I look a look at Mensa sometime in the 80s in the US, mostly through their publications. I was very underwhelmed—they had a very bad habit of coming up with a set of plausible-sounding definitions and basing an argument on them.
I went to an event, and I could get at least as good conversation at a science fiction convention.
On the other hand, one of my friends, an intelligent person, was very fond of DC area Mensa, and it doesn’t surprise me if there’s a lot of local variation. I also know another very smart person who’s also very fond of Mensa. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that she also lives in the DC area.
If the best company you’ve found was a math club, perhaps you should be looking for mathematicians and/or math clubs.
I suspect that local Mensas are different. But I also think that none of them even approaches the LW level. Maybe it’s a question of size—if you have say 100 Mensans in one city, 10 of them can be rational and have a nice talk together, aside from the rest of the group. If you only have 10 Mensans in one city, you are out of luck there.
The mathematician club I was in as a child was one of a kind; and the lady who led it doesn’t do this anymore. She has her own children now, and she works as a coordinator of correspondence competitions; which is not the same thing as having a club. Unfortunately, there was no long-term plan… If I could somehow restart this thing, I would try something like Scouts do (okay, I don’t know much details about Scouts, but this is my impression); I would encourage some members to become new leaders, so that the whole thing does not fall apart when the main person no longer has time; I would try to make a self-reproducing system.
There is an interesting background of that mathematical club. It started with a Czech elementary-school teacher of mathematics, Vít Hejný, who taught himself from books some psychology of Piaget and based on this + his knowledge of math + some experimenting in education he developed his own method of teaching matematics. He later taught it to a group of interested students; one of them was the lady who organized my club. But until recently, there was no book explaining the concepts. And even with the book, this man was a psychology autodidact, so he invented a lot of unusual words to describe the concepts he used, so it would be difficult to read for someone without a first-hand experience. And most of the psychologists wouldn’t grok the mathematical aspect of the thing, because it is a theory of “how people think when they think about mathematical problems”. So I am afraid the whole art will be forgotten. (Perhaps unless someone translates his book to English, substituting his neologisms with the proper psychological terminology, if there are exact equivalents.)
Also, that mathematical club had some “kalokagathia” aspects; we did a lot of sport, or logical debates. That’s not the same thing as mathematicians working alone, or math students spending their free time on facebook. Sometimes I think the math (on the olympiad level) simply worked as a filter for high-quality people—selecting both for intelligence and a desire to become stronger. I am not aware of any math club existing in my city, but people doing math competitions could be the proper group. I just need to make them meet at one place.
I look a look at Mensa sometime in the 80s in the US, mostly through their publications. I was very underwhelmed—they had a very bad habit of coming up with a set of plausible-sounding definitions and basing an argument on them.
I went to an event, and I could get at least as good conversation at a science fiction convention.
On the other hand, one of my friends, an intelligent person, was very fond of DC area Mensa, and it doesn’t surprise me if there’s a lot of local variation. I also know another very smart person who’s also very fond of Mensa. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that she also lives in the DC area.
If the best company you’ve found was a math club, perhaps you should be looking for mathematicians and/or math clubs.
I suspect that local Mensas are different. But I also think that none of them even approaches the LW level. Maybe it’s a question of size—if you have say 100 Mensans in one city, 10 of them can be rational and have a nice talk together, aside from the rest of the group. If you only have 10 Mensans in one city, you are out of luck there.
The mathematician club I was in as a child was one of a kind; and the lady who led it doesn’t do this anymore. She has her own children now, and she works as a coordinator of correspondence competitions; which is not the same thing as having a club. Unfortunately, there was no long-term plan… If I could somehow restart this thing, I would try something like Scouts do (okay, I don’t know much details about Scouts, but this is my impression); I would encourage some members to become new leaders, so that the whole thing does not fall apart when the main person no longer has time; I would try to make a self-reproducing system.
There is an interesting background of that mathematical club. It started with a Czech elementary-school teacher of mathematics, Vít Hejný, who taught himself from books some psychology of Piaget and based on this + his knowledge of math + some experimenting in education he developed his own method of teaching matematics. He later taught it to a group of interested students; one of them was the lady who organized my club. But until recently, there was no book explaining the concepts. And even with the book, this man was a psychology autodidact, so he invented a lot of unusual words to describe the concepts he used, so it would be difficult to read for someone without a first-hand experience. And most of the psychologists wouldn’t grok the mathematical aspect of the thing, because it is a theory of “how people think when they think about mathematical problems”. So I am afraid the whole art will be forgotten. (Perhaps unless someone translates his book to English, substituting his neologisms with the proper psychological terminology, if there are exact equivalents.)
Also, that mathematical club had some “kalokagathia” aspects; we did a lot of sport, or logical debates. That’s not the same thing as mathematicians working alone, or math students spending their free time on facebook. Sometimes I think the math (on the olympiad level) simply worked as a filter for high-quality people—selecting both for intelligence and a desire to become stronger. I am not aware of any math club existing in my city, but people doing math competitions could be the proper group. I just need to make them meet at one place.