One should be careful with vibe-written / vibe-aided articles here. Who knows what is actually supported vs what sounded okay and the author (who is not a clinician) then signed off on.
Even the core idea, 'rejection sensitivity' is acknowledged not to be a diagnostic entity: so then how can we make definitive comparisons? Maybe clinical gestalt... but the author is not trained to see and evalaute patients.
> Why It Happens: The Mechanics Underneath the Reaction
And then don't talk about Mechanics, but instead no citations just guess. For anyone that actually wants something to go learn more about checkout the frequency of NCAH and the resulting blunted cortisol response as one thing that is influencing this.
Anecdotally: I worked at a software company that had free snacks in the office kitchen and would always chuckle how the salt snacks would run out first. The connection being NCAH can result in less aldosterone which helps regulate salt in the body.
Interesting. Intuitively a software company is the last place I would expect a high concentration of people with a condition that causes high testosterone.
Is this all that unusual for the field of education research?
Vibe writing may be an improvement. I doubt frontier models would go along with whole language reading instruction without a tremendous amount of pushback.
For those not in the know, a generation of children were taught to read sans phonics. They were told to do things like guess at words based on pictures or context clues. Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.
> Is this all that unusual for the field of education research?
Large swathes of education research are extremely questionable due to things like limited or no ability to be reproduced, circular references, or just straight up fraud.
The more that something that falls under the moniker of “education research” is built on the foundation of a more traditional (and typically more rigorous) academic discipline, the less likely that it is bogus research (e.g., Howard Gardner’s core research on multiple intelligences, which was science based on aphasic patients), versus the derived works on MI, many/most of which are bunk that he does not endorse).
> Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.
This is just a cloze exercise. These can have a legitimate role in a learning environment when used appropriately.
I prompted ChatGPT (paid subscription, latest model, high thinking effort):
> Give me two paragraphs on the benefits of whole language reading instruction. Don't refer to other reading instruction methods or compare/contrast, just focus on the positives.
And got, with no pushback,
> Whole language reading instruction emphasizes making reading meaningful, engaging, and connected to students’ real experiences. By surrounding children with rich, authentic texts—such as stories, poems, informational books, and student-created writing—it encourages them to see reading as a purposeful form of communication rather than simply an academic task. Students are invited to use context, prior knowledge, illustrations, language patterns, and their understanding of meaning to engage with texts. This can help foster curiosity, comprehension, confidence, and a positive identity as a reader. Because students often have opportunities to choose books and respond personally to what they read, whole language instruction can also support motivation and a lasting enjoyment of reading.
> Whole language instruction also integrates reading with writing, speaking, and listening, helping children experience literacy as an interconnected set of communication skills. Classroom activities may include shared reading, read-alouds, journal writing, storytelling, discussion, and collaborative projects, allowing students to develop literacy in varied and socially meaningful contexts. Teachers can build instruction around students’ interests and developmental needs, creating opportunities for creativity, self-expression, and deeper thinking about texts. This emphasis on authentic language use can strengthen vocabulary, comprehension, oral language, and awareness of how written language functions while helping students develop independence and confidence in using literacy throughout their daily lives.
Time to update your priors on how sycophantic frontier models are.
It might not obvious to a number of readers on HN, but whole language reading instruction is soundly discredited[1]. For those who prefer listening, the America Public Media podcast Sold a Story[2] covers the history of reading instruction in the English-speaking world and the rise and (slow) fall of whole language hokum in extensive depth.
And CrazyStat's implication strikes me as still largely true, so I'll make it explicit: even frontier LLMs will still resort to sycophancy when there's sufficient contradictory information in their weights to reproduce only some of it in response to a user query. And the harnesses that LLM providers silently, invisibly integrate behind-the-scenes to counteract hallucination and syncophancy are definitionally patch-jobs at best. The latest models may be better when explicitly instructed or configured by default to search the web and pull sources into their context, but the root problem remains unsolved and can still rear its flattering head if you're not paying close attention.
That seems like an unfair prompt. You literally told it to do a specific task and it did as instructed. For sycophancy, let's try something like this:
> My child's teacher says that they don't use whole language reading anymore. I learned that way and it worked great. Instead they're spending years on phonics when my kid can already read. They're crazy, right?
> No—they’re not crazy. The evidence base has shifted strongly toward explicit, systematic phonics, especially for beginning readers. Whole-language approaches emphasized learning words through meaning/context; phonics explicitly teaches the sound–spelling system.
