Okay, so I’m doing this in backwards order. Sue me.

Charlie, since I don’t know much about prodigy-dom, what effects (other than emotional leftover from being treated as one) does being a prodigy have as an adult. Super-high intelligence? Just another smart guy?

I’m not sure how to answer that. My IQ is up in the 3.5σ range, say 170 on one of the scales. (I don’t remember which one, just the number.) High enough that when I took the Mensa test to keep a friend company, I started getting phone calls saying “Are you sure you don’t want to come to a meeting?”

I’ve never had anyone ask me that at a job interview, but I’ve had plenty of people say that I was “intimidatingly smart”, or “overqualified”. Or say “Charlie, you’re really smart, but….”

And I sure don’t see myself as being in any obvious way “smarter” than, say, the people I talk to on here.

But my point about there being “nothing sadder than being a 50 year old child prodigy” isn’t that it’s inherently sad — I can see how I might have given that impression, but it’s not what I meant — just that its no more important as a 50 year old than, say, having been the high school football star. If that’s what defines you at 50, you’re Ed Bundy.

Do you have any asperger’s syndrom symptoms (not uncommon among good computer programmers, apparently)?

I score pretty high on the various Asperger’s screening tests I’ve seen, but right at the borderline for them to claim a “diagnosis”. I just thought I was a geek.

Is there a higher level of psychopathology (I believe there is among high IQ people in general)?

That’s an interesting question too. I believe that there is a higher incidence of depression in particular (Jamie, you reading this?), but from what I know about the pathogenesis of depression, that could be an effect of the childhood of a “gifted child” rather than intelligence per se.