What do fellow rationalists think about Mensa?

taw

What do fellow rationalists think about Mensa? — LessWrong

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In my experience, putting Mensa on your CV doesn't really signal what you think it signals. It's not a terribly high bar (relative to a lot of other signaling mechanisms), so to me, adding Mensa to the CV signals that (1) you're insecure enough in your other accomplishments that you think you need the Mensa membership or that it adds something useful to the signal you're sending, and (2) you're un-smart enough to think the credentials required for admittance are in fact impressive. Neither of these is a signal you want to send.

In other words, all the truly smart people are too smart for Mensa, so it's probably a waste of your time. You don't want to signal that you are smart enough for Mensa; you want to signal that you are too smart to care about it.

[anonymous]17y40

In other words, all the truly smart people are too smart for Mensa, so it's probably a waste of your time. You don't want to signal that you are smart enough for Mensa; you want to signal that you are too smart to care about it.

I am reminded of Kieran Healy's description of Mensa, "the organization for highly intelligent people who are nevertheless not quite intelligent enough not to belong to it."

It is second-order statements such as erosophe's and Healy's that signal real intelligence. ;-)

6loqi17y

That's a difficult signal to send. And, in my experience, attempts to signal that one is too smart to care about Mensa end up saying pretty much the same thing as the membership signals.

3taw17y

Well, these are two issues - CV padding, and Mensa as such. As far as I can tell people reading CVs just scan for keywords and other stupid signals, and completely fail the Turing Test of understanding their content. They believe that things like "years of experience using technology X" are the awesomest signal, and as far as I can tell they're slightly negatively correlated with job performance in software development (the smart people switch technologies every couple of years as a rule), unlike IQ which is known to be highly positively correlated with job performance. CV readers are just an obstacle you need to get past. So putting something like that might very well work as far as I can tell. And I intended to give an actual percentile as extrapolated from stddev, which seems to be quite considerably higher than Mensa low threshold. This is slightly dishonest, as the test is not calibrated to this range, but naively speaking 152 on mean 100 stddev 16 means top 0.06%, which is the number I intended to stick on my CV, saying it's British Mensa-supervised test to make it sound more valid.

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