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I've met plenty of incredibly intelligent people in my life, and very few mentioned Mensa. Those who did had a yearning for being recognized as smart or excepti

I've met plenty of incredibly intelligent people in my life, and very few mentioned Mensa. Those who did had a yearning for being recognized as smart or exceptional. Perhaps using Mensa membership to draw inferences about smart people in general isn't statistically applicable. It could be that people who want to be recognized as smart have those mental issues, which other smart people don't.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
torstenvl 9y ago
Mensa is not exceptionally smart. It's 2% of all people. [removed a distracting point about social group size.] Most people are likely to know someone who could qualify for Mensa. Mensa is quite smart, but I wouldn't use the word "exceptional." If you write a method that throws an exception on 2% of all inputs, I think maybe you're doing it wrong. 2% is still too common, in my opinion, to be considered an exception.
- yorwba 9y ago
  You are making quite the assumption there about the number of one's friends and acquaintances.
  - torstenvl 9y ago
    True, it's an assumption, but my assumption is rooted in Dunbar's numbers.
    - ajmurmann 9y ago
      Dunbar's Number is about our cognitive ability to keep social relationships, not about how many social relationships people actually have. The later should be expected to vary widely by society, age, where you live etc. I don't understand what military unit sizes tell you about number of friends and acquaintances someone has.
      - chrisseaton 9y ago
        Some argue that a platoon or troop is a natural number of men you can get to know well, and a company or squadron the number you can be well acquainted with. Not saying that’s true, just explaining.
        ajmurmann 9y ago
        That makes a lot of sense, just like Dunbar's Number does. However, at least from my personal, anecdotal experience my number of friends and acquaintances isn't currently capped or was ever capped by my cognitive capability of being well acquainted with them, but rather by not actually meeting that many people and having very little time and energy to get to know the people I meet better. And on top of that things like moving result in weakened or lost relationships.
        dnautics 9y ago
        > my number of friends and acquaintances isn't currently capped or was ever capped by my cognitive capability of being well acquainted with them, but rather by... having very little time and energy to get to know the people I meet better. What's the difference between "cognitive capacity" and "time and energy"? I have a near photographic memoy for faces and an exceptional ability to remember details about people's lives; I have to limit the number of friends o have for precisely that reason, my cognitive capacity to care would overshadow just about everything else in life.
        ajmurmann 9y ago
        Well the difference is this: If I'm sitting at home every evening because I'm too exhausted from work or come home late every evening and thus have very little social interaction is a very different limiting factor than what caps the number of people in a military unit that I can keep social bounds with. In fact I might be very effective at keeping good working relationships with a large number of coworkers. That doesn't translate at all though to having many friends. At one point in my career I knew everyone in an office of about 100 people by name and had frequently very pleasant conversations with then. Yet I had fewer casual (as opposed to close) friends in the city I lived in than can be counted on one hand.
    - nordsieck 9y ago
      You're assuming that IQs are randomly distributed across relationships. They're not. People are assortative in their associations.
      - colek42 9y ago
        The assumption that people reading HN are above average intelligence is probably accurate.
        dsacco 9y ago
        It’s easy to believe that, but if you can’t reasonably quantify it based on anything empirical, why bother? It’s a cognitive blind spot to assume communities you’re a part of have a higher mean intelligence than the general population :)
        sametmax 9y ago
        I'm part of a lot of communities, and clearly HN is one of the rare where I am, more often than not, answered in comments by people more intelligent than me. So even if I'd consider myself an average Joe, it seems a good sign that HN has quite a lot of intelligent people. At least more than average.
        mrfusion 9y ago
        Hi!
        SubiculumCode 9y ago
        While I cannot be certain that a randomly selected HN participant is above average intelligence, the average and is clearly is at least 1 SD above average, and the median is not 100. The quality of posts, in-depth knowledge expressed, nuanced, fluid, and flexible thinking, makes this a community in which I wish to participate, and this is coming from someone who frequently communicates with academic researchers and intellectuals in his daily life.