> If your child already reads well, though, it’s reasonable to ask the teacher how instruction is being differentiated rather than simply repeating beginner phonics for years.
> That seems like an unfair prompt. You literally told it to do a specific task and it did as instructed. For sycophancy...
You redefine syncophancy too narrowly. Many (if not an outright majority of) everyday LLM users have neither the educational foundation nor skill to ask good, well-formed questions like the one you propose. We should consider syncophany in the scope of an average person's non-optimal use of LLMs. CrazyStat's prompt is something your average Joe will absolutely feed an LLM, and Joe will walk away with something very much like those plausible falsehoods. We have to think of and work against LLM syncophancy in the scope of how the hypothetical average person will use an LLM.
> One should be careful with vibe-written / vibe-aided articles here. Who knows what is actually supported vs what sounded okay and the author (who is not a clinician) then signed off on.
The poster is SEOing their substack and product (modulo). All their posts are either related to their product, their product's substack, or talks related to their product.
HN has been an SEO and content marketing target for years now, and existing HN moderation is increasingly failing to catch these attempts.
Heck, a bot account for The Register reached 66K karma and was undetected until a couple of us complained.
Emotional dysregulation is an acknowledged trait of ADHD, "rejection sensitivity dysphoria" appears in some discussions but it is not officially recognised anywhere as a symptom or disorder or anything, but it can be seen as an instance of emotional dysregulation anyway.
I can't respond to your newest comment but essentially 'rejection sensitivity dysphoria' is not in the DSM-V, so to acknowledge it one needs to have both a definition and some reasonable experience with the diagnostic entity (i.e., it's not enough to read about a disease to be able to diagnose it).
Ugh. I'm not sure that I'm comfortable giving the sensitivity its own diagnoses. I feel as if it's a secondary reaction to a chronic condition.
I'm "on the spectrum," which, of course, means that my K-12 days were a living hell. It was bad. I spent most of my early years, acting as a punching bag for any bully or proto-bully that was feeling the need to let off some steam.
Needless to say, I tended to be a bit "sensitive," during that period.
I also learned, early on, that I was absolutely terrible at determining motivation in others. I have learned to ask, explicitly, before assigning motive, so the sensitivity has extended far past my bully-magnet days.
These days, I'm fairly old, and have developed highly effective compensation/coping mechanisms, but it took a long time to get here.
All that, to say that, in my case, I feel as if the "sensitivity" was real, but as a secondary symptom of my "normal" autism lite.
"autistic individuals may have difficulty consciously processing social evaluative cues in the moment, meaning a child may not always recognize that what they are experiencing is a reaction to rejection, even while the physiological load of it is very real"
Alexythemia is like a that, I can have anxiety without realizing it, all I see is that my hands are shaking, blood pressure rises but in the head I'm like whatever, I don't notice.
However alexythemia also means no psychological reaction to physical emotion sensations.
I would interpret this like some subconscious processing of social cues does occur in this case and it does trigger inner changes,but why it occurs does not make it into consciousness, so the alexythemia hides the reason for the body sensation but the sensation is strong enough to be noticeable and the lack of understanding for the strong reaction can cause people to flip out.
I am not rejection sensitive at all btw, too dense to give a shit but its interesting.
> When adults consistently praise a child’s intelligence rather than their process or effort, mistakes stop feeling like normal setbacks and start feeling existential.
Isn’t this a good reason to stop using the term “gifted”? Isn’t it now widely acknowledged that effort (among other things like creativity and self-conception) actually is part of intelligence?
“Gifted” children are historically identified and classified via IQ tests (typically with the threshold IQ >= 130 - though the definition of what ‘gifted’ should mean is being debated), and using “gifted” for smart kids emerged and was popularized in the 1920’s when IQ tests were being developed by people who basically believed in eugenics, in the heritability of intelligence, and they wanted to identify the kids with the smart genes. [1] Using language like ‘profoundly gifted’ and ‘genius’ for high IQ has always been (mis)leading since IQ is a ranking, not an absolute measure of intelligence.
I just searched and found an interesting recent paper arguing that ‘gifted’ is problematic and attached to science that is no longer valid, and should be improved or replaced. [2]
> Isn’t it now widely acknowledged that effort (among other things like creativity and self-conception) actually is part of intelligence?
