This ties into why Gen X is so despondent and explains to a great extent why GT kids really hate school. This unfortunately, is the future of our country. (The original article was published by Paul Graham . You'll find this and 14 others in Hackers and Painters .) When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards." We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, incl...
How to make huge gains by being able to forecast the future that has already happened