        deleted 9y ago
    - bfuller 9y ago
      that's an upper limit but not a lower
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- kurthr 9y ago
  Indeed... there are many more selective: http://miyaguchi.4sigma.org/BloodyHistory/history.html http://miyaguchi.4sigma.org/BloodyHistory/history.html Some might wonder what relevance this soap-opera-ish tale has to the stated goals of the high-IQ societies. I would argue that in order to understand what these societies are about, one should understand their history, including the very human motivations that drove their foundings. Although I agree that depending on your circles (college anyone?) 98th %ile isn't much of a stretch. Further, not having a 2% one-sided outlier in your 30-60 person uncorrelated sample set ranges from 45-70%... but you're not likely to know it, and they're not likely to be Mensa members. Wanting to be a member, may be a bigger indicator for the disorders question.
- johnhenry 9y ago
  In this case, the word "exceptionally" may have some connotations associated with it that you've applied, but it really should be treated as your "quite".
- waster 9y ago
  There are actually specific terms to label intelligence based on the number of standard deviations from the norm (100 IQ). Two to 3 SD's is highly gifted; 4-5 is exceptionally gifted; and 6+ SD's is profoundly gifted. The numbers change depending on what IQ instrument is used, but the terms for those SD brackets remain the same. I forget what Mensa's IQ threshold is and what IQ instruments they accept as measures (I was a Mensa member for a year about 10 years ago, but they took my only available score, a GRE score, as proof), but it's possible that "exceptionally smart" is technically correct, based on SD thresholds.
  - ben_w 9y ago
    Just to add, by definition 6σ is one in a billion. It isn’t just “profoundly gifted”, but rather “there are seven of you”.
    - barry-cotter 9y ago
      IQ is a fat tailed distribution. There are way more people in the tails than the test’s definition and morning would suggest.
      - ben_w 9y ago
        IQ is defined to be a normal distribution. Intelligence, on the other hand, isn’t. This is one of the problems with IQ as a measure of intelligence. IQ 150 doesn’t mean doing mental arithmetic faster than IQ 100 by the same margin that IQ 100 beats IQ 50, only that IQ>150 is as rare as IQ<50.
thaumaturgy 9y ago
I tried out Mensa briefly some years ago. I was just looking for new social circles. I have some pretty sharp older buddies that I play Go with weekly, they're a blast to talk to, and I thought I'd find some more of that. It was bad. Really, really bad. The local chapter had a tiny handful of post-retirement members. I knew a ton of folks in my community at the time, a bunch of them were smart, active people, and none of them were members. It really looked like the only thing the Mensa folks had going for them was having done well on a test. The newsletter was hilarious. One of them had a feature article on which was the better superhero, Batman or Superman? The article and the responses to it mostly centered around which of the fictional comic book characters had a bigger IQ. The writing was juvenile (and not because it was written by kids), and there was a regular feature that would pick some kind of trouble in the world and ask readers how they'd solve it. None of the responses ever argued from any kind of expertise or domain knowledge or offered any new insight; the theme tended to be, "well, I'm pretty smart, so this seems like an easy problem to solve..." The discussion on HN on any given topic -- and the topics themselves for that matter -- tends to be a heck of a lot more interesting. I keep coming back here because of the people that just randomly show up in discussions who are actual experts on the topic. That doesn't really happen in Mensa. My takeaway from that whole thing pretty much agrees with what you're saying. People who are Mensa members are members because their IQ is really important to them to an unhealthy extent. That would seem to correlate well with other psychological and physiological problems. Probably anybody who reaches the level of 1 dan or higher in Go has at least a Mensa-level IQ. Researchers wanting to do further work in this area could try polling those folks too.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  > Probably anybody who reaches the level of 1 dan or higher in Go has at least a Mensa-level IQ. I've never been able to get past 4k. But from having watched a bunch of Bats go lectures on YouTube, he says (and proves) that it's possible to get well past 1d on direction of play alone without having any problem solving ability. https://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin/playlists
  - thaumaturgy 9y ago
macos9point1 9y ago
A lot of people join Mensa not to brag about it. Mensa can be a really good group to join to meet interesting people and make new friends. Lots of members don't discuss their membership outside of Mensa meetups.
- throwaway808st 9y ago