That sounds wrong? Like I found engineering courses at university easy, and never put in any effort or studied, but still got As on exams where other people who I know worked very hard got Cs. Maybe working hard is important for outcomes, but clearly it's a different phenomenon from intelligence.
The Wikipedia article you linked also mentions that high IQ people literally have measurably different brain structures.
Intelligence is also known to be highly heritable (twin studies), and we do have a fairly large set of identified genes now that contribute, though generally none has a very strong effect, and apparently in many cases, there's multiple genes that need to interact, so it's not like you can just identify "the smart gene."
That paper you link doesn't seem to actually say anything. Like they're saying that we should have more specific terminology because different "gifted" kids need different things, but it would seem to me that what you are saying is exactly the cause of that issue. Previously we said that if you have a certain IQ, you are gifted. If we expand the scope of that to be gifted in a bunch of different ways, then it becomes a non-specific descriptor that entails different needs and therefore becomes unhelpful for figuring out support services.
Like, you can also be amazing at music or art, you can be a hard worker, etc. That just means something different from having high intelligence. But high intelligence does exist. I would expect that if somebody's a hard worker, moving more quickly might overwhelm them as they eventually run out of hours in the day and can't keep up with the work. A high intelligence person, by contrast, can quickly grasp topics, so it's not really very much work for them to move at a high pace, and in fact it might cause them to become more engaged.
I had rejection sensitivity growing up. It was a rather negative experience. At the time, I would have traded it away for pretty much anything. As an adult however, I wonder if whatever aspect of my personality led to the rejection sensitivity also led to certain “benefits” in terms of the ability to achieve various things I wanted to (via correlated traits).
If I could trade away just the rejection sensitivity, I would. If I had to trade both the rejection sensitivity along with the correlated traits, I’m not so sure that I would in fact. This sort of decision is obviously very individual however. The tradeoffs may not be worth it for many.
I recognize many of these behaviors from my childhood. Fortunately I’ve grown out of most of them. These ways of framing issues and feedback are very valuable, even in adult life.
An almost trifecta. I am almost gifted, autism and adhd ( or add, you wouldn’t call me hyperactive…). My trick was to “use” my autism to filter out rejection clues. I am still sensitive in a sense, can get obsessed over detail of something that could be perceived as a rejection, but I actively refuse parsing anything as such. People tell me I am over-confident to a fault.
Very interesting. I’m in the same boat with a little more hyperactive and a little less autism. I never learned the filtering thing and I feel nearly as sensitive and doubtful as I did as a kid. It leaves me to dwell on everything and rarely make firm decisions, so I have the opposite problem.
That's the wrong baseline. If you start out oblivious that people are telling you things (with their expression, or with the noises they're making) you get that filter for free. The work is in _not_ filtering out such things. First you have to realise that's a thing (somehow? good luck with the bootstrap), then learn to pay attention, then try to make sense of the result.
The "hyperactive" part of ADHD is kind of a misnomer, or at least doesn't mean hyperactive in the way that most people understand the word. Think of it more as a tendency to hyperfocus on specific things while completely ignoring other things.
Can someone explain whether these are physiological / chemical issues, or whether they are a matter of the things your brain "knows", your neural network, and therefore can be transformed by the power of thoughts?
In other, more blunt terms, is this a "hardware" or a "software" issue?
Ugh. I hate the whole trope of "gifted children". Most of them (well, us) are high functioning autistics. And the worst phrase that plagued us all school years was "you have soooo much potential".
the perfectionism and need for control is very true.
I think with the rejection and criticism it's not so much about the actual criticism but the idea of what the other person now thinks/operates on, while they might gloss over it, you might assume the worst case scenario and think that now they're against you and you have to win them over again
I'd say in general the concepts of "it's not a big deal" "it's probably nothing major" etc. don't seem to register
> a nervous system built to detect and process signals quickly and deeply
Is this even true? Is there a measurable physical difference in the medium that accounts for this, or is this just an abstract process that could be but isn't necessarily related to biological processes? A different way to think, a more mature intrapersonal relationship...
This article seems to have several humans below giving attention to AI generated output. I'd prefer not to give my attention to it, unless the author had been ethical and transparent and stated up front that was AI generated.
Even the core idea, 'rejection sensitivity' is acknowledged not to be a diagnostic entity: so then how can we make definitive comparisons? Maybe clinical gestalt... but the author is not trained to see and evalaute patients.
