Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein's money - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/11/20860717/mit-media-lab-joi-ito-epstein <comment><USER2> Normally, organizations accept anonymous donations from people because of modesty or privacy -- the donors don't want their name on the wall or in the press. They have a mechanism for that called "anonymous donations", but the mechanism isn't meant to guarantee that no reputational benefits at all can be gotten by the donor.

In this case, several people knew he had donated to MIT and he invited professors to his dinners to show off to his friends, so there were substantial reputational benefits.

Lessig's utilitarian calculus doesn't convince me it's OK to take money anonymously from villains.

<comment><USER3> right. the veil of anonymity was torn apart in this case. this doesn't seem like a robust test case for Lessig's theory of anonymity.

<comment><USER2> I think no theory of anonymity works. A villain isn't going to keep their pinky-promise to not tell everyone that your prestigious institution took their money.

<comment><USER4> It's not particularly difficult to make a donation anonymous in a way that the recipient genuinely doesn't know who made the donation. Just have a neutral third party handle it. This could be a donor advised fund or a trustee, for example. I suspect this isn't particularly rare.

<comment><USER5> But then the donor tells the recipient that they are the ones who donated all of that money. And so they get all of the benefits anyway.

<comment><USER4> I just gave you $10M. Can I have a private dinner?

Do you believe me? If an anonymous donation is done with some degree of care, you have no way to verify my claim.

<comment><USER6> If a $10M anonymous donation had just showed up in my account and I hadn't told anyone, then yes I would be inclined to believe you.

<comment><USER4> That would be part of handling anonymous donations sensibly. The transaction should be between the development office and whatever trustee or foundation gives the gift. The ultimate beneficiary shouldn't be notified of the donation until, say, the end of the fiscal year, at which point all anonymous donations are aggregated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article seems to imply at points that power and influence won't accrue much as a result of anonymous donations, which I think is wrong. You lose the public prestige, sure, but the powerful people behind the scenes know you donated, as with Media Lab, and that power and influence isn't much diminished. In fact it's the behind the scenes type of power that can be the most effective and, as we see with Epstein, most corrosive.

Anonymity may shield the recipient from reputational damage of associating with a bad actor, but doesn't take away all of the benefits to the donor.

<comment> seph-reed I saw another article like this about MIT recently. I have a really hard time taking the discussion as a whole seriously, because it kind of feels like bike-shedding as compared to "How are we going to grill some of the people who really, actually deserve it?"

On the list of priorities, reprimanding labs and schools for taking donations seems like it should not be coming first.

<comment><USER8> The response needn't be serialized. That is to say, multiple actions may be popped off the priority queue at once, without waiting for the others to finish.

See also: the reason we are talking about this at all when there are still hungry children in the world.

<comment> seph-reed Hungry people are a growing and incredibly complex problem. Punishing even a single one of Epstein's clients seems much more manageable. And if we're going for impact-to-effort ratio queuing, this is likely a bit more of a gimme than world hunger.

<comment><USER8> The point is that society can address more than one problem (or more than one aspect of a problem) at once. The reasoning I responded to seemed to be following the tired cliche of dismissing any problem as not worthy of attention because children are still starving.

<comment> seph-reed > The point is that society can address more than one problem

Can it? It often seems like nothing really ever get addressed fully, while there is a barrage of half baked debates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You know what you should _not_ do if you really believe "the money gets put to a better use, and they don't get to accumulate prestige or connections from the donation because the public wouldn't know about it."

> The financier would meet with faculty members, apparently to allow him to > give input on projects…

(from the New Yorker article).

Also, if you know you are violating the policies of MIT's central fund-raising office, and you are taking active steps to HIDE it from them... you can say you just had a different philosophy of philanthropy than them, and this was so important to you that you were willing to violate MIT's policies and risk whatever consequences if found out...

...but come on, we all know it's just plain greed.

I don't think these are sincere philosophical beliefs about philanthropy, I think they are just the rationalizations that the powerful and greedy tell themselves to avoid admitting it's just about power and greed.

<comment><USER10> The evidence it was all about greed is that Epstein gave Ito's investment funds $1.6 million, more than TWICE the amount of money than the chump change Epstein gave to Media Lab in exchange for highly discounted reputation and a cast of academic celebrities to parade at his parties.

Epstein bribed Ito with more than 200% commission to make the other cash-for- reputation deal, which they both knew they must covered up at all cost, because Media Lab would pay with its reputation when discovered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a much better article and interview with the whistleblower:

[https://www.philanthropy.com/article/whistle-blower-tells- th...](https://www.philanthropy.com/article/whistle-blower-tells-the/247113)

Media Lab knew exactly what they were doing.

<comment><USER12> as did MIT if we are to believe ito:

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/10/former-mit- medi...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/10/former-mit-media-lab- fund-raiser-says-was-following-university- rules/OnnyCWT9t0I5AQW6OeeXwN/story.html)

<comment><USER10> I wonder if Epstein ever sponsored any cryogenics research at MIT?

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey- epstein-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/business/jeffrey-epstein- eugenics.html)

"Mr. Epstein told this person that he wanted his head and penis to be frozen."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of all the people to take Epstein's money or endorse him with their reputation, of all the slimy people, of all the career politicians, we've decided to mainly just fixate and ruin the life of one well-intentioned nerd who wanted to use the money for research.

I hope everyone feels fuzzy and warm with their self-righteousness. Evil is defeated once more -- and you all helped -- with your brave internet shaming and directed anger. Truly, we live in marvelous times, where we can all gather together online and use the decentralized social networks to conspire and destroy.

Of course, no one here could hope to destroy those who are truly powerful and deserving, so instead every once in a while perhaps we can pick off one of the weaker ones.

But he deserved it! And that's why we write and focus on it, right? What else do people deserve? What else could we have done with this time and energy? Anything greater? If so, why didn't we? Perhaps it's because destroying people feels good -- it's fun.

<comment><USER14> When Ito turns out to have covered for some of Epstein's "customers", or to have been one himself, will you stop defending him?

<comment><USER13> Respond to this comment if that happens, and I'll stop defending him and admit everyone was right, and I was totally wrong. I feel like there is only about a 5% chance that's the case, but who knows.

<comment><USER15> He took money from this guy after going to prison for rape, attended multiple events where underage prostitutes almost certainly were present... where do you get 95% confidence that his intentions were good?

Here's a question: if we had a list of everyone who ever attended one of those parties, would you estimate 95% of them had good intentions?

<comment><USER13> I think this is some special pleading though, since you could make similar statements about any of the many many high-profile people who commingled with Epstein. Is it all one large conspiracy? Or were they all just chumps?

<comment><USER15> I feel quite certain there is a large conspiracy? Do you have some doubt that he was at the center of a large conspiracy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "If a donation is anonymous, the theory goes — that is, anonymous to the public — the giver cannot accrue any prestige or social capital from it."

OTOH, it at least helps the anonymous 'givers' to feel a bit consecrated about their nefarious actions. Also it helps the prestigious 'takers', capable of ignoring the smell of it, to cloak their taint.

The rationalization that 'it's okay if noone knows' seems more like something for, say, a bank than for an academic institution. And the smell hangs around. It might lead to things like, say, rigged admissions standards. Or the unfortunate suicides of bright young stars.

</comment><comment><USER17> What Lessig's piece seemed to completely ignore (and what this seems to touch on but never quite state plainly) is that under the conditions of anonymity where someone can't use their donations to launder their reputation, someone like Epstein would have never made the sort of donation he made. The only thing that anonymity did here was to shield MIT from accountability; Epstein still got the benefits of such a large donation.

</comment><comment><USER18> Cognitive dissonance at work. I really want to take the money, so I will come up with all sorts of rationalizations, and subconsciously I will adopt those beliefs strongly, because the alternative is not being able to face myself in the mirror.

</comment><comment><USER19> The question I have is this: how did Jeffrey Epstein get his money in the first place? And once he acquired it, how did people accept it from him knowing his behavior?

</comment><comment><USER20> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

-Upton Sinclair

I think most people from the outside could see the problem in accepting donations from Epstein. People at the Media Lab (with some very notable exceptions) allowed their desire for money to get the better of their judgment.

<comment><USER10> Arwa Michelle Mboya is an early and very notable exception: an example of a person at the Media Lab with good judgement. She called for his resignation on August 23, and wrote the guest column "Why Joi Ito needs to resign" published in The Tech on August 29.

Arwa Michelle Mboya - @RuMboya: The MIT @medialab was nicknamed "The Future Factory" by @60Minutes . We are supposed to reflect the future, not just of technology but of society. I'm fighting for the #FutureOfWomen when I call for Joi Ito's resignation. 1:38 AM · Aug 23, 2019

[https://twitter.com/RuMboya/status/1164683383815004160](https://twitter.com/RuMboya/status/1164683383815004160)

OPINION GUEST COLUMN: Why Joi Ito needs to resign. We need to set a standard that ensures a safe future for women where money will never be seen as more valuable than their lives. By Arwa Mboya, Aug. 29, 2019.

