What’s mensa
Mensa is “the high IQ society”. Take that how you will, membership is mostly used for bragging rights and/or being pretentious.
The impression I get is that it was more relevant before the internet. Like, you’d be living in bumfuck Nebraska and take an IQ test in high school to see if you should be a trucker or farmer, and then a couple weeks later you get a letter asking if you wanna be part of a club of smart people who have a magazine and meet every once in a while.
I went to college with a kid who introduced himself to the class as a Mensa member on day 1. it was a logics class.
halfway through the semester I argued my point logically against him in a debate in front of the class and won. he was embarrassed as fuck and as red as a tomato. he was so pissed that he lost against me because he believed I was inferior to him.
my tactic was to get him emotionally flustered on his stance, which he vehemently believed in, and argue logical arguments regardless of their logical context to his stance.
for example if his stance was “all abortions are wrong.” my argument was, “if abortions are wrong and death is wrong then abortions that save life are right because abortions don’t kill people. so if abortions don’t kill people all abortions are right.” cue up a tit for tat back and forth for 15 minutes and I win the debate point for point.
anyway, we didn’t see him for the rest of the semester and he dropped out entirely.
I kinda feel bad a bit because it was clear he was on the spectrum and I used that to my advantage but the dude was a dick.
point is Mensa is a dick stroking competition and you’re better off avoiding it.
Claims “high IQ”, holds right wing views.
God that prickly sounds insufferable.
To be fair, debate classes often involve arguing for positions you’re personally opposed to.
I know, but this wasn’t the case
my tactic was to get him emotionally flustered on his stance, which he vehemently believed in, and argue logical arguments regardless of their logical context to his stance.
it wasn’t a debate class. the debates were merely a vessel to convey the logical process. we took time to dissect each of the arguments, which were written before hand and shared with the class. just as the “debate” took place. the rules were pretty simple
- teams were identified early, so you knew who you were debating
- topics were identified at the same time.
- write as many arguments(“ammo”) as you can think of on one sheet of paper(front and back)
- use one class period to work through the logical arguments to ensure they are logically sound, can use the aid of the teacher
- you can only use your “ammo” and cannot deviate from it or make new ones up on the spot
- if you run out of “ammo” or cannot use the “ammo” you have you must concede
so before the debate I already knew the topic and person I was going against. I already profiled him and knew if I overwhelmed him there was no way I’d lose. my arguments weren’t factually backed, but logically sound. I don’t know how many arguments I wrote, but it was probably at least 50. all with varying degrees of potential that could be used against anything he could throw at me. god, Jesus, Satan, whores, sluts, incest, rape. all of it was there.
he brought a knife to a gun fight and I beat the shit out of him with a baseball bat.
the teacher actually approached me after the semester and commented that I seemed to have a deep understanding of logical thought and I should probably pursue a career in software or become a paralegal. it was his last semester teaching there and I’d like to think I made it memorable 😅. it still is one of my favorite classes in college. a close second and third were my classes in psychology and sociology.
It’s irrelevant. It’s douche nozzle central.
damn i guess it’s secret information
i love being left outIt’s an organization or club or something where the criteria for joining is having an IQ above whatever their minimum is. (Like 120 or something maybe?)
98th percentile which should mean 130 but tests differ so who knows really
It looks good on college applications. But don’t join their clubs
Another word for college cafeteria in german.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
You other brothers can’t deny it
As a big booty latino I feel both interested and offended by this.
Also, don’t take our big booty latinas pls. We need them for <reasons>.
I’m still wondering what mensa means… I thought it was a like a flat hill.
I think it means table.
Mesa is a flat hill.
Mensa describes itself as a “High IQ Society”. Essentially, anyone who scores well on an IQ test can join, and they have plaques, membership cards, and such they give out. As far as I know, the whole point of Mensa is to say you’re smart enough to be in Mensa.
Ah, never bothered taking an IQ test, seemed like a waste of time. Thanks for the response!
mensa actually means dumb in spanish!
Go find yourself an IQ 300 mensa nerd. They need you
The answer is yes
nectar gets it
Doubt you’d find either in a Mensa subreddit.
I don’t get why something like Mesa even exists. Like, what even is the moment where pulling out your Mensa card is a good idea?
Assuming you are inteligent, you should know that flashing a card from a gatekept “clever people” club will probably not impress many people, just like you should recognize that the test you did doesn’t mean shit and IQ is not a good way how to measure people.
Well, the original idea behind Mensa was that if you got a bunch of really smart people together, they just might solve all the world’s problems. Didn’t quite work out that way, so I’d agree that it has no real reason to keep existing anymore.
At a guess? Smart people like validation too; and are just as vulnerable to manipulation that uses it. Potentially even more vulnerable, in fact.
As someone who doesn’t need to guess:
It exists as a social club founded in eugenicist thought.
Yeah, no one “flashes a Mensa card” unless they are a jerk. We joined many years ago when we lived in Iowa for the social aspect. The parties are a lot of fun and the people are all fascinating. Not all people you want to spend time with, but fascinating. We let our memberships lapse when we moved back to Colorado.
