5 ms·

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

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.

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.