  In my experience, the people interested in Mensa are people who need validation and aren't necessarily the sort to brag. Usually people whose identity is tied up in being intelligent. These are the sort of people who have trouble succeeding, because they're unable to take a risk (lest it somehow indicate they weren't smart). You know the sort, love online debates about bikesheds, but can't seem to make anything happen in the real world.
dailyvijeos 9y ago
Mensa most often attracts the deeply insecure and insufferably arrogant. I worked with several IITians and multiple PhD/MD’s... how many joined Mensa? Zero (0). Sure, IITians reminisced about rank every now and then, but they didn’t have social clubs about it. But hey, to each their own. And if it reduces the density of people I’d rather avoid everywhere else, expand Mensa with gusto.
rybosome 9y ago
I tried Mensa a few years ago when I was at a crossroads in my life and looking for something new. It was a profoundly disappointing experience. My involvement was limited to the official Mensa Facebook group, which was deeply toxic and rude. I couldn’t believe how childish and confrontational the discussions were, and I quickly lost interest in getting worked up every time I poked my head in. My take on it was that people who were active members had a chip on their shoulder about their intelligence, and believed themselves to be titans who were not obligated to suffer fools. There are many intelligent people in this world, the vast majority of whom are not in Mensa - and the better for it.
MR4D 9y ago
If I had a choice between having a reputation as being very smart or having a reputation as very hard working, I’d choose the latter. 25 years in the working world have utterly convinced me that being hard working is a much higher contribution to civilization than being super smart.
- tigershark 9y ago
  I don't think so. A single super smart person has a far far bigger impact on society than billions of hard working people. Our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the smart people. Seriously, I never thought that I would read something like this on HN...
  - lucio 9y ago
    It's not that simple. You can be super smart and (by that reason) choose to retire from society, or worst. The unabomber had a high IQ, for example. High IQ PLUS hard work (Conscientiousness, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH9-xsuPiUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH9-xsuPiUk) is what can make a big difference in the world.
  - nnq 9y ago
    > Our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the smart people. Yeah, except that the guy who "was smart enough to think about agriculture but not hard working enough to practically invent it" didn't help much towards moving away from hunting to something better. Probably people like him only got others killed in various direct or indirect ways. Also, "recruiting others to implement your ideas" is also really hard work: you're not going to convince others to do what you thought with just a few smart sounding remarks, and if they'd be smart enough to understand you arguments and explanations, they would have invented the new thing themselves. So being witty out of the question, argumenting and explaining out of the question, the smart guy who invented agriculture probably had to work his ass off until he proved others he can do at least as well as by spending the same amount of time hunting! Ergo our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the hard working people! (And yeah, if enough people work hard, some of them would also happen to be smart since IQ is mostly randomly distributed.) Seriously, get your shit together and work your ass off if you want your smarts to have a non-negative impact on anything (including on yourself). EDIT+: Also, you picked a very ironically unfortunate example: in general, hunting can actually require much higher intelligence than doing basic agriculture in many cases (although inventing agriculture from scratch is a different thing).
mirimir 9y ago
Yes, it's a biased sample. The title should be "Mensa membership associated with mental and physical disorders".
WhitneyLand 9y ago
The whole concept is repulsive to me, almost like having a club for white people. The birds of a feather approach to connecting people is great when it’s based around an interest or activity, but not when it’s solely based on some crude 21st century approximation of what too many people equate with human value. Why not just have events based around particle physics if that’s your interest? Oh that’s right, they do. The point is why rule people out who’s IQ is one point below a cut off that may turn out to be your most interesting conversation or new best friend. Nothing against those here who have applied. I know there are just different perspectives on it and many view it as benign.
lamby 9y ago
Christopher Hitchens did a great essay on Mensa, etc: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1996/09/hitchens-199609 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1996/09/hitchens-199609

