This and other threads on Mensa brings out the worst display of cognitive biases in the comments. Most people have no lived experience with (or even much expos

This and other threads on Mensa brings out the worst display of cognitive biases in the comments. Most people have no lived experience with (or even much exposure to) Mensa yet they have this unexamined notion that it is must be necessarily bad because its basic premise is flawed. Then there are those who generalize from very small sample sizes and exaggerate. These are the most cringey commenters. The basic premise is flawed. Yet there are lots of things in life that seem like fundamentally bad ideas but are actually ok in reality — it is from reality that we must learn from, not the mental model. I was part of Mensa in my youth because I was developmentally gifted and it gave a community of peers older than me that made feel less alone. There were very few settings at the time where a younger person could interact with older people who were smart and generally successful in life. The tribe of nerdy recluses with no social skills is definitely represented but they were not the majority — again people with small and biased samples would not know this. The small sample size problem is at the root of many cognitive biases but most people lack the discipline to withhold judgment and look for disconfirming evidence.