Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
I’ve been following but generally not participating, but the time has come to foist a pet, perhaps worthless, idea upon you.
Consumption of mass media over a generation or two has made it easier to sound/appear intelligent without necessarily being intelligent. It’s kind of like learning a language by exposure. There are not a lot of people out there anymore who sound dumb (I know, Madame VP) in the sense of being inarticulate. If I recall correctly, that used to be an obstacle because people who weren’t very smart did not express themselves very well and did not sound intelligent.
Now, even “celebrities” can sound articulate while spouting their harebrained ideas.
I’ll check back in later. Toodles!
Right on both counts. There is no perfect hammer, but there are types of hammers that are better for different jobs. Claw-peen hammers are meant for different jobs than ball-peen hammers or sledge hammers. Likewise, a carpenter or ebonist might use a number of types of saws to get a particular job done. An IQ test should be one tool in evaluating potential students or employees for hiring or promotion. But there should also be other tools.
It could be and has been abused that way. But that’s because humans are subject to human nature, and many aren’t smart enough to understand how to use a hammer, let alone an IQ test.
Using a test and a test alone to say “You are not suitable for this job” or “You are best suited to this job.” Humans are not so easily pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.
Back when I was living in Connecticut, some guy sued a police department for not admitting him to the police academy because his IQ score was too high.
I haven’t paid attention to the theory of multiple intelligences for a very long time, but I did see an online lecture by Jordan Peterson in which he says that Gardner’s theory has been pretty solidly refuted; that g can be found behind each of his posited intelligences.
If anyone said that, I missed it.
This is true.
In general I would not expect to hear any reasonable person do that.
However, limits can be reasonably set: The American military has a lower limit on IQ, because below a certain level of intelligence there are simply no jobs in the military that you can be trained to do. I would expect that just above that limit it is uncertain whether or not you can be sufficiently trained.
Nicolas Lemann’s “The Great Sorting” contains a fascinating examination of the history of intelligence testing in the context of the development of the SATs.
Okay, keep giving him jobs he can’t do, until he gets fired all the way down to “waste extraction.”
Doesn’t matter to me.
And there are other factors, of course, which the Left also wants to ignore.
They were probably being sued by a lot more minorities who were not being admitted because their scores were too low. So they take the path of least resistance: quotas!
As you climb the “academic ladder” IQ tests are replaced by others: SAT and ACT, GRE and MCAT and LSAT and so on. And then there are grades, interviews, letters of recommendation, and so on.
Few, if any, employers now administer IQ tests thanks to the Civil Rights Act and to the Griggs vs. Duke Power decision: “Disparate impact” and all that. Instead, most employers rely on proxy measures of intelligence such as a high school or college degree. (They demonstrate that you were not too horribly stupid or lazy or badly behaved.)
That used to be fairly valid, not so much any more. Many places are removing requirements for getting a high school diploma, kids may not even be actually expected/required to show up.
Not that was ever reported. The guy lost his suit.
Hmm I’m having trouble thinking of another reason why someone with a too-high IQ would be turned down, for that reason. Maybe there were other factors – such as a psychological test found he was a sociopath or something – but if that happened, then he wasn’t actually turned down because of his IQ score.
Can you think of any reason why someone would be turned down BECAUSE OF a too-high IQ score, other than that they were somehow required to admit people with lower scores, perhaps to head off lawsuits after a threat from Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton/etc? Which would mean no lawsuits were actually filed, but that could still have been the reason.
“He’s over-qualified so he’ll eventually get bored and leave” is a legitimate concern, which can be very hard on intelligent people desperate to find work during a depression. And I have known of a few highly intelligent people who preferred manual labor over the academic careers that they might have pursued.
Also, I bet the high-IQ guys who *think* they wanna be a policeman find out in a year or two that it’s for the birds. That is an expensive failure in hiring.
EDIT: Right, what Paul said.
Intelligence and IQ tests are “fraught” topics. The heritability of intelligence and other personality traits even more so.
Not all of them. My father did it for a full career and retired.
Which is too bad. Because it’s not really debatable, to the extent that it has been established. Most of the “debate” takes place in well-resolved space. There is much that is not known even to those who study intently, but the simple, established, verifiable, falsifiable, reliable truths are largely unwelcome.
By the way, @linsee, welcome to the thread drift that is Ricochet.
Sure. Anecdote. Granted.
It seems like a good idea to have more high-intelligence police candidates, if they can be the ones who eventually become chiefs of police etc, rather than the middling candidates who might get there pretty much just by seniority.
So unwelcome that you can end your academic career by showing any interest in studying such things.
Studies have to be done by stupid people, otherwise they might find out that stupid people don’t know very much.
I knew a psychologist who was being interviewed for a job at a small-town police department, and the interviewer said, “You know that many of our police officers here are not college educated, right?”
And she replied*, “I have a broad armamentarium of interlocutorial skills.”
She never got the job.
*Maybe that wasn’t precisely her answer, but it’s pretty close.
I once had a cop tell me that he was going to just give me a warning, because he was feeling “gratuitous.” Fortunately I was able to resist the urge to fall out laughing.
That was New London PD’s excuse. I wasn’t impressed then, and age has done nothing to improve it.