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

torstenvl 9y ago

Mensa is not exceptionally smart. It's 2% of all people. [removed a distracting point about social group size.] Most people are likely to know someone who could qualify for Mensa. Mensa is quite smart, but I wouldn't use the word "exceptional." If you write a method that throws an exception on 2% of all inputs, I think maybe you're doing it wrong. 2% is still too common, in my opinion, to be considered an exception.

yorwba 9y ago
You are making quite the assumption there about the number of one's friends and acquaintances.
- torstenvl 9y ago
  True, it's an assumption, but my assumption is rooted in Dunbar's numbers.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    Dunbar's Number is about our cognitive ability to keep social relationships, not about how many social relationships people actually have. The later should be expected to vary widely by society, age, where you live etc. I don't understand what military unit sizes tell you about number of friends and acquaintances someone has.
    - chrisseaton 9y ago
      Some argue that a platoon or troop is a natural number of men you can get to know well, and a company or squadron the number you can be well acquainted with. Not saying that’s true, just explaining.
      - ajmurmann 9y ago
        That makes a lot of sense, just like Dunbar's Number does. However, at least from my personal, anecdotal experience my number of friends and acquaintances isn't currently capped or was ever capped by my cognitive capability of being well acquainted with them, but rather by not actually meeting that many people and having very little time and energy to get to know the people I meet better. And on top of that things like moving result in weakened or lost relationships.
        dnautics 9y ago
        > my number of friends and acquaintances isn't currently capped or was ever capped by my cognitive capability of being well acquainted with them, but rather by... having very little time and energy to get to know the people I meet better. What's the difference between "cognitive capacity" and "time and energy"? I have a near photographic memoy for faces and an exceptional ability to remember details about people's lives; I have to limit the number of friends o have for precisely that reason, my cognitive capacity to care would overshadow just about everything else in life.
        ajmurmann 9y ago
        Well the difference is this: If I'm sitting at home every evening because I'm too exhausted from work or come home late every evening and thus have very little social interaction is a very different limiting factor than what caps the number of people in a military unit that I can keep social bounds with. In fact I might be very effective at keeping good working relationships with a large number of coworkers. That doesn't translate at all though to having many friends. At one point in my career I knew everyone in an office of about 100 people by name and had frequently very pleasant conversations with then. Yet I had fewer casual (as opposed to close) friends in the city I lived in than can be counted on one hand.
  - nordsieck 9y ago
    You're assuming that IQs are randomly distributed across relationships. They're not. People are assortative in their associations.
    - colek42 9y ago
      The assumption that people reading HN are above average intelligence is probably accurate.
      - dsacco 9y ago
        It’s easy to believe that, but if you can’t reasonably quantify it based on anything empirical, why bother? It’s a cognitive blind spot to assume communities you’re a part of have a higher mean intelligence than the general population :)
        sametmax 9y ago
        I'm part of a lot of communities, and clearly HN is one of the rare where I am, more often than not, answered in comments by people more intelligent than me. So even if I'd consider myself an average Joe, it seems a good sign that HN has quite a lot of intelligent people. At least more than average.
        mrfusion 9y ago
        Hi!
        SubiculumCode 9y ago
        While I cannot be certain that a randomly selected HN participant is above average intelligence, the average and is clearly is at least 1 SD above average, and the median is not 100. The quality of posts, in-depth knowledge expressed, nuanced, fluid, and flexible thinking, makes this a community in which I wish to participate, and this is coming from someone who frequently communicates with academic researchers and intellectuals in his daily life.
        deleted 9y ago
  - bfuller 9y ago
    that's an upper limit but not a lower
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
kurthr 9y ago
Indeed... there are many more selective: http://miyaguchi.4sigma.org/BloodyHistory/history.html http://miyaguchi.4sigma.org/BloodyHistory/history.html Some might wonder what relevance this soap-opera-ish tale has to the stated goals of the high-IQ societies. I would argue that in order to understand what these societies are about, one should understand their history, including the very human motivations that drove their foundings. Although I agree that depending on your circles (college anyone?) 98th %ile isn't much of a stretch. Further, not having a 2% one-sided outlier in your 30-60 person uncorrelated sample set ranges from 45-70%... but you're not likely to know it, and they're not likely to be Mensa members. Wanting to be a member, may be a bigger indicator for the disorders question.
johnhenry 9y ago
In this case, the word "exceptionally" may have some connotations associated with it that you've applied, but it really should be treated as your "quite".
waster 9y ago
There are actually specific terms to label intelligence based on the number of standard deviations from the norm (100 IQ). Two to 3 SD's is highly gifted; 4-5 is exceptionally gifted; and 6+ SD's is profoundly gifted. The numbers change depending on what IQ instrument is used, but the terms for those SD brackets remain the same. I forget what Mensa's IQ threshold is and what IQ instruments they accept as measures (I was a Mensa member for a year about 10 years ago, but they took my only available score, a GRE score, as proof), but it's possible that "exceptionally smart" is technically correct, based on SD thresholds.
- ben_w 9y ago
  Just to add, by definition 6σ is one in a billion. It isn’t just “profoundly gifted”, but rather “there are seven of you”.
  - barry-cotter 9y ago
    IQ is a fat tailed distribution. There are way more people in the tails than the test’s definition and morning would suggest.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      IQ is defined to be a normal distribution. Intelligence, on the other hand, isn’t. This is one of the problems with IQ as a measure of intelligence. IQ 150 doesn’t mean doing mental arithmetic faster than IQ 100 by the same margin that IQ 100 beats IQ 50, only that IQ>150 is as rare as IQ<50.

