[tlug] [OT] Raising a geek (was: Interesting Hans Reiser article in Wired)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:

 > I wish someone had told me, when I was five years old, that life was a
 > game that I had to play so that I could win, i.e. get what I wanted
 > out of life, which is simply access to knowledge.

*My* mother was a history major, and that's what she told me.  It
mostly worked, though nothing will work entirely.  This is definitely
a good thing to tell any kid, I think, but one of the blessings you
may receive, Shawn, is that you may be able to see him understand and
act on it even at this age.  Most kids simply aren't equipped to
understand it until much later.

The other very good luck I had was to run into somebody very similar
to me at the age of 7.  He was much more geeky (which was encouraged
by his parents), and his mother once told me that if it hadn't been
for me they would have gone the home schooling route.  (He left junior
high school to take courses at the liberal arts college his mother was
teaching at, and IIRC never graduated from anything until he got his
PhD, so I guess she meant it.)

 > [Tell him] that other kids who are not themselves different are
 > jealous of his intelligence.

No, they're not.  They may envy his grades (or the preschool
equivalent), but I doubt they envy him.  The point is that unless a
person is already different in this way, they simply don't understand
it well enough to want more of it than they already have.  It's a
qualitative difference, not a quantitative one.

So don't ever tell him that.  There are two ways it can turn out, IMO,
both bad: (1) he'll realize they aren't jealous of *him* though they
may want his grades or whatever, and lose some trust in your judgment,
or (2) he'll believe you, and attribute such twisted motives to people
inappropriately, leading to a cascade of rationalizations about how
they are lying to themselves.

The important thing IMO and in my personal experience[1] is to make
sure he knows you love him, and that you want to share *his* world
with him (not *your* world with him, at least not until he's sure you
care about his world).  If you can find other kids like him, so that
they can share their worlds with each other, that would be good too.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Although as far as I know I was merely smart (too smart for my
own good often enough), not a genius.