice-exceptional”, there’s lots of things to read online honestly. 

Notice a pattern? A matchup between the 4 terms and the 4 myths? Maybe I’m doing it on purpose. Maybe I’m doing the Aristotle thing and claiming things I just made up are true. 

I focus a disproportionate amount of my time to hating on 4 and 2, maybe because they irk me more personally, and also because 3 and 1 have been debunked to the moon and back. Which brings us to: the Zebra war.

A loose recounting of the events of the Zebra war.

I borrowed the name for this from OverThe130. The author replaced her immediate (though still just) reaction to the drama by a more well-researched analysis of the underlying questions, which is great, but is not what I’m trying to retell here.

In February of 2017, researcher Franck Ramus, mathematician and psychologist Nicolas Gauvrit, and psychology and education degree-holder Nadine Kirchgessner published this article, which was basically a due debunking of many ideas from the milder form of 3. In particular, it focused on debunking the often repeated, but not really corroborated (not at all, in fact), idea that a third (sometimes two third) (sometimes three quarters) of gifted kids would be doomed to fail school. (bleak)

I don’t have much to say about Gauvrit and Ramus, they do their job well I’d say.

EDIT: wait, I did have some qualms with the study presented in the article, this video sums up them well (in french).

Kirchgessner, though, is callout culture personified. She’s a blogger, and for the past 4 years her blog has been virtually nothing but callout posts. She has had very public fallouts with virtually every big-name author, psychologist, researcher or literal nobody who ever touched on the subject of gifted people (including Gauvrit), and every time wrote a whole article accusing them of disinformation and petty facebook drama. 

The part of the debunking paper that got controversial (and that I believe got rejected by the journal they were aiming for) is the very on-brand annex, written by Kirchgessner, a table of People That Have Been Wrong. Often, it’s journalists repeating the 1/3 or 2/3 or ¾ number, but the reasons for inclusion are vast and inscrutable, and there’s a high schooler being called out in there for describing his feelings with clumsy words... 

EDIT 13/01/24. I have learnt today of Nadine Kirchgessner's untimely passing. I regret being perhaps a bit harsh when i wrote this a while ago. May she rest in peace, and my condolences to her family.

Turns out this is going to be, for now, only a loose recounting of the starting events. Because I don’t recall everything that well, and basically what happened next is that JSF started beefing with the authors, and then everyone started beefing with everyone, and a broad division into two “sides” (which hardly made any sense at all, people were often catalogued as belonging to one side or the other for at most one thing). The “facts” side and the “feelings” side, how neat. And people who were proponents of 2 and soon 4, psychanalysts, and people arguing for completely unsourced stuff (so long that this was new stuff and not JSF’s stuff) got put on the “facts” side for a while (Kirchgessner called out the psychanalysts at least), while anyone who attempted to discuss giftedness from their own perspective/with their own words was automatically on the “feelings” side for a while, even if they didn’t affirm anything non-factual. And the moves got dirty and dirtier during 2017-2019.

And by people, I mean virtually everyone involved (why do you think no one’s talking online about it anymore). To the point that giving any testimony at all is tricky.n™. 

I can’t prove any of that it’s just an impression I get, the reason I waited that long to write. The reason I feel safer in English, too. I might write translations someday.

My take on terminology. 

I’m not in school anymore. I’m way too old to call myself precocious. High potential is a really stupid term, I don’t get why it took off. What does it even mean? It just feels like a way to put more pressure on people’s shoulders.

Besides, HPI is the preferred term for 4-discourse, which is a dumpster fire. Thankfully, HPI is also the name of TF1’s (really good!) TV series, which is drowning out the noise from the discourse. If we could move on from the word HPI so it could unambiguously refer to the series I’d be happy. (It's airing tonight can't wait.)

Surdoué. Everyone hates it. Performatively? It feels like you have to hate it, but compared to the aforementioned two, it’s not even that bad. It kind of means what it needs to mean – you don’t have a gift that other people don’t have, like with the English word gifted, but you have slightly more gift than other people. I think that’s, ultimately, an okay way to put it. Besides, everyone knows what it means.

I’ve come to like Zebra again too, for the opposite reason. I’m a contrarian, of course, but also, no one knows what Zebra means. It’s not super mediatized, and if you don’t know, you don’t know. It means nothing, it’s a nice euphemism that comes with its associated patterns. Which can be nice. It fills a niche. Never mind that it’s problematic. I still like it.

Thomas