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Reporter Goes to Mensa conference, Misses the Point
New York magazine recently published an article about Mensa, “My Week with America’s *Smartest People,” by Eve Peyser. She attended Mensa’s Annual Gathering in July, wrote 2,800 words about what a nice time she had, and concluded, “But if my time at the Mensa Annual Gathering taught me anything, it’s that being ‘smart’ and doing well on tests have virtually nothing to do with each other.”
How did this well-meaning writer miss so much about what made the AG enjoyable for her? I’ve been a Mensa member for a long time. Rereading, I could see how her expectations colored how she interpreted what she saw and heard.
Actually, being intelligent – whatever she meant by “smart” – and doing well on tests specifically designed to measure intelligence have virtually everything to do with each other. That is, the tests work. That wouldn’t mean much, it’s nearly a tautology, but the significance of the tests is that measured intelligence is highly correlated with major life outcomes – for better or worse. All else being equal – though it seldom is – higher IQ is associated with better outcomes.
For one thing, I think Peyser was unfamiliar with the real-world importance of IQ. She uncritically quoted from an interview with Dr. Adrian Owen, lead researcher on a 2012 study of IQ. “When we looked at the data, the bottom line is the whole concept of IQ — or of you having a higher IQ than me — is a myth,” Owen said. “There is no such thing as a single measure of IQ or a measure of general intelligence.” I think she misunderstood what Owen meant. That study identified three major components of intelligence – short-term memory, reasoning and verbal facility. Yes, those are all distinguishable. But they’re also all highly correlated, and all are reflected in an IQ test score.
She goes on to say, “Mensa’s members seemed to be, on average, as dumb as the general populace,” She based that on several sessions she attended where someone offered an opinion that Peyser thought was dumb. Smart people commonly believe some dumb things, that’s not news. I won’t belabor the point here, but Ricochet had a two-part podcast in January, hosted by Steve Hayward with guests Charles Murray and Steve Sailer (https://ricochet.com/podcast/powerline/a-conversation-with-charles-murray-and-steve-sailer-pt-1/) which I recommend if you haven’t heard it.
But my Mensa experience also offers some clues. I joined in 1977 when my son started kindergarten, because I had read somewhere that it was sort of a support group for parents of very smart kids, and I thought someone was going to need a support group when he and the schools encountered each other. I didn’t, as it turned out, and I wasn’t an active member, but I kept my membership because I thought Mensa was a Good Idea in principle.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1992 – new job, in a state where I’d never lived and knew no one, just divorced – and decided to check out the local Mensa group by attending an open house in a nearby suburb. The person who answered the door welcomed me, and said, “You’re new, aren’t you?” I asked him how he knew. “You knocked,” he said.
Then he asked me a few questions, and having learned I taught for a year in Shanghai, introduced me to someone who had been a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Thailand. I didn’t know anything about Chinese agriculture, but as a conversation starter it was worlds apart from the weather and TV football. I had a great time, and kept going back. I attended half-a-dozen Regional Gatherings while I lived in California, and have been to four AGs. Where I live now, in Minnesota, I edit the local newsletter, and I’m looking forward to our first RG since pre-covid. (Many regional gatherings are open to non-members, if you’re interested.)
Peyser’s introductory anecdote is about meeting Kimberly Bakke, “basically Mensa royalty,” she writes. I never met Kimberly, except maybe as a baby, since I did know her mother Cookie Bakke from several of those California RGs. How did Peyser end up talking with Kimberly, among 1,100 people attending? Well, she went to a session on polyamory, met someone there who’s a friend of Kimberly’s, and introduced her.
She notices that a common thread among her conversations at the AG is that Mensa is a place where they fit in, where they found “their people,” where the crowd gets their jokes. She thinks that is a good thing, but she doesn’t quite get why people would need it. She writes, “I have never in my life struggled to find smart friends who get my jokes, … but high IQ is not in the top ten or 20 or 100 qualities I look for in a friend or community.”
Many intelligent people are already in social communities where they mostly know other intelligent people – college faculty, for example. It’s a safe bet that pretty nearly anyone with a Ph.D. could qualify for membership, but they rarely do because they already know lots of Mensa-eligible people, so why bother?
That’s related to another significant fact: Nothing about Mensa is representative. The qualification is scoring in the top 2% on any of a large number of IQ tests used professionally by psychologists. SAT and GRE scores no longer count, but when they did, before the scoring was “recentered” in the 1990s, the qualifying score was 1250.
Of the 6 million Americans who could join Mensa if they wanted to, less than 1% are current members. Of the current members, less than 2% attended the AG. Generalizing about “Mensa members” from such a small sample is a fallacy, on the same scale as generalizing about Americans based only on Mensa members. Danish IQ researcher Emil Kierkegaard has a recent Substack post, at https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/the-mensa-fallacy, on exactly this error, a study conducted among about 600 Mensa members in Europe, which found higher rates of mental illness among the study subjects and presented it as information about highly intelligent people.
Kierkegaard’s post reviews the extensive history of this error.
He also links (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.26.22275621v1) to a paper presented at the 2022 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), in Vienna, Austria, in July 2022. That paper used UK Biobank data to examine the difference in the prevalence of mental health disorders between individuals with high (7,266 people) and average (252,249) general intelligence. Those in the higher group (2 standard deviations above the population mean) were less likely to suffer from general anxiety and PTSD, and no more likely to suffer from other mental disorders.
