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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
Note that I am talking only about what we should expect a sub-distribution to look like based on it being a subset of a larger normal distribution. The cut-off has already spoken by moving the mean — it doesn’t get two votes.
There may well be other factors at play. If so, then they may be identified via the usual methods, and what you should then find is that there is either an explicit hard limit (I have not heard of hospitals requiring a certain IQ), or some other peculiar selection. But it will not be solely due to the fact that high IQ professions feature higher IQs.
Not necessarily. It might only change the median and standard deviation. That’s what we have been discussing. Those who marginally qualify could still wash out before becoming a licensed and board-certified physician, and it could leave a normal distribution rather than the selected tail of the general populace. Other factors could also be in play.
Haven’t we all known smart people who can’t function, and allegedly dumb people who can easily out-perform them?
Attempts to measure intelligence and use it as a basis for worker value feels like commie eugenics garbage.
It does feel like that.
Unfortunately, it seems to work extremely well, in general. Which stinks. But there you go.
It does not determine worker value, but it may be one indicator of likely success. It can also be used wrong and abused. Just like a hammer can kill a person. It’s a tool with specific purposes.
No doubt there is plenty to read on this. The military, for one, since WWII or so. Anywhere that the hiring — and classification — actually matters.
Your aptitude tests show that you are epsilon grade, citizen. You have been assigned to waste extraction.
As a measure of human value, it’s commie garbage. As a basis for *employee* value, it’s reliable and valuable — in the aggregate.
Not to go all Goodwins law on this, but I don’t think anybody can reasonably say that Hitler, Stalin and Mao weren’t very intelligent people. They even spent a lot of time working out “moral reasoning”. But they fail pretty quickly on the “morals and ethics” grade.
Maybe not assigned, but they’re going to end up limited to certain areas regardless.
Otherwise… what? Let them stay in medical school forever, because they’re not smart enough to ever graduate?
Who said anything about medical school? I’m speaking generally.
I think that is one of the most preposterous claims I’ve ever seen someone make on Ricochet.
And they are outliers. So rare that they are famous. No doubt you saw my many references in this thread to individuals vs aggregates.
“Godwin’s”.
Isn’t that only true if people randomly selected to become Doctors or Lawyers, and then were culled for intelligence?
And “in the aggregate” means it is a probability with high correlation. There are always exceptions on both ends and in the middle. (This is to clarify for others, BDB. I suspect you know that.)
The MCAT and curricula at the schools take care of that.
My experience was in 1965, so I’m sure things have changed; as I have.
Same difference, isn’t it? If they’re not smart enough to do anything but something like waste extraction, what’s the alternative? Let them go to House-Painting School forever, maybe at taxpayer expense, because they’re not smart enough to ever graduate, but it’s what they WANT to do? Or maybe they just don’t WANT TO be in waste extraction? (Although that’s one reason why I think a “skid row” is actually good for society: so other people – especially children – can see examples of how NOT to live.)
I have found that people who consider themselves intellectuals often aren’t.
Right. That *is* the culling.
In fact, if a random stripe of people were selected as doctors, then tested and some cut-off were established, you would absolutely wind up with a non-normal distribution. It would be truncated normal distribution with an arbitrary limit.
It doesn’t even have to be a high correlation. Just so long as it’s positive, not negative (or trivially positive, margin of error etc).
Well, I was a consultant for 30+ years, in a tiny little segment of architecture. One day flying back from Saudi Arabia, my seatmate looked around the cabin and said, “I bet 60% of us here are consultants.”
What makes us think that a test can tell us this?
But it was designed by experts!
Yeah, I’ve had it up to here with “experts.”
“Experts say” is now just a joke.
Over a hundred years of excruciatingly documented experience with tests telling us *exactly* this.
The rest of this is just wind in this context, which I will bundle appropriately and save for retarding the progress of wayward ships-at-sea.
Do you doubt there is such a thing as intelligence? Do you think that it cannot be measured?
There are differences between intellect, knowledge and wisdom, right?
I don’t think there’s a perfect test for it, and I don’t think that the results of that test alone can tell us enough about a person to make the sort of judgments that are being suggested as its use.
And it all feels like something out of a dystopian novel. Say Brave New World, for one prominent example.
Hmmm. Sounds like you’re going somewhere with this. I don’t like being Socratized. I will stipulate the difference, of course.
I don’t know what are “the sort of judgements” that you allude to. IQ tests are good predictors of success in school. The more intelligence a job requires (abstract reasoning ability, let’s say) the better IQ tests predict success in that job. This may be an unpleasant fact to ponder, but the Blank Slate Theory is dead.
There are other important success factors besides intelligence, such as conscientiousness and honesty, but without sufficient intelligence there are jobs that one simply cannot do.