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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

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
  And yet there are a ton of folks who have watched many of his videos and have played tons of games and not made it to 1d. Including me, I'm just a lowly 4k. Maybe you're right, but my experience playing both in small local tournaments and a lot online has been that the folks 1d and above are pretty sharp generally.
- zardo 9y ago
  Even if it is a good indicator of intelligence, it's also a good indicator of dedication.
llamaz 9y ago
How good you are at Go (or chess for that matter) has no correlation with your IQ. There are plenty of examples of people extremely good at chess that struggle, seriously, with academics (e.g. world champion Jose Raul Capablanca, and the youtuber and grandmaster Eric Hansen). Kasparov doesn't have 180+ IQ, which is a common myth. At some point he took the test and it turned out he had a respectable but definitely sub-Mensa IQ.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  Richard Feynman, one of the most respected geniuses of our era, tested as only having an IQ of 125. IQ tests are far from perfect, to say the least. This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed. Feynman seemed to take glee in sharing his "low" IQ of only a 125. He was one of the smartest men on the planet in the last 100 years. Surely, we should defer to his opinion that the concept IQ is sort of a joke. ;)
  - fileeditview 9y ago
    It always struck me as crazy to represent all that is intelligence in one number. Also AFAIK many things such as "social intelligence" are not tested at all. I always smile at people putting that much weight into IQ numbers..
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      I usually cringe.
    - Banthum 9y ago
      The crazy thing you think people are doing is not actually being done. IQ is not intended to represent 'all that intelligence is'. It is simply one way to measure a cross section of particular capacities that are valuable in a modern society and are easy to test. E.g It doesn't attempt to measure the ability to track an animal, or remember the face of a person you met once last year. This test is of interest because it is strongly predictive of other things we do care about, like educational attainment, criminal behavior, economic outcomes, etc.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
I never applied to Mensa. A cousin of mine (that I barely knew) was in it. He encouraged me to apply on the theory that they had a small scholarship that would help me return to college. He felt my SAT scores would qualify me. I have seen some discussions on the internet that fit with your hypothesis that many people join Mensa to have their smarts validated. There are other ways to validate that, like getting additional college degrees. These other ways tend to result in real world achievement, like better jobs. CEOs and the like don't seem to spend a lot of time trying to get their smarts validated. They are too busy getting their business model validated. So, I tend to see Mensa the same way you do: It primarily appeals to people who need validation they are incapable of getting via other avenues, such as pursuing their Master's or PhD.
- throwaway808st 9y ago
  And by extension, people who need validation via pursuing PhDs in an artificial environment (academia) are often people who have trouble succeeding in the real world.
- croon 9y ago
  While I agree on your overall point that you should be using your mind for something productive rather than showing off, I have to note that getting degrees has nothing (edit: very little) to do with IQ. IQ might help you understand a subject better, but being focused, studying, planning, and having the motivation is what gets you degrees.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    I am medically handicapped and was also suicidal throughout high school. I had better test scores in high school than grades. I missed a lot of school and often failed to do homework. In most cases, past grades are a better predictor of future grades than test scores. But college was physically easier for me because I had more control over my schedule and was thus better able to accommodate my handicap. So my grades went up substantially, more in line with my high test scores. My health issues have long been a barrier to achievement. So this always gives me pause when trying to judge ability of other people. Maybe their poor performance says more about racism, sexism, an abusive childhood etc etc than it does about supposed innate ability. Maybe their good performance says more about getting social support, being born into the right family, etc than it says about innate ability. But I will note that the comment you replied to said nothing about IQ. I only spoke of a need for validation and that's it. I was quite careful to not suggest it had anything to do with intelligence or competence. I have spent quite a lot of my life failing to have a real career, failing to get taken seriously and failing to make much in the way of money. So there are ways in which I hunger for validation, yet Mensa does not appeal to me. I see it as mostly massaging one's ego and I would rather find actual solutions to my problems instead. Getting a serious career and adequate income etc will take my pain away. Validation from Mensa would be sort of like a painkiller, not a means to heal what ails my psyche. I am not interested in remaining a loser but getting adorned with some sort of phony crown implying that I am totes not a loser, really. Instead, I want to stop losing at life, even if no one else notices.
mrcsparker 9y ago
Just out of curiosity, which super hero did they pick? I would imagine that Superman wouldn’t have to be too bright but I don’t know much about his character.
- pkroll 9y ago
  Depending on who happens to be writing him, Superman ranges from "smart guy but not THAT smart" to super-genius level. He's the last of a race of genetically optimized people and his parents were scientists so, I'd go with "he's much, much smarter than Batman, but Batman's power is to always have planned for everything whether or not the writers thought of it at the time."
- thaumaturgy 9y ago
  I honestly don't remember. I dimly recall facepalming so hard that I woke up on the floor a little while later. There may've been a mild concussion.
bitwize 9y ago
Holy cow, that sounds so Sheldon Cooper it's physically cringe-inducing.
tomcam 9y ago
Very similar to my experience. That organization is a train wreck. I realized afterwards that joining them is like joining something called the Leg Club. You aren't bound by an interest in anything other than yourself, as opposed to, say, an environmental or tennis club.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
swiftting 9y ago
Your description of Mensa sounds exactly like the IQ obsession over on quora.com. Every week tons of posts about IQ. It’s the same questions over and over again, I really feel like the community over there has very low self esteem in regards to intelligence because they’re not on track to be the next mark zuckerberg.
gozur88 9y ago
>It really looked like the only thing the Mensa folks had going for them was having done well on a test. Maybe not even that. I don't know if it's still true, but Mensa used to accept anybody with a PhD. I used to know a not-at-all-brilliant woman who was a Mensa member by virtue of her doctorate in Library Science.