[https://thetech.com/2019/08/29/joi-ito-needs-to- resign](https://thetech.com/2019/08/29/joi-ito-needs-to-resign)

MIT Media Lab People: Arwa Michelle Mboya. Civic Media.

[https://www.media.mit.edu/people/mboya/overview/](https://www.media.mit.edu/people/mboya/overview/)

How Grad Student Arwa Mboya Helped Bring Down The Epstein Coverup At The MIT Media Lab

[https://moguldom.com/225575/how-grad-student-arwa-mboya- help...](https://moguldom.com/225575/how-grad-student-arwa-mboya-helped-bring- down-the-epstein-coverup-at-the-mit-media-lab/)

Ito's resignation was necessary for the greater good, Mboya suggested. "This is not an MIT issue, and this is not a Joi Ito issue. This is an international issue where a global network of powerful individuals have used their influence to secure their privilege at the expense of women's bodies and lives."

After Ito resigned, Mboyo told The Washongton Post, "I feel vindicated, like I'm not crazy." Ito is to blame for his actions, but others are to blame for allowing his actions to continue, she wrote in the guest column.

[...]

"We have a bad history of forgiving talented men who wield power," Mboyo wrote. "If there is no accountability for the people who bolster men like Epstein, sexual violence against powerless people will continue."

Mboyo is from Kenya. "I'm a young black woman (running the risk of being called 'angry' or 'crazy' for speaking up)," she wrote. "On the ladder of power, I am on a very low rung. That said, I am educated, I am smart, and I have a voice … I at least have the power to advocate for the girls and women who couldn't speak out when they were raped and abused. I have the power to say no to a director who chose not only to ignore the accusations but to lie about his involvement as well. I can say that I am part of the #MeTooSTEM movement and will not be silent."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's an easy answer for this, although it's uncomfortable for the Epsteins of the world. Simply formalize the entire process. Have a dedicated system for handling not just Very Important People, but Very Rich Assholes. When VRAs want to give money, make it clear that the money will be marked as from "an anoymous piece of shit" rather than "a generous donor". When they want to walk around the lab, make it clear that they'll be wearing a nametag with "VRA" printed in big red letters.

Sure, take money from child slavers if you must, but don't glorify them or even give them the decency of polite society. Mark them for who they are, if you know it.

<comment><USER22> I like this sentiment, but the lab's behavior is antithetical to Lessig's argument. For unsavory benefactors there should be no tours, no VIP badges, no meetings with senior staff, no visits or honor of any kind. An invitation to the campus degrades the university's reputation. His presence in the lab is offensive to decent people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Then there is the whole question of whether Epstein was using his money to _direct research_ specifically to junk science like Euugenics.

I think Sarah Taber said it best though.

""" I think the best lens to understand what was going on here isn't just "reputation laundering."

The Media Lab's leadership catered to a superiority fetish in exchange for cash.

That's sex work """

[https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117193193908069171...](https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1171931939080691713)

<comment><USER8> Dang, I missed that whole 'subplot' about the food computer scam: [https://gizmodo.com/mit-built-a-theranos-for- plants-18379682...](https://gizmodo.com/mit-built-a-theranos-for- plants-1837968240)

What a weird lab.

<comment> xkcd-sucks It's a department, and it's dedicated to the creation of media. Doing "cool nerd stuff" is strictly to support that mission.

Very postmodern and advanced if you think about it-- Most actual scientists are measured by how they produce papers (e.g. media). Which is also how the "replication crisis" and "p hacking" came to be. The Media Lab just recognizes it explicitly

<comment><USER8> So their objective was to create a media splash about 'food computers', rather than to actually advance ag technology? That somehow seems even weirder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nobody should be trying to cover for the Media Lab in any way or form. If you're a professional and you take money in this way you are complicit, period.

An article claiming Epstein was a victim because pedophiles and rapists are "victims" would have been less vapid than what Vox focuses on in this article.

<comment><USER25> Hey! I'm the article author, and I didn't write about what the Media Lab was thinking to give them "cover". As I put it in the article, the Media Lab's actions were so horrific that it brings into question the whole philosophy behind anonymous donations. So why take a close look at their justifications? Well, a couple reasons. Firstly, I think it's interesting when smart people argue themselves into incredibly bad decisions that anyone could've warned them against. It's an easy failure mode to fall into, and looking in gruesome detail at some cases where other people fell into it has taught me a lot about how these failures happen.

Secondly, I think that condemnation hits harder when it's the result of sincere engagement with someone's justifications. Yep, I listened to you when you said why you did it. And you were wrong. It's not always worth taking that step, of course, but in a big case like this, I think it is.

<comment><USER26> I think the point for this particular case, which you did allude to, is that there was nothing anonymous about the relationship. Everyone knew about it, some of them implicated directly in the actual court case (Minsky). This is more about a completely corrupt and toxic culture at Media Lab. It would have been more interesting to look deeper into Joi Ito for example and the posturing of several key players when exposed, than wax poetic about the blanket of anonymity.

<comment><USER27> How do you know that culture inside Media Lab was "completely corrupt and toxic"? From my experience, it was (is?) a super cool place and most researchers didn't have any clue what was going on with the funding. I bet there are many universities where revolts would happen if true donors and their actions were revealed. You even have whole famous universities named after robber barons.

<comment><USER20> > a super cool place and most researchers didn't have any clue what was going > on with the funding.

I don't know. I think witnessing the lab director giving tours to an old man accompanied by very young foreign women who raise suspicions that they might be victims of human trafficking, should make people at least consider that there is something shady going on with the funding.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Existential Depression in Gifted Children - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10269.aspx <comment><USER3> I cried a little.

I'm 18 and since 3rd grade I was in a special class for gifted children. I know this feeling so well, from my experience and from those of my classmates and friends, it literally hurts.

I'm no psychiatrist but from my nonobjective personal experience depression in gifted children and your regular "normal" teenage depression are completely different, in symptoms as well as in cause, which I think the article illustrates nicely.

I think the people criticizing the article for focusing on children and on gifted children specifically don't understand it's a whole different world. There are whole fields of study in psychology, psychiatry, education studies and other fields that focus on gifted children because they need a completely different system to thrive. People, especially family and educators, need to know about this.

<comment><USER4> Just don't get too used to thinking being gifted is particularly rare and requires a different system to thrive. Many acquaintances of mine at a certain crimson ivy university grew up with similar notions, and got into a different kind of depression once being surrounded by other 'gifted' individuals - <USER2> to having the 'world view' they've internalized so far, around the notion of them being special, getting totally crushed. Many also got used to explaining away their flaws as somehow being related to them being brilliant. This notion of specialness being crushed, they also saw those thing for what they are - failings, i.e. that they fail to connect with young people their age due to poor social skills, and not due to them gifts; and this becomes obvious now that others around them are also smart, etc. They realized that even if you're 1/1000 this means Facebook could staff the entire company with even more gifted Americans, and you'd still not make it, and so on.

These people are also crushed to learn upon graduation that people don't automatically revel in their obvious greatness, and that they need to earn their place by actually delivering / 'executing' on some of that potential.

TL;DR: Smart teenagers tend to not realize they are still 99% teenager, 1% smart. That itself is a teenager like habit.

Humans have roughly similar meta-emotional makeups and thrive in environments that cater to this. Gifted or not, children and teenagers thrive where they can expand their social, intellectual, emotional, spiritual boundaries and capabilities in a trusting, safe, encouraging environment. Thus the 'system' is the same, the gifted merely require a different mix of 'content'. They may be advanced in certain ways but normal or behind in others.

<comment><USER3> I agree that the system makes us think we're a special little snowflake and I've had the whole "I'm not that special" crushing experience, but I do truly believe that gifted children need a different environment to thrive. I wouldn't have lasted long among my peers, socially and academically.

<comment><USER5> No doubt, but unfortunately it's probably not as simple as placing the 'gifted' ones in one room and the 'ungifted' ones in another. Surely its a spectrum?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The only two real issues I've got with this article are that it limits itself in scope to the "gifted" and that it limits itself to children.

As for the latter issue, I suspect that this may fit into a broader work or area that the author presumes readers are familiar with--these issues are certainly seen in teenagers and afterwards.

As for the first point, a bit of a cliche but still accurate is the saying "The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike"; at some level, everyone I've met sharp or dull, gifted or not has run up against some version of the four issues (death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness). It may take until middle age and a house and a picket fence and seventy grand in debt, but it hits eventually.

One of the best realizations I've come to is that _everyone_ , at some level or another, faces these problems in their own way and that I should try and respect their experience--because for them, their existential conflict is at least as severe as my own, their circumstances and stakes at least as dire.

What struck me as interesting was the author's specifically calling out touch as a mechanism for grounding and comfort--this struck a chord with me when I read it. It's part of the reason I have dogs: there is a very real touchable physical presence of pet, something to hold and hug and pet when you're mulling over some of the day's shittiness.

tl,dr; life's a bitch, get a dog.

