I was thinking whether Mensa could be used for CFAR purposes (raising the rationality waterline), and I would like to hear your opinions. Also, I am interested how many LWers are in Mensa, and how many think that Mensa is useful for anything more than satisfying social needs of its members.

For me personally, Mensa was a huge disappointment. (I am not sure how much that reflects only Mensa in Slovakia, and how much applies for other countries too. I know many people in other countries are disappointed too, but it also seems to me that Mensa in other countries does more useful activities.) The easiest way to explain it is that when I first heard about Mensa, I imagined something like CFAR Minicamps. It did not occur to me that someone would spend their energy to create a worldwide organization for highly intelligent people, only to do... nothing. Because that is exactly what most Mensa members do, in my experience. They meet, they talk about something, but usually only to signal their own superiority, then they solve puzzles. Everyone wants to be a leader; almost no one is willing to be a team player. So all they do is confirm each other's superiority, and then lament about why the world does not hold highly intelligent people in higher esteem.

Yet I am somehow not ready to give up on the idea that selecting people with high IQ is potentially very useful. Many intelligent people are irrational. But still, higher intelligence should mean higher chance to become rational, and higher possible benefits from rationality. I mean, if you want to make someone interested in LW-style rationality, you should have better chances with "random person with IQ over 130" than with "random person". It's just that both of those chances are rather low. Selecting highly intelligent people could be a good first step toward some goal -- the problem is that for Mensa, selecting them is the goal. (To avoid misunderstanding: I don't think that a person must be Mensa-level to benefit from rationality. I just think that if you can do the IQ-testing cheaply, e.g. by outsourcing it to Mensa, your resources could be better spent on people who pass the test, than on random people.)

If many people have similar experience like me (tried to find rationality in Mensa, became disappointed, and eventually left), perhaps we could try to gain these people for rationality. Don't search among long-term Mensans; look at the fresh ones. They are preselected for IQ, and also for wanting some new experience -- we could offer them an alternative to Mensa, while outsourcing most of the costs of finding them.

This is the outline of a plan: Create a local rationalist organization. Become members of Mensa (even if you don't care about Mensa). Create a "special interest group" within Mensa. Get information about when the new members are tested. Go to the meetups with the new members, and try to recruit them for your organization. (If your organization is a subgroup of Mensa, there is nothing wrong about contacting new Mensa members, right?) But besides this, just ignore Mensa, and keep your group informally open for non-Mensans too. -- Simplified version: Create flyers about CFAR, with links to LessWrong and "Facing the Singularity", and give them to the new members.

Expected result: cheapest way to find new fellow rationalists in your area. Do you think it could work?