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taw comments on What do fellow rationalists think about Mensa? - Less Wrong
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Comments (32)
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.
If you send out a lot of CVs, you should experiment: mention Mensa on half of the CVs. Please report results.
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.