<comment><USER7> _The only two real issues I 've got with this article are that it limits itself in scope to the "gifted" and that it limits itself to children._

I think that can be entirely attributed to where it is published -- the website of a 501(c)3 that solely focuses on "gifted children".

<comment><USER8> _> Such concerns are not too surprising in thoughtful adults who are going through mid-life crises. However, it is a matter of great concern when these existential questions are foremost in the mind of a twelve or fifteen year old. Such existential depressions deserve careful attention, since they can be precursors to suicide. _

This paragraph explains why it is relevant to focus on gifted children.

I can attest to that as I still have rather vivid memories of standing on the edge of the roof berating myself for not having the guts to actually jump.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I googled Dabrowski and Positive Disintegration Experience and was led to this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Disintegration](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Disintegration)

I found the following especially interesting:

 _Dąbrowski also described a group of people who display a different course: an individualized developmental pathway. These people break away from an automatic, rote, socialized view of life (which Dąbrowski called negative adjustment) and move into and through a series of personal disintegrations. Dąbrowski saw these disintegrations as a key element in the overall developmental process. Crises challenge our status quo and cause us to review our self, ideas, values, thoughts, ideals, etc. If development continues, one goes on to develop an individualized, conscious and critically evaluated hierarchical value structure (called positive adjustment). This hierarchy of values acts as a benchmark by which all things are now seen, and the higher values in our internal hierarchy come to direct our behavior (no longer based on external social mores). These higher, individual values characterize an eventual second integration reflecting individual autonomy and for Dąbrowski, mark the arrival of true human personality. At this level, each person develops his or her own vision of how life ought to be and lives it. This higher level is associated with strong individual approaches to problem solving and creativity. One 's talents and creativity are applied in the service of these higher individual values and visions of how life could be - how the world ought to be. The person expresses his or her "new" autonomous personality energetically through action, art, social change and so on._

</comment><comment><USER10> The book that taught me to spiritually make sense of a world that is a constant let down was "The Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov. The author wrote it in secret while living with totalitarianism and meaninglessness in Stalinist Russia.

If you're not in the mood for a book, there's a great mini-series adaptation that was produced in Russia in the 2000s that takes about a week to watch. It does an almost perfect job of reproducing the book. I don't think it's available online.

<comment><USER4> I've often thought that in a warped, twisted way totalitarianism gives meaning to life for certain people. If it opression is so intense to make life worthless, then one has a cause dearer than life itself - to fight this opression. This struggle itself is meaningful. Many 'hero' movies are structured in this way, the 'good guys' have a cause, usually around defeating some kind of evil, that gives them ultimate purpose.

Likewise, I've found friends with far worse actual problems in the developing world to be existentially happier. They derive great pleasure in being able to go to a rock concert, etc. The game dynamics still work for the majority. Lots of intermediary issues to overcome, bosses to beat. Threat of destruction (socially or economically) seems to be wonderfully stimulating. Game dynamics still work.

What I find far worse is the banality of the first world. That seems to evoke and ferment existential concerns. Kind of along the lines of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LeLZ2crZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LeLZ2crZE)

In a way, it is the problem one faces once more basic things are taken care of. Hard to focus on existential angst when hungry.

At the end of the day, even though the universe itself may be arbitrary and doomed, I found that the only things that infuse durable meaning into us as humans is our love for each other, our desire to understand this universe, and our appreciation of beauty in all its forms.

<comment><USER11> Man's Search for Meaning is about totalitarianism to the extreme; having no freedom except that in how you choose to react. The author was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp.

And about first world banality - the book of Ecclesiastes in the the bible addresses this also:

"I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my labor, and this was the reward for all my toil. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun."

I had the existential depressions when I was 19 - 24. I dropped out of college and all my parents knew to do (and did) was put me in a psych ward and 'treat' me with electroshock. That didn't work.

<comment><USER12> What worked then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Gifted children are intense? Has the author ever actually been around children? They're _all_ intense. That's the nature of children!

Of course, they may simply all be gifted until they're hammered into their little social boxes; I've often thought that. Some of us weirdos just can't be hammered as efficiently, or break before bending or something.

<comment><USER13> (Also, the guy in the picture is probably not depressed due to nihilism, but because he forgot to put a dropcloth down before painting - I know I've cursed myself for that one before.)

<comment><USER6> Perhaps a very subtle hint at the existential crises we all have of living with the corners we've painted ourselves into?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A somewhat different response is found in "The drama of the gifted child," which argues that gifted children, having been singled out for attention because of their impressive abilities, become dependent on validation from authority figures and then have trouble adapting to self-directed life as an adult: [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465016901](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465016901)

<comment><USER15> Well, it doesn't help that most parents want to see their child as "gifted". We as a society put a _lot_ of emphasis on inborn qualities ("being smart"), rather than growth and hard work.

It's not surprising when the dream of many is to have it easy. Being smart is easy. Working hard is hard. I remember there being a study where successful kids who were told they worked hard ended up working harder (and over time getting better results) than kids who were told they are smart.

I guess what I'm saying is everyone has impressive abilities, but the authority figures' guidance may be what will differentiate a lazy "smart" person from a hard working (successful) one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Giftedness is misunderstood. That even highly educated audiences don't get this is evident in some of the comments here. Giftedness is terribly named. It is more affliction than blessing. Giftedness is rare. Gifted kids are not the same as brilliant high achievers. They have high IQ's but are also underachievers (by regular standards, not some elevated bar) and often dropouts. They should be highly successful but are not and often commit suicide. Gifted children are routinely dismissed as overly privileged or advantaged kids, and usually do not get any special needs attention in schools. People see their intellectual side and ignore their emotional needs and problems. I can say from personal experience that while gifted kids are exceptional in many ways, they also tend to lead difficult lives with many challenges because they are so deeply misunderstood. Even by their own parents.

<comment><USER17> I second this. I was identified as "gifted" around 3rd grade, and from that point on, my teachers "guided me" (only allowed me access to) literature and texts they felt were "at my level". Third grade is way too young to be reading literature classics - they are all incredible tragedies, with the worse aspects of human behavior exhibited and analyzed to the extreme. By 5th grade I'd pretty much finished the entire classics section at our library, and I was as dark minded as an individual could get, with the vocabulary to support plus youthful piss and vinegar ready to debate anyone with optimism.

Thank god I discovered literary science fiction, and soon thereafter Phillip K Dick. I found reading "unhappy" literature was comforting, and U.K. post-punk bands like Joy Division also lent a sense of not being completely alone. Also reading Malcome X was hugely uplifting, as a white Iowa boy. And the cyper- punk authors were just starting then; I remember reading Neuromancer when it first came out and feeling completely at home in the reality painted by that novel.

About the only "good" thing that came out of my elementary school teachers only allowing me access to "gifted" activities was their taking me out of math class and leaving me alone with the school's first computer (this was the late 70's) for 2 hours every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I faced some of these issues during my early teens. It went away after that. Now I am 29 and facing the mid life crisis that the author has mentioned. It's a confused state of big dreams and crushing reality.

<comment><USER6> Shoot me an email if you need to vent--we all need can use someone to chat with now and again.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for your kind words. It means a lot!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I was in the third or fourth grade, I had an extreme form of this type of depression that lasted for maybe a year or longer. Instead of just reflecting on the meaning of life, I worried reality might not be real and understood even then at my young age there's no way to prove the people around me weren't constructs of my imagination. I came to these conclusions independently without ever hearing of Brain in a Vat, Evil Genius, or watching The Matrix, and it was very terrifying back then.

As I've grown up, I still realize there's no way to prove the world around me is real, but I'm glad I encountered this theory so young because I've had a good while to be motivated by the fact that it doesn't matter if it isn't real. What matters is what I do with this experience and how much joy I get out of it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Not sure why the emphasis is on children especially. This seems to affect thoughtful people of all ages.

Or maybe, in that thoughtful, existentially-depressed way, the author is just understatedly asserting that adults are just big children. That would probably be overthinking it.

<comment><USER21> It's on a website about talent development in gifted children, they're speaking to their audience. The article has been around for a while.

<comment><USER20> Ah. This makes my comment look silly then. Sometimes that kind of context is not obvious when these things come up on a site like HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make lots of graphs." \- Lisa Simpson

<comment><USER23> I know this post is at least partially a joke, but if there's any correlation between IQ and happiness, it's positive.

[http://theboostbook.com/2013/01/link-between-intelligence- an...](http://theboostbook.com/2013/01/link-between-intelligence-and- happiness/)

<comment><USER24> Apart from the fact that IQ as a measure of anything is completely bullshit, sure. We can make such a correlation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have felt those things before but then one day I had an epiphany. Everything in this universe, living or dead, are all made of the same universe, like gems cut from the same rock. So that even when I find myself having difficulties with someone, something or even idea, I remind myself that we're all in this together. The universe is us, its what we choose to make of it. The universe isn't just one state of the universe but rather the transitions between one state after another, just like how a movie isn't just the current frame I see, but rather all the frames put together, and although the movie is going to end, we don't know how the story is going to go. That part, is up to us, so let's create something beautiful.

