Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

Re:Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorder... by btilly on Monday October 14, 2019 @07:38PM (#21254056)

I have long joked that Mensa membership indicates that you passed the IQ test and failed the intelligence test.

More seriously, Mensa membership selects for people whose main accomplishment in life is doing well on an IQ test. So they are at least somewhat smart. But if you look for people who have actual accomplishments, you'll find people who tend to also be smart but are more interesting to be around.

Note, this is not sour grapes. My test scores mean that I'm qualified for Mensa, but I've never been impressed enough by any Mensa member that I met to be interested.

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Re:Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorder... by kerkeslager on Monday October 14, 2019 @10:10PM (#21254966)

This was sort of my experience with Mensa. Their three purposes supposedly are:

1. to identify and to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity;

2. to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence;

3. and to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members.

It's not entirely clear to me how anything they do benefits humanity (1), the "nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence" seem to revolve around games for them which is a pretty meaningless measure of any form of intelligence I care about (2) and while I'm not a member so I can't say whether it's stimulating to them, I can certainly say that all the materials I've come across from Mensa have soon bored me(3). So from where I sit, Mensa fails on two of their purposes, and only succeeds in their third because of a technicality in their wording.

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Re:Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorder... by mcv on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @05:39AM (#21256901)

Mensa seems to have a pretty bad reputation in the US. I never had much opinion about and didn't know any Mensa members until my sister joined. She meets loads of interesting people there. They have game weekends where they play all sorts of interesting board games, but also in other activities it's nice to be around people who think a bit like you do.

I've never felt the need to join Mensa because I studied CS and AI, and all my friends from there are probably about as smart as I am, so I already have plenty of people to relate to, but she was always very interested in sport, which probably attracts a different crowd (though she's working in IT now).

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Re:Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorder... by cs02rm0 on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @06:26AM (#21257136)

My test scores meant I was qualified for Mensa too, I could've taken up the membership when offered as a kid but declined at the time.

Eventually I took the quick test which suggested I should take the longer test as a young adult looking to bolster my CV (résumé). Narrowly missed out and before I was able to submit again I had enough on there not to give it much thought again for me. An IQ test was part of the qualification process for the first job I took out of university, something I've not seen since.

I think my eldest son's probably at least as bright as I am, so this sort of thing has been on my mind again. We try and give him a breadth of experience - he does a lot of rugby (completely non-contact at his age), running and other sports, some child adventure centres, music lessons, scouts soon, etc. But I don't see too much wrong with adding Mensa as a small part in the context of a larger picture.

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