thaumaturgy 9y ago

I tried out Mensa briefly some years ago. I was just looking for new social circles. I have some pretty sharp older buddies that I play Go with weekly, they're a blast to talk to, and I thought I'd find some more of that. It was bad. Really, really bad. The local chapter had a tiny handful of post-retirement members. I knew a ton of folks in my community at the time, a bunch of them were smart, active people, and none of them were members. It really looked like the only thing the Mensa folks had going for them was having done well on a test. The newsletter was hilarious. One of them had a feature article on which was the better superhero, Batman or Superman? The article and the responses to it mostly centered around which of the fictional comic book characters had a bigger IQ. The writing was juvenile (and not because it was written by kids), and there was a regular feature that would pick some kind of trouble in the world and ask readers how they'd solve it. None of the responses ever argued from any kind of expertise or domain knowledge or offered any new insight; the theme tended to be, "well, I'm pretty smart, so this seems like an easy problem to solve..." The discussion on HN on any given topic -- and the topics themselves for that matter -- tends to be a heck of a lot more interesting. I keep coming back here because of the people that just randomly show up in discussions who are actual experts on the topic. That doesn't really happen in Mensa. My takeaway from that whole thing pretty much agrees with what you're saying. People who are Mensa members are members because their IQ is really important to them to an unhealthy extent. That would seem to correlate well with other psychological and physiological problems. Probably anybody who reaches the level of 1 dan or higher in Go has at least a Mensa-level IQ. Researchers wanting to do further work in this area could try polling those folks too.