<comment><USER26> I also had an experience where the existential depression went away. I thought this comment on the original article described it pretty well:

 _The solution to existential depression is counter intuitive, which is probably why it isn 't well known. Existential depression is caused by wanting to have meaning when a part of us knows that meaning doesn't exist. We grow up in a life where everyone around us jumps from one 'important' and 'meaningful' thing to another, never seeing the pointlessness of it all. We think this is normal so adopt the behavior, but we constantly fight ourselves because part of us sees how pointless it really is. Our base state is where we see how pointless everything is. However, this state does not create existential depression. It's the conflict between the pointless state and the part of us that wants meaning that creates existential depression. We enter suicidal states only when we are unable to find a solution. (i.e. we are unable to find something that has meaning.) The solution, which is now obvious, is to remove all feelings of meaning and importance so that we return to our natural state. If everything is meaningless than everything is unimportant. If everything is unimportant than nothing is more important than anything else. When the feelings of meaning and importance are removed, our existential depression disappears._

Basically it felt like the abstract notions I had been worrying over were indeed meaningless, but that the meaningful world from when I was a little kid was still around, when I could capture the same intense non-verbal awareness.

<comment><USER27> I echo all of that.

Do you not also feel that sometimes it's hard to consciously think that it is pointless and to feel yourself accidentally drifting back into a state of trying to find meaning... to feel this existential depression creeping back?

I find it takes constant awareness (not effort) to maintain an idea that it is all futile and pointless, to allow me to exist without any depression.

<comment><USER26> Well, nowadays I just try to be aware in the moment and not focus on meaning, the future, etc unless I need too. Success varies.

If I'm too hyper-focused on something (like coding) for too long though sometimes I'll still get a similar feeling. Haven't found anything to do in that case but wait it out.

<comment><USER27> I mix several things at all times to ensure the hyper-focus doesn't set in.

At the moment I code, cycle, read sci-fi, takes photos, and am just about to buy an electric piano to add something else (as the coding was dominating again).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A well written piece. The excessive use of "gifted" works against its intentions though. By referring exclusively to "gifted" children the author is throwing up a wall. Everyone has different levels of care and thought when it comes to the world around us.

<comment><USER6> Well put; thank you for not jumping on the "hurr durr look at the special snowflake language" bandwagon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Site is giving a 500 error, here is the gcached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:piXqTtN...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:piXqTtNWJk0J:theunboundedspirit.com/existential- depression-in-gifted-children/+http://theunboundedspirit.com/existential- depression-in-gifted-children/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER30> I faced this "existential" crisis of a pretty severe nature in my college years. I kept reading stuff about psychology, philosophy, and physics in the hopes of an answer. The first breakthrough against this existential demon came in the form of a course "non-linear dynamics and chaos", the ability of chaotic equations to exhibit life and nature like behaviour, and understanding that life is chaotic, and so is nature. The second one came when I realized that philosophy and reason itself are handicapped, insufficient, powerless against this existential dilemma. The third one came while reading Carl Jung and his work, the fact that consciousness is a very small produce of the biological system that is human body. Fourth when I read Nietzsche's "On Truth and Untruth", which again showed how our speech has taken the form of animal's claws, we fight, threaten etc mostly by what we say, that's like a higher level of abstraction over the physical equivalent. Then there was Tolstoy, who pointed out that its logical that we humans, if we really want to stay true to ourselves, need a god, or something higher than ourselves to believe in, because logically, if you are going to die, there is no reason to live, yet every human and animal does. Then there was "Black Swan" by Taleb, which drilled the idea into my head that we humans don't know even a tenth as much as we think we do. And then there was programming, actually building systems that exist outside of you and do something.

Over the years, I developed the worldview that as human body is formed by numerous of organisms working together, and how futile would it be for a "red blood cell", in all its consciousness, to ask "what is my purpose ?", the same way its futile for human to ask about his/her place in the universe. I started trying to live more like animals do (or rather, how a human animal would live if it only had nature imposing rules on it), copying nature for decision- making, and general wisdom (it even helps me with my work). We humans are basically nature forming a greater system , the human society, which then again competes with many other greater systems formed by other organisms, and till now, has been doing pretty well.

I also have given up trying to control my conscious thought and efforts too much. I trust the biological system that this consciousness came out of to provide me with a better judgement than I can come up with consciously.

Its been around 2.5 years since i cleared up the existential crisis in my head, and my growth since then has even astounded me. I have become better, much better in all spheres of life, and I can't remember a time I was more happier than these 2.5 years

<comment><USER31> I loved this comment and went through a serious critical study of those domains as well.

I have a clarifying question: Isn't human consciousness and troublesome curiosity -- things you seem to be minimalizing and attempting to tone down -- just as real as everything else? Could your view that questioning your place in the universe as futile not be seen as escapist/defeatist? Why do you trust the biological system for consciousness but not how that consciousness operates?

<comment><USER30> Yes, it is a very troublesome and magnificent curiosity, but realizing the futility of thinking that "I _NEED_ to know my purpose in this universe" takes out the troublesome part of that curiosity. The thing is, even if I waste my whole life in search for an answer, and still discover nothing, then also, I'd have played out my part as a useless prick in the universe (Read up stuff about free will, there is a paradox or something). I'm much more happier doing things that intrigue me push me, fascinate me, and overall, are in sync with the "biological system" that my consciousness developed on, than spend my time pondering on my "purpose".

Rest of this stuff is revealed when you actually do something, and push your limits in it, the patterns that are revealed, and how the system based abstractions and patterns really transcend various fields of knowledge and practice.

Anyways. This is what I think, and since I am not rich or haven't "made it big", , I won't be taken seriously by many people. And when, and if, I get rich, people would try to "dig my brain", so to say. But I don't think a lot of this stuff is "portable". Everyone needs to realize this type of stuff on their own, come up with their own explanation.

<comment><USER32> Thanks for sharing kapv89

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have two kids both starting at age4 questioned me about death. I don't believe in God so it's hard to calm them, but there is no better way to comfort them, so I say we will all go to heaven when we die.

One day we visited my grandparents cemetery,my boy started crying, and asked me why my grandparents are buried here while I said people went to heaven when they are dead. I had to say that our body remains here, but our soul/spirit go to heaven and we live there.

Then one night he tears again, then cry, when I ask, he said if it's just spirits/souls go to heaven, we won't even have a face there, our family will never be able to recognize each other, and we won't be able to re-unite in heaven.

I almost cried myself.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have to point out that a good percentage of people seem to gravitate towards religious, spiritual, mystical, or other basically non-reason-based thought patterns, I suspect to help alleviate this sense of existential hopelessness. Perhaps these "gifted children" find it harder to go down that particular route, for obvious reasons.

</comment><comment><USER35> While I've read a fair bit of existentialist works I've never seen this term, but I think I know what it means. I also think the article would be improved by just titling itself "Existential Depression". The narrow focus is odd, even if true, and might serve better as a footnote.

There's the strangest feeling I come across from time to time, and I think "come across" is the only good way to describe it. Everyone has bouts of doubt and melancholy, I think or would like to think, but there's something much larger that creeps up that becomes harder to relate. In spite of the difficulty to describe, I could imagine anyone might feel this way, not just gifted children.

I always called it "The Cosmic Sadness", which is a name that I came up with after experiencing the feelings while I was reading about heat death of the universe (and associated articles) on Wikipedia[1]. This feeling ends up upsetting (not quite right, maybe disquieting) me much more than things like the death of a pet or a family member.

It doesn't only have to do with cosmological things, but I think it addresses the scope of the feeling, where you get this sensation of being so zoomed out, so encompassed by (perhaps) all that might be, that you have a hard time coming back down to being you.

It's like when you ponder the plight of some character in a novel you're reading, and you empathize enough to get a little upset, then you remember that none of that is real and its OK you've gone one level up now back to real life, no one is suffering like the character in the novel. You "snap out of it" \- There's de-escalation, and some relief. But with the cosmic sadness there is no going up one level, it's all there to ponder and still real. No snapping out of it.

I was shocked by how this article ended because the only way of coping I have (other than mere time), to de-escalate this feeling, is literature and poetry. I tend to read several poems a day[2] as a kind of cathartic ritual, and poetry brings a comfortable way to remember (or re-realize) the very meaningful and concrete parts of experience, so I end up surrounding myself with it, finding the most comfort in it.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe)

[2] For example Where to Live, by Du Fu: [https://gist.github.com/simonsarris/5472121](https://gist.github.com/simonsarris/5472121)

Du Fu is a favorite of mine because he lived during a time that experienced one of the largest losses of human life on the planet (an lushan rebellion), so a lot of his poetry dithers between bleakness and hope. Somehow this makes it easy for me to reflect (perspective) and draw some inner sympathy for everything.

