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I guess Mensa may differ between countries a lot, even if some criticism seems common. example, reading somewhere in Asimov's autobiography about his first visit in Mensa, I just sighed, yeah it would be equally bad here, despite being a different country.
Please note that I don't have bad opinions about people with high IQ in general. Quite the other way round! My hypothesis is that (in some countries?) Mensa is not representative of that group, but rather of its somewhat problematic subgroup.
Officially, Mensa selects for:
But de facto, Mensa more or less selects for:
It is the latter two points that are problematic. If you are a high-IQ person well integrated in the high-IQ culture -- for example a computer science professor at a good university -- you are probably not going to join Mensa. Why would you? Your need to interact with smart people is already satisfied at your workplace. And you are too busy learning new stuff, doing research, teaching students, and having non-academic hobbies. On the other hand, if you are a high-IQ person doing some depressing nine-to-five job surrounded by normies, Mensa may seem very attractive. Thus the latter will be overrepresented in Mensa, compared with the base group of high-IQ people in general. What is worse, this may create a feedback loop, where the former will recognize Mensa as a group composed mostly by the latter, and will avoid it on purpose.
I have also seen many Mensans engaging in endless pissing contests. Instead of, dunno, changing the world, they keep bringing yet another puzzle, or in worse (but quite frequent) case, yet another crackpot explanation of theory of relativity and/or quantum physics, without actually being familiar with the very basics. Now again, imagine an actual physics professor joining them for an evening; he or she would run away screaming.
My local Mensa even seems to be sabotaging itself at every step. It's as if they try to keep the membership small. They have no blog; no recruitment; minimum cooperation with Mensas in other countries. It's as if they fear that if too many people join Mensa, the ones already there will stop being special. In a country with 5 mil people, the top 2% equals to 100 000 potential members; of those 10 000 potential members in the capital city. Yet the actual number is maybe 300 members country-wide, which means 10 - 20 of them meeting regularly at one place. If you are a student at a good university, you already have more high-IQ people around you at school! As if these people fail to understand that it's supposed to be about having a wide network.
A few random things I would do as a dictator of my local Mensa:
Have an official blog. Probably without comment section, because all the crackpots would immediately go there. Or perhaps a public blog, with a private comment section. This should take like one day to set up. Have some editors filter the content for quality, so it won't be full of e.g. conspiracy theories on youtube, just because an active Mensan happens to be a fan. Hope that one day a cool article will be shared on social networks, and people will want to join you.
Have two tiers of membership: paid and unpaid. In other words, if someone passes the IQ test, and wants to be recognized as a Mensa member, keep them in the fucking database, even if they refuse to pay the fee. Because Mensa is a network, and a value of a network generally increases with the number of nodes, even if the nodes don't contribute financially. (Why are people on Facebook? Because other people are on Facebook. Why do you have a phone? Because other people have phones.) Keep the unpaid members in a database, let them select the topics they are interested in, and send them various announcements and invitations -- it doesn't cost you anything extra. Don't let them vote if they don't pay the fees; but keep them connected.
Instead of each country playing on its own playground, recognize that the world is connected and people speak foreign languages. Create international websites. Or just use the existing infrastructure, such as Reddit -- create a subreddit with limited membership, when only people certified by their local Mensa can join. But don't make a subreddit per country; make a subreddit per language, with some people in more than one. With enough members, make a subreddit per language and topic. It is utterly stupid for a country with 20 - 50 active Mensans to pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist.
What I am trying to say here is that my local Mensa seems like they don't even try, and sometimes actively oppose any attempts to change the status quo, which a few years ago was "the same ten people keep meeting once in a month in a room, discussing latest conspiracy theories and crackpot quantum physics", but these days it's more like "once in a few months we invite a speaker from outside Mensa to tell us about some interesting topic" which is a huge improvement, mostly made by 1 very assertive and popular person.
Maybe the situation in other countries is different, but from what I heard, the endless pissing contests (yet another puzzle to solve), crackpot physics, and meta debates about IQ (without knowing the elementary facts about psychometrics, replacing them with random "opinions") seem to be everywhere. Perhaps the difference is that in some countries the member base is large enough that it also includes a few people who actually get things done.
I feel there should be an organization for highly intelligent people. I just think Mensa mostly fails at this goal.
I don't see a reason for the organization to have intelligence as membership criteria. There are people who used to be Mensa members in our local Lesswrong group and according to their impression the IQ according to them most people in our LW group would likely pass the entrance criteria of Mensa.
The Chaos Computer Club would be another organization full of intelligent people. The Chaos Computer Club happens to be a community that doesn't l... (read more)