> Why It Happens: The Mechanics Underneath the Reaction
And then don't talk about Mechanics, but instead no citations just guess. For anyone that actually wants something to go learn more about checkout the frequency of NCAH and the resulting blunted cortisol response as one thing that is influencing this.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06102-y#MOESM3 Plasmalogen, B5, 12-HETE, Androsterone sulfate, etc are all related to the functioning of the HPA-Axis.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19598235/ <- CYP11B1 specifically here
Anecdotally: I worked at a software company that had free snacks in the office kitchen and would always chuckle how the salt snacks would run out first. The connection being NCAH can result in less aldosterone which helps regulate salt in the body.
Vibe writing may be an improvement. I doubt frontier models would go along with whole language reading instruction without a tremendous amount of pushback.
For those not in the know, a generation of children were taught to read sans phonics. They were told to do things like guess at words based on pictures or context clues. Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.
Large swathes of education research are extremely questionable due to things like limited or no ability to be reproduced, circular references, or just straight up fraud.
The more that something that falls under the moniker of “education research” is built on the foundation of a more traditional (and typically more rigorous) academic discipline, the less likely that it is bogus research (e.g., Howard Gardner’s core research on multiple intelligences, which was science based on aphasic patients), versus the derived works on MI, many/most of which are bunk that he does not endorse).
> Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.
This is just a cloze exercise. These can have a legitimate role in a learning environment when used appropriately.
> Give me two paragraphs on the benefits of whole language reading instruction. Don't refer to other reading instruction methods or compare/contrast, just focus on the positives.
And got, with no pushback,
> Whole language reading instruction emphasizes making reading meaningful, engaging, and connected to students’ real experiences. By surrounding children with rich, authentic texts—such as stories, poems, informational books, and student-created writing—it encourages them to see reading as a purposeful form of communication rather than simply an academic task. Students are invited to use context, prior knowledge, illustrations, language patterns, and their understanding of meaning to engage with texts. This can help foster curiosity, comprehension, confidence, and a positive identity as a reader. Because students often have opportunities to choose books and respond personally to what they read, whole language instruction can also support motivation and a lasting enjoyment of reading.
> Whole language instruction also integrates reading with writing, speaking, and listening, helping children experience literacy as an interconnected set of communication skills. Classroom activities may include shared reading, read-alouds, journal writing, storytelling, discussion, and collaborative projects, allowing students to develop literacy in varied and socially meaningful contexts. Teachers can build instruction around students’ interests and developmental needs, creating opportunities for creativity, self-expression, and deeper thinking about texts. This emphasis on authentic language use can strengthen vocabulary, comprehension, oral language, and awareness of how written language functions while helping students develop independence and confidence in using literacy throughout their daily lives.
Time to update your priors on how sycophantic frontier models are.
And CrazyStat's implication strikes me as still largely true, so I'll make it explicit: even frontier LLMs will still resort to sycophancy when there's sufficient contradictory information in their weights to reproduce only some of it in response to a user query. And the harnesses that LLM providers silently, invisibly integrate behind-the-scenes to counteract hallucination and syncophancy are definitionally patch-jobs at best. The latest models may be better when explicitly instructed or configured by default to search the web and pull sources into their context, but the root problem remains unsolved and can still rear its flattering head if you're not paying close attention.
[1]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100618772271
[2]: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
> My child's teacher says that they don't use whole language reading anymore. I learned that way and it worked great. Instead they're spending years on phonics when my kid can already read. They're crazy, right?
> No—they’re not crazy. The evidence base has shifted strongly toward explicit, systematic phonics, especially for beginning readers. Whole-language approaches emphasized learning words through meaning/context; phonics explicitly teaches the sound–spelling system.
> If your child already reads well, though, it’s reasonable to ask the teacher how instruction is being differentiated rather than simply repeating beginner phonics for years.
You redefine syncophancy too narrowly. Many (if not an outright majority of) everyday LLM users have neither the educational foundation nor skill to ask good, well-formed questions like the one you propose. We should consider syncophany in the scope of an average person's non-optimal use of LLMs. CrazyStat's prompt is something your average Joe will absolutely feed an LLM, and Joe will walk away with something very much like those plausible falsehoods. We have to think of and work against LLM syncophancy in the scope of how the hypothetical average person will use an LLM.
The poster is SEOing their substack and product (modulo). All their posts are either related to their product, their product's substack, or talks related to their product.