<comment><USER36> The article focus on gifted children because it is a particular problem since they can't share their thoughts and questions about it with friends. These questions are somehow comming up "too early" in life wrt to their capacity to cope with them. As adults we have collected enough data to be able to readjust our understanding of life in a sound way. The depression is the phase that follows the anger from not being able to cope with it. Helping these kids to go through this phase is important because risk of suicide is also higher.

I don't want to diminish the problem of existential depression in adults. I just want to point out that the problem is probably more accute and troublesome in gifted children as I think the author tried to explain.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. A thousand times this.

I had exactly what was described in the article in response to a car accident (being hit while biking) that 'should have been fatal' at age 15.

The author's recommendation of a daily hug also resonates with me since if I had to describe, 15 years later, what happened I'd say that the accident caused my mind to retreat from my body and that it wasn't until I learnt to enjoy physical touch again 7 years later that I felt I had recovered.

While my experience probably was a bit more intense than the article describes, my guess is that it points to a failure mode in gifted (or let's say 'mentally oriented') children in which they focus on their mind to the exclusion of all else and lose track of their (physical) connection to the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If a mod sees this, they should change the URL to this:

[http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10269.aspx](http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10269.aspx)

The link I posted was a re-blog on a website with a nicer reading experience.

</comment><comment><USER37> [http://xkcd.com/167/](http://xkcd.com/167/)

<comment><USER38> [http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=14](http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=14)

<comment><USER39> Yeah, I always wondered how the so-called existentialists aren't just yielding ground to ideological fundamentalists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I really enjoyed reading that--especially the poem at the end (I remember mentally rolling my eyes the first time I read it, thinking the message was self-evident. But in this context it's just wonderful).

I do wish this sort of message could be part of an effective, formulaic prescription that could be doled out to web surfers who are suffering. "Depressed about things? Just keep scrolling down...watch this TED talk, heed this advice, read this article..." My friend who surfs the web all day and who tells me he has his suicide all planned out--I wish he could stumble on these things more often. Maybe instead of a "CSS Site of the Day Award" badge there could be a "Contemplating Suicide?" badge...

Another example, I wish I had learned before I became a film major that imagery is powerful, and that our brains can confuse on-screen trauma with real trauma. I suffered needlessly--and that sounds ridiculous and maybe funny, thinking about a film major with wide eyes wondering just what he signed up for--but I watched things that I will never forget, and that have become part of a mental burden I work to release now that I'm a bit more experienced in discerning what I can and can't handle.

I guess it pains me to think that while there are things we can do to ease others' pain, there are many extremely simple, almost thoughtless ways by which that existential depression worsens. Watch the wrong film. Read the wrong book. Make the wrong song lyric your mantra. (Wrong...well, maybe inappropriate is a better term; something that takes into account one's personal state) Traditions, cultures, microcultures...transcending that sort of thing is harder than most people realize, and certainly doesn't happen on autopilot.

</comment><comment><USER41> Let's all get in a circle and talk about our experience as gifted children.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think there are two separate issues here:

(1) Existential depression, and

(2) Gifted kids have difficulties because adults don't talk to them as equals, and their concerns and thought processes are difficult for their peers to comprehend.

</comment><comment><USER43> "In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion." \-- Douglas Adams

</comment><comment><USER44> Another literary cure for the Great Sadness is Isaac Asimov's [The Last Question]([http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm](http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm)).

<comment><USER45> So, the cure for the Great Sadness is basically... religion? Like a modern, high-tech version of the Wheel of Time.

You do have to believe in a cause greater than yourself. All your passions and drives die with you, so if you want life to be meaningful then you need to contribute to something that will last.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> "The average person believes themselves to be above average"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority)

<comment><USER6> Read the article before spouting off.

<comment><USER46> It was directed at the comments.

<comment><USER47> Perhaps HN attracts many gifted folks? Would that be so unexpected? The level of discourse is quite high.

<comment><USER48> Is this a joke?

<comment><USER47> The idea that the level of discourse on HN is high? Compared to say, Reddit? Or YouTube comments? No, not a joke. It's my perception that many of the folks participating on HN are, well, both gifted and engaged in the world. Do you disagree?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think almost everyone struggles with this type of depression at some point in life.

I'm not sure how much being gifted has to do with it. Strangely, one of the things that has helped develop my framework for life is a fanfiction (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality) [1], written by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

I think it's been recommended several times before on Hacker News, but it really is a great fanfiction. The protagonist is an atheist and transhumanist who wants to defeat death.

The author has also written many other essays that I find interesting and sane. I'm an atheist who has occasionally struggled with the idea of death and meaninglessness, and his essays were the first viewpoints that seemed to make sense. [2] [3]

[1] [http://hpmor.com/](http://hpmor.com/)

[2] [http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda](http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda)

[3] [http://lesswrong.com/lw/sc/existential_angst_factory/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/sc/existential_angst_factory/)

I really recommend that anyone here who has struggled with existential depression to read the above three writings. Of course, it's very possible that you'll still be depressed, in which case you'll need to look for other solutions.

But Eliezer's writing helped significantly in cleaning up my life views.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm not saying I was ever overly gifted, I was just a very introvert child who spent a lot of time thinking and through that became depressed about my seemingly pointless existence.

Well I just wanted to say that what helped later in adult years was discovering true love. I know it sounds corny but once you realize that life on this earth is short, and that short time can be used to experience great feelings of love and togetherness with other humans, you do feel less depressed about it.

</comment><comment><USER51> I've only experienced this right after high school, college and PhD graduations. These were long term goals that dominated my life. There was bit of emptiness once these goals were achieved. Plus there was a dispersion of the social communities I had lived in for long time. This emptiness did not last long as there were always new projects around the corner afterwords.

I expect the same feeling after job "retirement" and expect it to last as long.

<comment><USER11> The greatest burden in life is not having a burden to carry. - Sadhu Sundar Singh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think this is a really pathetic reason to be depressed. And these "gifted" people have it all wrong. No, the laws of physics don't directly dictate that all governments be democratic, or that people drive on the right side of the road. But if they thought about the world on a deeper level, they would realize that there _is_ structure, and that it's breathtakingly-beautiful (albeit subtle and not always easy to pick up on when you don't explicitly seek it). No, you don't get to be a teacher's pet for your whole life, and you don't get paid for doing well on IQ tests. But one person _can_ have an impact on the world: sometimes, a very pervasive, meaningful one. I fail to see why some gifted children can't appreciate the world and their existence enough to at least have a good time and explore it a bit. You only get to do it once, and you won't get the chance to do _everything_ the world has to offer, but you should consider yourself lucky to be conscious in the first place. My theory is that kids labeled "gifted" end up dwelling on their "ability" to the point where they actually think they are entitled to something outside educational institutions. Or maybe they fail to realize, to their chagrin, that IQ grossly belies proportional intelligence, especially after a certain point, and that IQ tests don't measure what it takes to make a meaningful difference in the world. People like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates are unequivocally gifted, but they don't dwell on it; they don't statistically determine the probability that they will make a difference; they don't spend their time researching IQ tests or bragging about their intellect; they go out and do their best to change the world. And they do.

<comment><USER24> > I think this is a really pathetic reason to be depressed.

Who the fuck are you to judge why people get depressed? Someone I know got depressed because she was 70 and her cat died. The only other social contact she had in her life withered away. Is that a good enough reason to judge her?

> But one person can have an impact on the world: sometimes, a very pervasive, > meaningful one.

Really? In the long run, how much does it matter? Oskar Schindler saved a bunch of people from the Holocaust. He died poor, broken; his saved people went on to create a state which is known for its war crimes. The cycle goes on.

> I fail to see why some gifted children can't appreciate the world and their > existence enough to at least have a good time and explore it a bit. You only > get to do it once, and you won't get the chance to do everything the world > has to offer, but you should consider yourself lucky to be conscious in the > first place.

You have never been depressed ever in your life, have you? This is like me going to a sad walmart employee and telling them they should be happy getting a job when there are people in Africa starving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> It is a unique experience at a young age when one especially feels that there is not a soul they can truly speak to, almost to the extreme that it is a luxury to feel understood.

Since this isn't your usual teenage angst, making friends who are older than you can help a great deal.

Realizing man has pondered the same things, for hundreds and thousands of years gives you a chance, to access their thoughts in the form of books, literature, poetry.

</comment><comment><USER54> This reminds me a bit of the short film "Kid's Story" from The Animatrix. It revolves around a teenager who is waking up to the possibility of the matrix who finds himself alone in a world full of people unaware of its existence. He seeks the help of those who are woken up, specifically, Neo. In a way he is like these children, aware of the fleeting nature of life, waking up to these issues.