I knew psychologist Arthur Jensen when I lived in the Bay Area, and interviewed him for Mensa’s magazine. (The interview was spiked by a nervous editor.) Jensen said he did recruit Mensa members for some of his research, because they were easy to find and often willing to join a study. But he was far too careful a researcher to claim they were representative of all high-IQ people.
(Peyser’s article is https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/08/my-week-with-americas-smartest-people.html but it’s behind the paywall now.)
Published in General
Here’s the thing though. I’m not sure why “Intelligence” is something to form a group around, anymore than “Blond hair” or “left-handed” would be. It doesn’t mean common interests.
Or “race”.
Ever marvel that you’ve met somebody who just gets your jokes?
Of course, her conclusion was known years before. She’s reciting a politically necessary position that no evidence will change. Attending the gathering may have been just set-dressing, an opportunity to gussy up her position.
Note, that’s “getting more out of Ricochet” not “getting out of Ricochet.”
About which it has been said “you can check in, but you can never leave.”
If one communicates in memes, it’s an automatic expulsion from Mensa.
So far that’s never happened to me.
Ha! That’s a good one!
😂😂😂
Nice
That’s not funny.
I recall a bit of empirical evidence that supports your view, Doc. As I recall, Charles Murray’s latest book (Facing Reality) lists the average IQs of a variety of professions. Medical doctors and lawyers have the highest average, and I think that both were in the 117-118 range.
The Mensa cutoff is 132.
I don’t think that we can draw any conclusions about the percentages of doctors or lawyers who would qualify, because while IQ is normally distributed for the population as a whole, I would not expect it to be normally distributed among these groups.
Wisconsin.
Correct.
Does this mean that you can’t stand Thomas Sowell, or Charles Murray, or Jordan Peterson?
Right. There are probably very few doctors or lawyers with IQ’s under 100.
Which means, with an average of 116 (for example), that there can’t be very many high IQ’s, since there are no low IQ’s to drop your average.
You were joking?
A college girlfriend dragged me along to some Mensa function, then asked me if I wanted take the test. I demurred. Then she found out what my SAT score had been (nosy little minx). She told me I was already qualified and would only need to fill in a form. Then I flat-out refused.
Not correct. They will be normally distributed in any sub-population, just with a different mean and sd.
Oh, and welcome, Linda.
Beware of @arahant, for he is a menace.
So cruel – the man is this close to getting his Humility Coin.
Unless people with lower IQ’s would have difficulty getting into medical or law schools. That selection bias will shift your curve.
But that’s the same variable we’re already talking about. All else being held constant (i.e., random for our purposes), this will be a normally distributed curve about a higher mean.
I think of intellectuals as those whose career surrounds pontificating on a fairly wide range of general topics but who have not really made a mark notably in one area. New York Review of Books types. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I don’t put Sowell or Murray in that category, and am not familiar enough with Peterson.
Wouldn’t you expect the curve for medical/law school to have a much sharper rise on the left side than the fall-off on the right side?
More than shifting it, it can turn it into an abnormal distribution. I can’t find any data on it currently. I find comparisons of different occupations, but that only shows the mean and range, not the full distribution. Distributions can be bimodal, skewed, and many other types. Not all are normal.
Or, it could be one tail of a normal distribution. Show me the data.
It will be interesting to see where the theories on intelligence go in the future.
We’re beginning to understand the roll of myelin sheathing on neurons and the part it plays in habit formation–the more we do something, the more layers we add to the myelin sheathing for that habit.
There have also been some fascinating developments in preventing dementia, including Alzheimer’s. Of course, in the case of Alzheimer’s, we’d have to focus on strengthening the remaining part of the brain, the gray matter that is not deteriorating.
One interesting finding about music has been that it is in a somewhat protected part of the brain–people who have experienced some mental decline for some reason are able to recall music almost forever in their life. Fascinating stuff. When I was raising money for music education, I used to talk about this phenomenon, why its existence made it so important to teach classical music to young children. That said, Russell Crowe learned how to play the violin at nearly 40 years old to make Master and Commander in 2003. The key to continued intellectual growth throughout our life is to keep learning all the time. Atrophy happens in our brain just as it does everywhere else, perhaps.
I think we will find that intelligence can be increased significantly and, on the flip side, that it can also never develop fully due to external factors such as poor nutrition or stress or poor education.
One of the things that George H. W. Bush did during his presidency that I thought was positively brilliant was get behind funding for the Volen National Center for Complex Systems, the purpose of which is to study the most complex system of all: the human brain and mind. There was a great deal of political pressure on Bush to “do something about education.” He responded by saying that the federal government had only a very minimal role in education, that education was the purview of the states and cities and towns. He turned his attention to this research effort instead, which, if I were in charge of the world, is exactly what I would have done too.
The other person I admire in the field of education and intelligence is Howard Gardner who developed the theory of multiple intelligences, he is presently in the education department (at 79 years old). This is an interview with him that is interesting.
In short, there remains a lot of work to be done for us to fully understand intelligence and learning.
I don’t think Sowell would consider himself an intellectual. He seems fairly critical of such people.
Sowell, Murray, and Peterson are certainly public intellectuals. But TBA is a wag, and was joking in his distinction. If you have to argue about a joke, it’s blown by over your head, and maybe Mensa qualifications aren’t so great after all.
Amen.