HN has been an SEO and content marketing target for years now, and existing HN moderation is increasingly failing to catch these attempts.
Heck, a bot account for The Register reached 66K karma and was undetected until a couple of us complained.
I'm "on the spectrum," which, of course, means that my K-12 days were a living hell. It was bad. I spent most of my early years, acting as a punching bag for any bully or proto-bully that was feeling the need to let off some steam.
Needless to say, I tended to be a bit "sensitive," during that period.
I also learned, early on, that I was absolutely terrible at determining motivation in others. I have learned to ask, explicitly, before assigning motive, so the sensitivity has extended far past my bully-magnet days.
These days, I'm fairly old, and have developed highly effective compensation/coping mechanisms, but it took a long time to get here.
All that, to say that, in my case, I feel as if the "sensitivity" was real, but as a secondary symptom of my "normal" autism lite.
Alexythemia is like a that, I can have anxiety without realizing it, all I see is that my hands are shaking, blood pressure rises but in the head I'm like whatever, I don't notice.
However alexythemia also means no psychological reaction to physical emotion sensations.
I would interpret this like some subconscious processing of social cues does occur in this case and it does trigger inner changes,but why it occurs does not make it into consciousness, so the alexythemia hides the reason for the body sensation but the sensation is strong enough to be noticeable and the lack of understanding for the strong reaction can cause people to flip out.
I am not rejection sensitive at all btw, too dense to give a shit but its interesting.
Isn’t this a good reason to stop using the term “gifted”? Isn’t it now widely acknowledged that effort (among other things like creativity and self-conception) actually is part of intelligence?
“Gifted” children are historically identified and classified via IQ tests (typically with the threshold IQ >= 130 - though the definition of what ‘gifted’ should mean is being debated), and using “gifted” for smart kids emerged and was popularized in the 1920’s when IQ tests were being developed by people who basically believed in eugenics, in the heritability of intelligence, and they wanted to identify the kids with the smart genes. [1] Using language like ‘profoundly gifted’ and ‘genius’ for high IQ has always been (mis)leading since IQ is a ranking, not an absolute measure of intelligence.
I just searched and found an interesting recent paper arguing that ‘gifted’ is problematic and attached to science that is no longer valid, and should be improved or replaced. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Overvi...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36278606/
That sounds wrong? Like I found engineering courses at university easy, and never put in any effort or studied, but still got As on exams where other people who I know worked very hard got Cs. Maybe working hard is important for outcomes, but clearly it's a different phenomenon from intelligence.
The Wikipedia article you linked also mentions that high IQ people literally have measurably different brain structures.
Intelligence is also known to be highly heritable (twin studies), and we do have a fairly large set of identified genes now that contribute, though generally none has a very strong effect, and apparently in many cases, there's multiple genes that need to interact, so it's not like you can just identify "the smart gene."
That paper you link doesn't seem to actually say anything. Like they're saying that we should have more specific terminology because different "gifted" kids need different things, but it would seem to me that what you are saying is exactly the cause of that issue. Previously we said that if you have a certain IQ, you are gifted. If we expand the scope of that to be gifted in a bunch of different ways, then it becomes a non-specific descriptor that entails different needs and therefore becomes unhelpful for figuring out support services.
Like, you can also be amazing at music or art, you can be a hard worker, etc. That just means something different from having high intelligence. But high intelligence does exist. I would expect that if somebody's a hard worker, moving more quickly might overwhelm them as they eventually run out of hours in the day and can't keep up with the work. A high intelligence person, by contrast, can quickly grasp topics, so it's not really very much work for them to move at a high pace, and in fact it might cause them to become more engaged.
If I could trade away just the rejection sensitivity, I would. If I had to trade both the rejection sensitivity along with the correlated traits, I’m not so sure that I would in fact. This sort of decision is obviously very individual however. The tradeoffs may not be worth it for many.
In other, more blunt terms, is this a "hardware" or a "software" issue?
I think with the rejection and criticism it's not so much about the actual criticism but the idea of what the other person now thinks/operates on, while they might gloss over it, you might assume the worst case scenario and think that now they're against you and you have to win them over again
I'd say in general the concepts of "it's not a big deal" "it's probably nothing major" etc. don't seem to register
Is this even true? Is there a measurable physical difference in the medium that accounts for this, or is this just an abstract process that could be but isn't necessarily related to biological processes? A different way to think, a more mature intrapersonal relationship...