People who boast about their IQ are losers. -Stephen Hawking For those who don’t know, MENSA is an organization where the requirement for membership is scoring in the top 2% in an IQ test. The number of eligible people worldwide would therefore be around 160 million. MENSA has
Have you ever considered that there might be smart people who currently are not members of a university who long for stimulating, non-virtual, live conversations?
People who may live in rural or isolated areas where intellectual activity is almost non-existent,and so finding the few ones with intellectual interests becomes a need?
It is the snobish idea that if you are not in academia pursuing a Nobel Prize or have not graduated from the Ivy League with honors, you cannot possibly be smart.
Your prejudice against the idea that authors or actors can be smart bears the odd, given your left-wing tendencies (not very inclusive, agree?).
True, there are people who brag about IQ (pointless in my opinion), but then there are people who brag about publications and PhDs. Vain people exist everywhere.
I know a kid who is 10 years old, has been diagnosed with autism, and has an IQ of 145. His psychologist suggested Mensa as a way for him to feel included, less isolated, and find kids with similar interests. Maybe you went to a great elementary school with a great gifted program that made that unnecessary. Many children don't have that luxury.
> I think this at least backs up the hypothesis that people with obvious intellectual accomplishments tend to stay away from MENSA. It also shows that high intelligence is not a surefire shield against weird or wrong opinions or bad behaviour.
Given that you need to pay an annual subscription fee to stay a part of MENSA I think actually smart people would be less likely to join it. I'm pretty sceptical that IQ is a good measure of intelligence. Nassim Taleb has a good article on it ( https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 ) with a personal highlight being:
> Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook)
which reminded me of the countless times I've taken a test and had to figure out not what "the" right answer was, but what the teacher thought that the only answer was.
Your article completely misses the point.
Have you ever considered that there might be smart people who currently are not members of a university who long for stimulating, non-virtual, live conversations?
People who may live in rural or isolated areas where intellectual activity is almost non-existent,and so finding the few ones with intellectual interests becomes a need?
It is the snobish idea that if you are not in academia pursuing a Nobel Prize or have not graduated from the Ivy League with honors, you cannot possibly be smart.
Your prejudice against the idea that authors or actors can be smart bears the odd, given your left-wing tendencies (not very inclusive, agree?).
True, there are people who brag about IQ (pointless in my opinion), but then there are people who brag about publications and PhDs. Vain people exist everywhere.
I know a kid who is 10 years old, has been diagnosed with autism, and has an IQ of 145. His psychologist suggested Mensa as a way for him to feel included, less isolated, and find kids with similar interests. Maybe you went to a great elementary school with a great gifted program that made that unnecessary. Many children don't have that luxury.
> I think this at least backs up the hypothesis that people with obvious intellectual accomplishments tend to stay away from MENSA. It also shows that high intelligence is not a surefire shield against weird or wrong opinions or bad behaviour.
Given that you need to pay an annual subscription fee to stay a part of MENSA I think actually smart people would be less likely to join it. I'm pretty sceptical that IQ is a good measure of intelligence. Nassim Taleb has a good article on it ( https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 ) with a personal highlight being:
> Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook)
which reminded me of the countless times I've taken a test and had to figure out not what "the" right answer was, but what the teacher thought that the only answer was.