Mensa themselves say they aim to take the top 2% of the population. This strikes me as too many to be useful. There are other high-IQ societies which are far more selective (Wikipedia’s Mensa page has a list), but none of them are household names.
Useful as evidence of smarts; useful as a community of smart people. I was a member many years ago, just to see what it was like. Finding insufficient reason to stay, I left.
A community has to have some sort of focus, a reason for its members to be there, or it doesn’t work as one. Being a bit brighter than the mass, and “enjoying each other’s company and participating in a wide range of social and cultural activities” (from their web site) strikes me as rather diffuse. The company was, like Eliezer described, like a small SF convention—but without the SF to provide the focus. I’ve been going to cons for a long time, but I only went to a few Mensa meetings.
When I was a member, I also went to a couple of AGMs, where intelligence was conspicuously not in evidence.
Your criticism seems to be that being in the top 2% doesn’t guarantee anything of interest. That’s true, but if you think of it as a first step, a mechanism for filtering the lowest 98% rather than selecting the top 2%, then it starts to seem potentially more useful, depending on your motivations in the first place.
Mensa themselves say they aim to take the top 2% of the population. This strikes me as too many to be useful. There are other high-IQ societies which are far more selective (Wikipedia’s Mensa page has a list), but none of them are household names.
Useful for what?
Useful as evidence of smarts; useful as a community of smart people. I was a member many years ago, just to see what it was like. Finding insufficient reason to stay, I left.
A community has to have some sort of focus, a reason for its members to be there, or it doesn’t work as one. Being a bit brighter than the mass, and “enjoying each other’s company and participating in a wide range of social and cultural activities” (from their web site) strikes me as rather diffuse. The company was, like Eliezer described, like a small SF convention—but without the SF to provide the focus. I’ve been going to cons for a long time, but I only went to a few Mensa meetings.
When I was a member, I also went to a couple of AGMs, where intelligence was conspicuously not in evidence.
Your criticism seems to be that being in the top 2% doesn’t guarantee anything of interest. That’s true, but if you think of it as a first step, a mechanism for filtering the lowest 98% rather than selecting the top 2%, then it starts to seem potentially more useful, depending on your motivations in the first place.