I recently had a psilocybin mushroom trip that resulted in a bit of temporary derealization during which I needed one of my friends to hold me just so that I knew I was real. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life, but through it I learned that our existence in this world is entirely a perception of the mind, and that we create our reality through each and every action we take and each thought that we make. Particularly one of my most profound insights was that the concept of time is irrelevant, for there is only the now, and when one is able to perceive the now, then one can be free from the grasps of _what if_ and can one see _what is_.

I find it difficult to convey these feelings with other people, as I often find them saying things like "yeah, that's interesting", but I can see that they do not truly _understand_. There are some that do however and for those who do I am grateful. For the children and those of you who find yourself in this "existential depression", I can only offer this...

Create. Create art, create music, create _life_. If you can leave something behind for the rest of the universe, then your life was not for nothing, for you created _something_ , were a part of _something_. This at the very least is all that we can do, and that is okay, for even if all you can do is make someone smile, you have created a ripple in the world that will manifest itself as a wave in the lives of those who carry on.

</comment><comment><USER55> As a gifted child, I had a lot of this. It was finally in my 30s when I realized that existentialism for me was really the only way forward. I really wish I had been exposed to these ideas earlier (However I'm not sure I could have absorbed them as a young adult)

Over the years I've become somewhat of a shill for the Teaching Company, which offers college-level courses on CD and DVD. Robert Soloman's "No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life" is an excellent introduction to existentialism. Highly recommended. [http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.asp...](http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=437)

In my mind, if we are going to encourage and nurture kids at both ends of the spectrum -- highly functioning and less functioning -- we should provide some kind of intellectual bedrock to allow the gifted an anchor to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER56> Very thoughtfully written piece. One would wonder what this has to do with HN, but the content is universally applicable, therefore not only in regards to children. Plus, we could suppose that the majority of HN's users consider themselves gifted :) Anyway, read the article folks, you won't regret your spent minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it because I think HN attracts people who have the traits expressed in the article:

\- high potential for development \- innately aware of problems in the world \- over-exciteable \- drawn towards 'escapes' that help them grow

<comment><USER39> Really? Here I thought HN mostly attracts white or East Asian mostly-male, mostly-20-30-something computer programmers who live in orbit around the Silicon Valley start-up industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> In the end all psychology boils down to our brain circuits. It is interesting that nature has shaped us so that we have a constant existential anxiety, maybe it even served some evolutionary purpose (or maybe not, and it's just a side effect that becomes more evident to the few gifted children)

</comment><comment><USER58> > it is because substantial thought and reflection must occur to even consider > such notions, rather than simply focusing on superficial day-to-day aspects > of life.

What elitist garbage.

<comment><USER59> Really? I read it nodding, thinking of how many of my friends/family/cow- orkers, and if I'm being honest with myself - me a lot of the time, could be described perfectly as "simply focusing on superficial day-to-day aspects of life."

<comment><USER39> I assure you: everyone else is having the same Special Snowflake Thoughts as you.

<comment><USER31> Probably something about being special, yes. But it's not the same thing. The OP is referring to a kind of critical thinking.

If you don't believe in qualitative differences in thought, then we might as well just abandon education as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I wonder how the "gifted children" whom were raised on religious believes react to the same sort of "ultimate concerns"

<comment><USER61> Yes, it's the same. Any "gifted children" can see also the "problems" in the belief system that they were raised, it's part of the conflict.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'd encourage statistics check.

It is common that many of the "containment regimes" that are supposed to motivate children are more ruthlessly enforced on gifted children to "help them reach potential". And it is known that overly harsh rules induce depression too.

</comment><comment><USER63> Great article. Sadly, I wish it wasn't focused on the gifted. I bet a lot of children suffer with existential depression and I also can imagine how hard it is to have to listen to the bullshit answers they will inevitably receive to their deep questions.

</comment><comment><USER64> When I started to read this, I felt embarrassed and exposed, maybe little taken aback. But I'm really glad I came across this article. I'm in a weird place between a cynical bastard and depressed kid, and this kind of helped. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER65> The article says that freedom refers to the absence of external structure, as if it's a grim state of confused aimlessness. I say that freedom refers to the absence of external coercion, which is a happy state of purpose and possibility.

</comment><comment><USER66> _It has been my experience that gifted and talented persons are more likely to experience a type of depression referred to as existential depression._

is there any evidence (beyond the author's "experience") that this is true?

</comment><comment><USER32> The fact there's something rather than nothing. 'Nothing' \- like absolute zero - is only a referential concept. Beware of introspective traps. Light, breezy and not trying too hard.

</comment><comment><USER67> From the article, which is about a topic I discuss frequently in other online communities (including online communities hosted by the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that operates the website hosting the submitted article):

"In essence, then, we can help many persons with existential depressions if we can get them to realize that they are not so alone"

And this is why I strenuously oppose the term "existential depression" as a supposed designation of something that is rare in most people and more common among people who are "gifted." There is no evidence of such a thing. Rather, treating giftedness as a condition of life different from what most of our fellow human beings experience magnifies the sense of aloneness that too much of the gifted education literature promotes among people identified as gifted.

When I was young, I read a science fiction story by author Philip K. Dick in which he made a statement I have seen made in much the same form by many of the lousier authors on gifted education: that if your IQ is high, you are as different from above-average people as retarded persons are from normal people. That's baloney. The social distance hypothesis of IQ has little empirical support, and seems mostly to be a cultural hang-up of twentieth century America. When I lived in east Asia (after majoring in Chinese language at university) as a young adult, I discovered a new cultural perspective, the cultural perspective that if a person is smart, there is hardly anything better to do with the smarts than to learn how to get along with other people. As Confucius said, 三人行,必有我師焉 ("wherever three persons are walking, my teacher is surely among them"). Whatever my IQ score, I have plenty to learn from essentially everyone, and plenty of reason to feel kinship with my fellow human beings.

There is, however, a kind of isolation of the gifted that must be specifically counteracted. And that is the isolation of the gifted education literature, like the article kindly submitted here (by an author I have met at several conferences on gifted education) from the mainstream literature of psychology. Most gifted education gurus, and the author of this article is a salient example, have their highest formal degrees in education, from schools of education (such as from a "directional state university" that historically was a "normal school" for training teachers). The most rigorous research on human psychology--and psychologists have recently been painfully aware that all too little research on psychology is rigorous at all--

[http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/](http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/)

[http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/readings/WeirdestPeople.pdf](http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/readings/WeirdestPeople.pdf)

is gained by persons whose highest formal degree is in psychology, from a major research university. Very little of the best insights gained from recent decades of psychological research seeps into schools of education, especially those schools of education that have programs in gifted education.

The late author Dabrowski mentioned promptly in the article kindly submitted here and in much gifted education literature is an admittedly obscure writer (as acknowledged in the only book that collects commentary on his ideas,

[http://www.amazon.com/Dabrowskis-Theory-Positive- Disintegrat...](http://www.amazon.com/Dabrowskis-Theory-Positive- Disintegration-Mendaglio/dp/0910707847)

which I read part of recently) who produced essentially no testable hypotheses. Dabrowski's ideas are vague and open-ended enough to allow making up dozens of anecdotes when speaking at conferences on gifted education, but provide no guidance whatsoever to help young people face tough issues in personal development.

The bottom line: the term "existential depression" is a euphemism used in the gifted education community for the same depression experienced by many people of varied IQ levels. The correct statement in the article submitted here is the statement that you help people experiencing depression by encouraging them to feel less isolated from the rest of humankind. And one of the best ways to do that for gifted people is to emphasize their commonality with the rest of humankind, rather than their IQ scores or poor fit age-graded school programs.

[http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html](http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html)

<comment><USER68> that's interesting. can you link to any research supporting the claim that depression doesn't fundamentally differ for people with varied IQ levels?

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> parts don't make a lot of sense, not every gifted child is trying to spend every waking hour on improving their talents. I don't know a child that doesn't enjoy play..

I find that a lot of gifted children are opposed to authority, which causes frustration with non-stimulating class work assigned by poor teachers.

</comment><comment><USER70> Woody Allen already covered this in a scene in Take The Money And Run.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Aaaaaand it's down.

</comment><comment><USER71> ok, I'm gifted and depressed, how can I get a job ?

</comment><comment><USER72> Having some experience in this area:

Gifted children are aware just how dysfunctional this society is.

They aren't fooled by shiny things. They look at the structure of things and analyze them.

Thus they're a high-risk group because while most people see a few scattered small problems, gifted kids see one big problem.

Naturally, there are solutions to that including contexting and acceptance therapy, but those are never provided.

I bet they'll find gifted kids have a higher suicide rate, too, especially as an empire nears its collapse.

</comment><comment><USER73> I remember thinking these 'existential' thoughts that cause depression my first day of pre-school. I am not as intelligent as a lot of people, but I know that I'm not unintelligent. I began failing my classes in school when I was 9, and my depression was beginning to really develop. I would walk around the playground, by myself, thinking. By 15, I had renounced my belief in God and refused to be brainwashed by anyone who wanted to tell me otherwise.