Alex3917 9y ago
> Probably anybody who reaches the level of 1 dan or higher in Go has at least a Mensa-level IQ. I've never been able to get past 4k. But from having watched a bunch of Bats go lectures on YouTube, he says (and proves) that it's possible to get well past 1d on direction of play alone without having any problem solving ability. https://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin/playlists
- thaumaturgy 9y ago

macos9point1 9y ago

A lot of people join Mensa not to brag about it. Mensa can be a really good group to join to meet interesting people and make new friends. Lots of members don't discuss their membership outside of Mensa meetups.

throwaway808st 9y ago
In my experience, the people interested in Mensa are people who need validation and aren't necessarily the sort to brag. Usually people whose identity is tied up in being intelligent. These are the sort of people who have trouble succeeding, because they're unable to take a risk (lest it somehow indicate they weren't smart). You know the sort, love online debates about bikesheds, but can't seem to make anything happen in the real world.

dailyvijeos 9y ago

Mensa most often attracts the deeply insecure and insufferably arrogant. I worked with several IITians and multiple PhD/MD’s... how many joined Mensa? Zero (0). Sure, IITians reminisced about rank every now and then, but they didn’t have social clubs about it. But hey, to each their own. And if it reduces the density of people I’d rather avoid everywhere else, expand Mensa with gusto.

rybosome 9y ago

I tried Mensa a few years ago when I was at a crossroads in my life and looking for something new. It was a profoundly disappointing experience. My involvement was limited to the official Mensa Facebook group, which was deeply toxic and rude. I couldn’t believe how childish and confrontational the discussions were, and I quickly lost interest in getting worked up every time I poked my head in. My take on it was that people who were active members had a chip on their shoulder about their intelligence, and believed themselves to be titans who were not obligated to suffer fools. There are many intelligent people in this world, the vast majority of whom are not in Mensa - and the better for it.

MR4D 9y ago

If I had a choice between having a reputation as being very smart or having a reputation as very hard working, I’d choose the latter. 25 years in the working world have utterly convinced me that being hard working is a much higher contribution to civilization than being super smart.

tigershark 9y ago
I don't think so. A single super smart person has a far far bigger impact on society than billions of hard working people. Our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the smart people. Seriously, I never thought that I would read something like this on HN...
- lucio 9y ago
  It's not that simple. You can be super smart and (by that reason) choose to retire from society, or worst. The unabomber had a high IQ, for example. High IQ PLUS hard work (Conscientiousness, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH9-xsuPiUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH9-xsuPiUk) is what can make a big difference in the world.
- nnq 9y ago
  > Our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the smart people. Yeah, except that the guy who "was smart enough to think about agriculture but not hard working enough to practically invent it" didn't help much towards moving away from hunting to something better. Probably people like him only got others killed in various direct or indirect ways. Also, "recruiting others to implement your ideas" is also really hard work: you're not going to convince others to do what you thought with just a few smart sounding remarks, and if they'd be smart enough to understand you arguments and explanations, they would have invented the new thing themselves. So being witty out of the question, argumenting and explaining out of the question, the smart guy who invented agriculture probably had to work his ass off until he proved others he can do at least as well as by spending the same amount of time hunting! Ergo our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the hard working people! (And yeah, if enough people work hard, some of them would also happen to be smart since IQ is mostly randomly distributed.) Seriously, get your shit together and work your ass off if you want your smarts to have a non-negative impact on anything (including on yourself). EDIT+: Also, you picked a very ironically unfortunate example: in general, hunting can actually require much higher intelligence than doing basic agriculture in many cases (although inventing agriculture from scratch is a different thing).

mirimir 9y ago

Yes, it's a biased sample. The title should be "Mensa membership associated with mental and physical disorders".

WhitneyLand 9y ago

The whole concept is repulsive to me, almost like having a club for white people. The birds of a feather approach to connecting people is great when it’s based around an interest or activity, but not when it’s solely based on some crude 21st century approximation of what too many people equate with human value. Why not just have events based around particle physics if that’s your interest? Oh that’s right, they do. The point is why rule people out who’s IQ is one point below a cut off that may turn out to be your most interesting conversation or new best friend. Nothing against those here who have applied. I know there are just different perspectives on it and many view it as benign.

lamby 9y ago

Christopher Hitchens did a great essay on Mensa, etc: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1996/09/hitchens-199609 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1996/09/hitchens-199609