Notes

Well... you think faster. And that's about it. But it's a LOT faster. As in, when you're in school, learning content several years ahead much faster than your peers are learning grade-level stuff.

Is life easier? In an academic sense, yes, of course. In high school I was taking dual enrollment and I actually ran out of college math classes we were allowed to take. Even in the hardest (Multivariable Calculus) I was a straight-A student without studying.

Disadvantages? Absolutely.

Consider: Assuming for the moment that a person's apparent intelligence will generally match their IQ (on which I am not qualified to make a general determination, apart from my own anecdotal evidence), an IQ of 149/SD 15 (mine) or above is held by 1 in 2,000 people. Now let's say you go to a high school with a total student body of 300.

That means there is, on average, a single person with that intelligence level in every seven complete groups of students (all four grades). That means there's a new one in the freshmen class every twenty-eight years, and a twenty-four year gap between their graduation and the next.

In all likelihood, this twenty-year-old school hasn't seen someone else like me in its entire existence, and won't see one again until I'm in my forties. (The former idea appears to be experimentally valid: I'm the only person in the school's history to go past AP Calculus AB).

It can be incredibly lonely, going through those years of school without knowing a single person who's similar to you in that regard.

Boredom is also a serious issue. If nothing's a challenge, how are you supposed to keep entertained? (It's possible, but difficult).

Oh, and there's the old "I already know where your argument's going to lead and I had a response for that ready ten minutes ago, so please shut up and let me reply already." You can either sit there for another several minutes of predictable points or be rude and cut them off.