I'm 25 now and after a lot of drugs and alcohol, I believe in God, again. I read the Bible, not as often as I should, but at least I read it. It makes me feel better.

For those of you who are 'former Christians', I recommend you try to bring it back into your life. It does help, I promise.

<comment><USER11> Thank you so much for sharing that, and I second your suggestion.

I was born again at age 24, after swearing it off for years due to the evil and hypocrisy I saw growing up in it. But I had just hit another near suicidal rock bottom - even though my life was very monetarily successful - and I finally stopped fighting God's call and being so stuck on myself.

I went to church and was blessed to meet my kind, flexible, and giving wife who is truly my better half. (PS guys, odds of meeting flexible and giving women is _much improved_ there) It's been 9 years later and we have two wonderful sons. Even if God takes me home tomorrow, I know he made some good out of my life.

<comment><USER74> Fantastic to hear... I'm interested to know what you meant by "being so stuck on myself"? I like to hear stories of how God has changed people!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> The French philosophy of the last century said nothing about children.) In some sense a realization of absurd and meaninglessness require some experiences of ageing adult which children simply cannot have. They cannot realize the attractiveness of youth and meaninglessness of that attraction. Time to reread Age of reason or something.

</comment><comment><USER76> TIL: Children can be Nihlists too? Does it really take a gifted child to see the futility in the majority of life or to understand our insignificance? This is something that should be fairly obvious to anyone without privilege, not only children.</comment>


Ask HN: Could Google Android face antitrust lawsuits like US vs. Microsoft? - <AUTHOR>

Microsoft was found guilty of breaking antitrust law after they used their dominance in one market (operating systems) to win a bigger share of another market (browsers). They did this by designing the Windows UI and APIs to favour Internet Explorer over 3rd-party browsers, for example.
It seems to me the tight integration of Gmail and Google Calendar on Android phones gives it a clear advantage over 3rd party mail and calendar services.
Is Google using its dominance in one market (mobile operating systems) to benefit their position in another (calendar and mail services)? Aren't they at risk of similar lawsuits?
Or is there some difference that I'm missing? <comment><USER2> Android only has ~50% market share, which is hardly a monopoly. Also, Gmail was already very successful before Android was released. Also, it's hard to show what consumer harm has come from this bundling. (I was forced to sign up for Gmail when I got an Android phone, but I just don't use it.)

</comment><comment> simba-hiiipower Interesting that you look to its dominance in Mobile (Android) affecting on Email/Calendaring when considering such a case. That never really crossed my mind; but I have done some thinking on the topic and feel there is a much more poignant case for an abuse of monopoly power by GOOG. And, in my opinion, I feel that what GOOG has done is far worse than MSFT in its case. With that said, though, I also believe the risk of GOOG facing a similar case is highly unlikely and I'll explain why.

First off, I'd argue that GOOG's dominance in Mobile is not the cause of any potential antitrust action (at this point), but rather, the result of an abuse of its monopoly power in Search. And (again, my opinion here) this is far worse than MSFT's abuse in leveraging Windows' dominance as an OS to enter the Browser market.

I'll start with looking at MSFT. At the time of the case Windows as an OS commanded essentially the entire market for 'connected devices' (back then the only real connected device was the PC). And the only practical way to use a browser was through a PC. So MSFT used its dominance in the first, a market which it controlled entirely, to break into the latter, an emerging market with many small players. While this may seem 'bad' (it is, as it stifles innovation in the space) it clearly made sense for the company as a defensive measure. MSFT saw where the market was heading (…the internet), and realized that the growth of browsers (the gateways to the internet) that were not tied- down to a particular OS could threaten Windows' dominance. So MSFT created IE and bundled it with Windows, for free, while strong-arming Hardware manufacturers to not bundle Netscape (and others). Again, yes this is bad. But it makes perfect business sense as a defensive move to preserve an existing product (and especially so when you're dealing with a product that was essentially the whole company at the time).

Now let's look at GOOG. In the wake of a competitor essentially building-out a new market (yes, smartphones were around for years before the iPhone; but look at the market pre and post release and you'll see why I call it a new market) GOOG acquired and built-out Android to compete. <For this case let's just put aside the fact that mush of Android utilizes patented IP from, oddly enough, MSFT's Windows Mobile (among many others) and looks, umm.. 'similar' to the iPhone's UI. After all, in the above I ignored the fact that IE was likely heavily influenced by Netscape and others in the market, so it's only fair we put that aside.> So far, nothing really different here. And, like MSFT with IE, GOOG made Android free. But here is why I find GOOG's abuse far worse.. MSFT did what it did to protect its product; GOOG, on the other hand, used monopoly profits from dominance in one industry to entirely undermine an, let's be honest, entirely unrelated industry. We're not talking Mobile search here, we're talking an entire Mobile OS; and one that competes feature-to- feature with others in the market. And taking an entire OS, which is arguably one of the most valuable contributor to the market (in terms of IP), and making it free, is one of the worst things a company could do. It is for this reason, that as extreme of a view as it was, I can entirely relate to Steve Job's views on the issue (especially if you couple-in the element I left out above).

So, with all that said, why don't I think GOOG faces the same threat of antitrust action as MSFT? Well, I'll keep it short and say that times change, markets change, and the relative positions of the players involved matters. At the time of MSFT's case people feared the idea that any one company could become so dominant. This, coupled with the fact that the goliath that is/was MSFT was taking on relatively small players like Netscape, and you have the perfect combination for major antitrust litigation. GOOG faces different attitudes in today's society and the fact that it's undercutting the likes of AAPL (they made how much last quarter!?), RIMM, MSFT and others likely won't mount the same type of pressure if it were truly entering a new market with smaller players. Though I feel they deserve it, I don't see GOOG facing the same situation MSFT did, and that's just the way it is.

And, getting back to the original post, I feel if this larger issue, and more severe abuse, is unlikely to present a threat to GOOG, I doubt integrating its services within Android will either.</comment>


Towards Yinyang K-means on GPU - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sourced.tech/post/towards_kmeans_on_gpu/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty interesting. Is the author here? I have something to point them at. @nlothian on Twitter, or email in my profile.

<comment><USER3> Here. Please don't bite :)

<comment><USER4> Do you have any interest in implementing other clustering algorithms on GPU? e.g. HDBSCAN? Or is it not as parallelizable?

<comment><USER5> Agree on HDBSCAN/DBSCAN, which is able to find the number of clusters in a large class of problems (unlike K-means, which requires that the number of clusters/centroids be provided as a hyperparameter, or found via some kind of search).

Otherwise, I just want to say to vmarkovtsev: thank you for this -- I will add it to my arsenal of tools, and may others will surely do so as well.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Actually, I like DBSCAN a lot and use it often, though I am not much familiar with it's internals. It looks like it is iterative and thus does not fit very well to a GPU. The only way I see is to pick several seed points at start...

<comment><USER5> A Google search reveals this paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02226](https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02226)

This paper claims a "97x improvement" over traditional (non-parallelized) DBSCAN algorithms, but that's not a very helpful claim, because it does not indicate what the computational costs are as a function of, say, the number of data points or dimensions.

<comment><USER3> 97x improvement is actually very suspicious. Thanks for the article!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Schizophrenic brains not fooled by optical illusion - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/schizoillusion/

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945670> <\- Lots of comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556993> <\- From 18 months ago</comment>


The Value of Game Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/08/the-value-of-game-ideas/

<comment><USER2> The idea may not be, but the moment it becomes a demo it can be worth quite a lot. The story, characters and gameplay can be very valuable, it is how the idea is sold to publishers. This is just like scripts in the movie industry. Most publishers have internal studios, that could possibly be sitting idle. While it is not often done, there is the opportunity for a publisher to move on a developer's idea much faster than the developer could.

The video game industry is brutal, especially with people doing copy cat projects. Look at the current farm games on facebook. The first one was FarmTown, made by a small group. Now some of the facebook powerhouses have released the exact same game with nearly identical gameplay and even similar art (FarmVille from Zynga and Country Story from Playfish).

Or just look at the rivalry between Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

The execution is still worth much more, but I think there is still a need to protect the idea.

<comment><USER3> This may be nit picking, but FarmTown hardly invented the social farm game. The genre has been popular in China for a while now.

[http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/08/04/five-minutes- ada...](http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/08/04/five-minutes-adapts- popular-chinese-social-game-happy-farm-for-facebook/comment-page-1/)

Also, it's not like FarmTown is getting destroyed in the marketplace after it's been cloned - they're still the third most popular game on Facebook with 18 million monthly active users (behind FarmVille and Mafia Wars).

<http://appdata.com/>

<comment><USER2> Sure, they probably were not the first ones to come up with the idea of bringing a social farm game to facebook either. However, it is clear that once Zynga and Playfish found this idea they could rapidly turn it around too.

It is a bit scary as a small developer to know that you need to share your idea with publishers, but to also realize that they can turn around and dump so much money on your idea that they could produce something much much faster that you cant even hope to compete with them.

