Open thread, May 29 - June 4, 2017

Thomas

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

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1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

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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 let crackpots on it's stage. I heard there years before the Snowden releases that the NSA has access to German internet traffic and it turned out to be right. Julian Assange whose talks I heard to times at the congress when he could still travel to Berlin (and the congress was in Berlin). You have a bunch of people who can really clearly think about real-politics and who's opinions of political opinions I trust more than the opinion of some random journalist.

As a third group the debating club at university is also full with very smart people. No one of the groups needs IQ as a criteria.

My idea is that a Mensa-like organisation should essentially do two things.

1) Allow you to easily filter for high intelligence. You have no problem to find e.g. a highly intelligent programmer, because programming and high intelligence are related. But if you want to talk about something different, which is not related to intelligence, but you still prefer talking to highly intelligent people, it could be difficult to find them. But for this to work correctly, you need a lot of members, like thousands. So that for many traits X there is a sufficient subset... (read more)