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
And yet there are a ton of folks who have watched many of his videos and have played tons of games and not made it to 1d. Including me, I'm just a lowly 4k. Maybe you're right, but my experience playing both in small local tournaments and a lot online has been that the folks 1d and above are pretty sharp generally.
zardo 9y ago
Even if it is a good indicator of intelligence, it's also a good indicator of dedication.

llamaz 9y ago

How good you are at Go (or chess for that matter) has no correlation with your IQ. There are plenty of examples of people extremely good at chess that struggle, seriously, with academics (e.g. world champion Jose Raul Capablanca, and the youtuber and grandmaster Eric Hansen). Kasparov doesn't have 180+ IQ, which is a common myth. At some point he took the test and it turned out he had a respectable but definitely sub-Mensa IQ.

DoreenMichele 9y ago
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected geniuses of our era, tested as only having an IQ of 125. IQ tests are far from perfect, to say the least. This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed. Feynman seemed to take glee in sharing his "low" IQ of only a 125. He was one of the smartest men on the planet in the last 100 years. Surely, we should defer to his opinion that the concept IQ is sort of a joke. ;)
- fileeditview 9y ago
  It always struck me as crazy to represent all that is intelligence in one number. Also AFAIK many things such as "social intelligence" are not tested at all. I always smile at people putting that much weight into IQ numbers..
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    I usually cringe.
  - Banthum 9y ago
    The crazy thing you think people are doing is not actually being done. IQ is not intended to represent 'all that intelligence is'. It is simply one way to measure a cross section of particular capacities that are valuable in a modern society and are easy to test. E.g It doesn't attempt to measure the ability to track an animal, or remember the face of a person you met once last year. This test is of interest because it is strongly predictive of other things we do care about, like educational attainment, criminal behavior, economic outcomes, etc.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

I never applied to Mensa. A cousin of mine (that I barely knew) was in it. He encouraged me to apply on the theory that they had a small scholarship that would help me return to college. He felt my SAT scores would qualify me. I have seen some discussions on the internet that fit with your hypothesis that many people join Mensa to have their smarts validated. There are other ways to validate that, like getting additional college degrees. These other ways tend to result in real world achievement, like better jobs. CEOs and the like don't seem to spend a lot of time trying to get their smarts validated. They are too busy getting their business model validated. So, I tend to see Mensa the same way you do: It primarily appeals to people who need validation they are incapable of getting via other avenues, such as pursuing their Master's or PhD.

throwaway808st 9y ago
And by extension, people who need validation via pursuing PhDs in an artificial environment (academia) are often people who have trouble succeeding in the real world.
croon 9y ago
While I agree on your overall point that you should be using your mind for something productive rather than showing off, I have to note that getting degrees has nothing (edit: very little) to do with IQ. IQ might help you understand a subject better, but being focused, studying, planning, and having the motivation is what gets you degrees.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  I am medically handicapped and was also suicidal throughout high school. I had better test scores in high school than grades. I missed a lot of school and often failed to do homework. In most cases, past grades are a better predictor of future grades than test scores. But college was physically easier for me because I had more control over my schedule and was thus better able to accommodate my handicap. So my grades went up substantially, more in line with my high test scores. My health issues have long been a barrier to achievement. So this always gives me pause when trying to judge ability of other people. Maybe their poor performance says more about racism, sexism, an abusive childhood etc etc than it does about supposed innate ability. Maybe their good performance says more about getting social support, being born into the right family, etc than it says about innate ability. But I will note that the comment you replied to said nothing about IQ. I only spoke of a need for validation and that's it. I was quite careful to not suggest it had anything to do with intelligence or competence. I have spent quite a lot of my life failing to have a real career, failing to get taken seriously and failing to make much in the way of money. So there are ways in which I hunger for validation, yet Mensa does not appeal to me. I see it as mostly massaging one's ego and I would rather find actual solutions to my problems instead. Getting a serious career and adequate income etc will take my pain away. Validation from Mensa would be sort of like a painkiller, not a means to heal what ails my psyche. I am not interested in remaining a loser but getting adorned with some sort of phony crown implying that I am totes not a loser, really. Instead, I want to stop losing at life, even if no one else notices.

mrcsparker 9y ago

Just out of curiosity, which super hero did they pick? I would imagine that Superman wouldn’t have to be too bright but I don’t know much about his character.

pkroll 9y ago
Depending on who happens to be writing him, Superman ranges from "smart guy but not THAT smart" to super-genius level. He's the last of a race of genetically optimized people and his parents were scientists so, I'd go with "he's much, much smarter than Batman, but Batman's power is to always have planned for everything whether or not the writers thought of it at the time."
thaumaturgy 9y ago
I honestly don't remember. I dimly recall facepalming so hard that I woke up on the floor a little while later. There may've been a mild concussion.

bitwize 9y ago

Holy cow, that sounds so Sheldon Cooper it's physically cringe-inducing.

tomcam 9y ago

Very similar to my experience. That organization is a train wreck. I realized afterwards that joining them is like joining something called the Leg Club. You aren't bound by an interest in anything other than yourself, as opposed to, say, an environmental or tennis club.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

swiftting 9y ago

Your description of Mensa sounds exactly like the IQ obsession over on quora.com. Every week tons of posts about IQ. It’s the same questions over and over again, I really feel like the community over there has very low self esteem in regards to intelligence because they’re not on track to be the next mark zuckerberg.

gozur88 9y ago

>It really looked like the only thing the Mensa folks had going for them was having done well on a test. Maybe not even that. I don't know if it's still true, but Mensa used to accept anybody with a PhD. I used to know a not-at-all-brilliant woman who was a Mensa member by virtue of her doctorate in Library Science.