It is just a different climate than web based startups. Console game especially are pretty much not possible without publishers, which is not something a 3 man web startup ever really has to worry about.

If VCs were keeping tech teams in house that could potentially jump an idea i think the startup community might see the value of ideas a bit differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Game ideas are worth $0.008333.*

* A dime a dozen.

<comment> matthew-wegner I've been cranking out reasonably full-size games every 8 weeks with a few guys for Blurst.com, so we're in the idea generation phase pretty frequently (Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, Minotaur China Shop, Time Donkey).

As a general statement I think it's fair to say that game ideas are worthless. If you want to get semantic on it, though, I think the problem is that most people think theme/treatment/context ideas are game ideas ("You wake up in an insane asylum with no memories").

If you define a "game idea" as something that clearly states what the player is actually _doing_ , from second to second, then I think game ideas have worth. People who demand NDAs just to hear their brilliance as still full of shit, obviously, but ideas distilled to the brink of execution have merit, and can be bandied about in discussion in a useful way.

Of course, boiling a game idea down to that level of granularity is quite hard, so if you have that done you've done much of the mental clarification already.

<comment><USER5> At that point you may be talking about a game design, which is more than the idea. Just as there's a long way from the idea of a program to the program itself, there's a long way from a game idea to a game design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Coincidentally, the Ludum Dare contest just finished (I didn't enter this time.) Here's a crapton of games, all written in less than 48 hours, and all themed around caverns! :

<http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-15/?action=preview>

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought this would be more interesting, but it's just a rehash of the basic "execution is key" message; the "game ideas" aren't even game ideas so much as generic genre themes. They could just as easily work as pitches for books, movies, or tv series. The mechanics are the message.

</comment><comment><USER8> This conversation comes up time and again.

The mistake people make in framing this conversation is that while some people come up with high concept ideas and don't think about the execution. Most people at least, myself and other professionals I've worked with(In game development or web development) tend to come up with clever implementation hacks as well as ideas. And really it's the cleverness that you don't want to share, often you've spent much time figuring out and collecting economically creative implementation details. It's these that we worry about sharing easily, and really are what make an idea feasible beyond it's artistic merit.

I don't favor keeping all things to myself, just wanted to frame the debate more succinctly to discuss the aspects of the debate separately.

</comment><comment><USER9> Although I agree with the article's overall idea, his example of Okami and Legend of Zelda as games with totally different ideas and similar game mechanics is a horrible example. Okami's game mechanics are quite different from Zelda's.

</comment><comment><USER10> There must be some game ideas which are worth plenty on their own. Tetris, for instance. Or... well, actually that's the only example I can think of. But it's a big one.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there any arena in which the idea in and of itself is important?

<comment><USER12> Patent law.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't a patent require an implementation?

<comment><USER13> There's no implementation requirement for US patents, but there is a requirement that can be satisfied by demonstrating an implementation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you Wish Google Search Could Find Faster for You? - <AUTHOR>

If there was one category/subject/thing you could have Google give instant answers on, what would it be?<p>Your answers will help me out a lot, and the more the better. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Time. It's surprisingly difficult to order search results temporally, and according to Googlers on the search team with whom I've discussed this, a major part of the problem is the divergence between creation time, recorded creation time, and Google's discovery time. This would be particularly valuable for news, where Google has fallen behind an inexplicably fails to leverage its machine learning advantage to extract semantically rich information rather than doing relatively dumb string matching.

Yeah, that's sort of abstract. I like the hard problems :-) On a more conventional note, and in descending order of difficulty:

\- search for musical data by musical sequence, eg searching for 'G-G-G-E' would suggest Beethoven's 5th symphony, but searching for 'C-C-C-A' would also suggest it as a transposed result. This isn't as difficult as it sounds, as there are MIDI files for most classical and historically popular pieces, MIDI and/or ringtones for popular contemporary ones, and polyphonic pitch extraction is a relatively well understood signal processing task. Easy win for someone with the interest and infrastructure: using the audio recording features in HTML 5 for tune identification, as already present in some mobile apps for both content discovery and contextual identification.

\- Software error codes and the like. I find troubleshooting a miserable experience, especially when so many results turn out to be community-based forum support which fails to resolve problems.

\- Hurf durf semantic web grumble grumble.

<comment><USER3> @Software errors: I second that. If the result isn't officially documented or on StackOverflow, it's a total tossup whether it'll be easy to find or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My wife and I just moved into a new house, and on more than one occasion we've foolishly tried to Google the following:

"restaurants open right now" or "restaurants that deliver here"

As a software engineer, I know these queries won't work, but I keep hoping that one day Google will surprise me. It should be hard to parse "right now" to be the current local time, and limit the search to my current location. The same is true of the other query. Google has local restaurants along with attributes like "delivery" so it should be possible.

<comment><USER2> It's only quite recently that Maps seems to have developed a (basic) understanding of 'home'. When I'm looking up directions and type home without any other qualifiers, it shouldn't be asking me if I mean 'Home Depot'. Especially not since I give permissions to Google Latitude and my phone and computer are in fact being operated from my designated 'home' location.

For that matter, my contacts in Android and google+ let me classify people as friends, work contacts etc., but I've found no way to explain to it that Mrs. Anigbrowl is my wife as distinct from any other family member.

BTW please upvote threads like this when you reply to them. Many interesting discussions fall off the new page unnoticed despite having promising replies.

<comment><USER5> Friend of mine was telling me how she has a friend who was doing an investment banking internship this summer, and Google Now inferred "home" to be her office (presumably because she was always there at 1:30 in the morning). I can't tell whether this is an embarrassing mistake or an embarrassing success.</comment></comment></comment>


On Performant Arrays in Swift - <AUTHOR> http://jordansmith.io/on-performant-arrays-in-swift/ <comment><USER2> Optimization makes a _huge_ difference with arrays in Swift. The following took 2.37 seconds (!) on my machine un-optimized:

         var bytes = [UInt8](count: 16_737_732, reapeatedValue: 0)

This was slow enough to block my UI (spinning pizza) -- so I ran it on a background thead!. Turn on optimization and it took a more reasonable 0.0165 seconds. BTW, took C's memset only 0.00827 seconds on the same machine.

I switched back to my beloved Objective-C for the app I was developing. Won't be using Swift for low-level image processing.

<comment><USER3> You say 'beloved Objective-C'. Sorry if this is really off topic, but is objc_msgsend (the whole late-binding thing) or anything else about Objective-C particularly appealing? Maybe the decent unoptimized speeds or the fact that you can use plain C whenever?

<comment><USER2> I love C because I do a lot of low-level programming and I feel closer to the machine with C. For higher level UI stuff I like the Smalltalk extensions to C and Obj-C's dynamic nature and the fact that I can use C (and C++ directly).

Also I have been programming the Mac for a long time and I have a lot of mental investment in Objective-C.

OTOH, I do like the functional, strongly-type features of Swift, but like any higher level language I feel more removed from the machine. That's the price for abstraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why does every Swift article use emojis in their code samples?

<comment><USER5> I imagine because Swift famously touted the ability to use emojis as identifiers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article says _"Array can be toll-free bridged to an NSArray"_ , but is the reverse true, too?

[https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Sw...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/BuildingCocoaApps/WorkingWithCocoaDataTypes.html) says the two are bridged, but doesn't mention whether that is toll-free.

If that is toll-free, users of Array, just as users of NSArray, should be aware that indexing in them can be O(log n). See [http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/array.html](http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/array.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Very fascinating stuff, also follow the link at the bottom of the article towards another explanation with visuals how arrays are structured.

Honestly I never run into performance problems since the volume of data I work with is either really huge and done in a C or C++-based library or so small I would never think about array performance.

<comment><USER8> Almost always, worrying about arrays is premature optimization.

<comment><USER9> On the contrary, developing a good intuition about stuff like this so you get it right the first time is a big time saver in the long run. Especially when it's no extra code to do the better thing to begin with.

Good developers have battery empathy.

<comment><USER10> Good developers know when to use profilers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ClojureDocs: Community-Powered Clojure Documentation and Examples - <AUTHOR> http://clojuredocs.org/ <comment><USER2> I particularly like this page: <http://clojuredocs.org/quickref/varsonly/Clojure%20Core>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great. Docs, for me, are so much better with examples. I'm not the biggest PHP fan but their community powered docs never left me wondering how to use, and alternative uses for, a function.

</comment><comment><USER4> This has been a wonderful resource while trying to work through the <http://www.4clojure.com> examples.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm really glad to see this. This looks like a great resource, and with community contributions will only continue to get better.

</comment><comment><USER6> Isn't it kinda odd one has to run rails to run it locally though as opposed to like.. Noir or some such?

<comment><USER7> I could be wrong, but I think ClojureDocs predates most of the major Clojure web app infrastructure. So presumably nobody has thought rewriting it was the best use of their time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool docs, Thanks for sharing the link. I guess I have no excuse now, I have to take a closer look at and start playing with clojure</comment>