you have a gift and i am very ill

it is very true that we always seek to explain things and make sense of others' behaviour. yet once it's all explained and clear, we take both our eyes and minds off it and it is quickly forgot. hence if i marvel at your whatever achievement which seems totally impossible and against every kind of sense (e.g., you are admitted to the varsity at the tender age of 9, or you receive 9As in HKCEE as a 14-yr-old and are subsequently admitted to a certain medical school), you'd better not tell me HOW you make it and keep maintaining that you are gifted and have a certain talent for public examination. wait..... maybe not. you'd better not call it a talent for public examination because it then sounds shallow. how about a talent for doing academic work which is rightly reflected in your HKCEE grades. yes this sounds better.

why? it is because if you tell me you spend 14 hours a day over a period of two years labouring over designated textbooks, working on previous papers and drilling for the examination, plus my own understanding that this kind of public examination probably reflects motivation more than anything else, then your achievement is all of a sudden explained. my curiosity thaws and now it all makes good sense why you are where you are doesn't it? then i stop calling you talented or gifted and recognise that you are after all not that special. it becomes trivial.

hence in ancient times when thunder and lightning were not quite explained, people threw them into a big collection bag containing all God's doings. you may argue, well, isn't "God" an explanation? yes, absolutely. "God" as an explanation works similarly as "talent" and "gift". these are ultimate explanations; you don't go further. so why are you admitted to the varsity at 9? because you are gifted. what is a gift? i don't know. a gift is a gift. hence this is ultimate.

if you can describe Z in terms of some sort of relationship between X and Y, then X, Y, and their relation would constitute an explanation for Z. after this operation Z ceases to be mysterious, given that X and Y are common, unbizzare concepts which already exist in our common sense, such as studying hard and practising for an examination. but if Z can't be re-described by other more common concepts, it is ultimate, like talent and God. and if Z is not generally found or observed in our everyday living, then we marvel at it. hence why such and such talents hit almost all the local newspaper headlines.

on the other side of our evaluation system we have different "diseases". hence a naughty child could be suffering from "ADHD", a lazy and hence poor-reading lad could be having "dyslexia", an unhappy person is struggling through her "depression" which has certain clearly defined "symptoms".

guess what, an all time correlate of dyslexia is family income. this translates into: a child coming from a poor familiy is more likely to read poorly than a child coming from a rich family. i myself have come across many studies which actually fail to match dyslexic with "normal" children on family income. therefore in the real world money goes with reading ability; it is very difficult to come up with age-matched children who are from similar socioeconomic backgrounds yet display different reading behaviour.

(but beware: i am trying to (mis)lead you into thinking that money, or the lack of it, CAUSES reading problems. what about a correlation between family income and, say, influenza? it feels quite different doesn't it?) 

sad, but real. if you recognise this, then "dyslexia" ceases to sound special, because now it's explainable by money the power of which no one would doubt. this is not unlike explaining talent by hard work and practice.