Nearly universally, Mensans recognized that IQ is only measure of how well you do on an IQ test (which, as you may know, was never intended as a test for the upper end, only to find students who needed intervention) or the other allowed tests.
There were materially successful people and not, socially adept and not. People we learned to avoid and people who became friends. Cringe and connection.
I suppose it is like any other social club where you have something in common with the additional kicker that people were not holding back in conversation. You had the chance to rapidly be humbled in that case if you went on at length about some favorite topic only to find out the person you were talking to was an expert in it.
Plus there were cool speakers and field trips. “Dumb things smart people do” was one of our favorites.
Thank you, that makes perfect sense. It’s easy to fall from the outside into the trap of judging it by the “smarter than you club” label, and forgetting that probably isn’t the point for most members, and the club part is the important one.
Honestly, that sounds like a lot of fun.
Yeah, no one “flashes a Mensa card” unless they are a jerk.
One time I made fun of people who do cross fit and someone at the table said “I do CrossFit.” Then I said, “It’s almost as annoying as people who flex over their AMEX card.” And another guy pulled out his AMEX card.
I regret not bringing up a Mensa Card.
Heh, that would have been perfect.
No, high iq people like big tiddy latinas.
I’ll consider this an IQ test and apply for Mensa
Perfection
I wish I could remember the story but there was a guy that joined Mensa so he could con people. It worked too which rather seems to suggest that the entry requirements are not all that stringent.
Isn’t mensa sort of a con itself?
IQ testing, arguably. Mensa is a social club that wants nerds to fuck nerds and make nerd babies
I think their entry requirements are doing exactly what they’re supposed to.
The problem is that intelligence, even if we could measure it correctly, doesn’t and shouldn’t imply what a person knows, nor their experiences and the wisdom that they carry.
Someone can be learned with a low IQ. Someone can be wise and similarly low IQ. In the same way, someone with a high IQ can be unwise.
The problem with having only one individual metric for a group which believes themselves to compose the smartest people, is that they’re arrogant. I know plenty of people who are so extremely intelligent that I am certain that they could be a part of Mensa; yet, they are not. When they looked into it, they decided it would be unwise to become a member, given the requirements and the attitudes of, and about, the group.
Hell, there’s a decent chance I could get in. I’ve never tried and I don’t care to, for all the same reasons, so I would never know if I could “make it” or not.
Their arrogance and hubris is their undoing.
Mensa is for people who grew up in gifted programs being told that they will achieve greatness just because of the one test they scored hight on, and then they amounted to nothing, so they need a place where they can tell each other that they are unsuccessful only because they are so much smarter than everyone else around them.
High IQ people who manage to do something with their life usually have more to be proud of than an IQ test they took decades ago.
Or IQ is a useless measure
And over-identifying woth it is something arrogant shit heads who are easy to con do.
Unlike me. I’m better than that.
Wpuld you like to join my new society of people who are two smart to show off their IQ? You get a cool badge you can show people
Obviously.
Im in!
IQ is absolute nonsense that tells you literally nothing about intelligence or anything of the like.
It’s a very good measure if you want to predict how well people will do on IQ tests.
It gives you a good indication of their mental speed and memory.
It is poor at measuring specific abilities or wisdom.
Thank you for your expertise, @WorldsDumbestMan
Unironically had to do a lot of (sloppy) research to try and treat myself.
Don’t let you convince yourself of something just because you want to believe it’s true. IQ is not an objective measurement of intelligence, but it isn’t completely useless either.
It’s worse than useless. It tells you literally nothing about anything, plus idiots think it’s meaningful.
Well, it helped me understand why people would very regularly not understand apparently simple stuff I explained. This happened on so many topics with so many people it was very frustrating.
I don’t think that makes them lesser than me or me better than them (the people not understanding)… It just means I had and still have to work on adapting my messaging to my audience ← and that is something that everybody regardless of IQ should do.
IQ is a rough measure of short and long term memory, pattern recognition, and reasoning ability. Naturally as a single number its predictive power is limited in the face of the broad range of human abilities, but given a high enough sample size it clearly correlates with several meaningful things.
Even accepting only the most clear correlation-- that performance on an IQ test predicts performance on future IQ tests-- to claim that this correlation is useless is to claim that there is no other activity performed by humans which is sufficiently similar to an IQ test, which is clearly not true.
If you’re going to have feelings this strong about the subject, you should do some more reading on it. Your view that IQ isn’t some absolute measure of human value is correct, but you should understand how and why if you’re going to go in depth about it.
“Feelings this strong” lmao it’s like you all read out of the “worthless reddit dumbfuck book” or something. My balls are a sample size, son. That’s my IQ.
Or computational intelligence isn’t the same thing as skepticism
Or everyone is vulnerable to con games
… Or wisdom.
Do you remember how that con was supposed to work?
It was in an article about the real life incidents that influenced Terry Pratchett in the discworld series. So the con itself probably took place in the '80s or '90s, so quite a while ago. I can’t really remember if the article itself went into any details but I ended up looking into it myself because I thought it was funny that people in Mensa had been conned.
I think it was some sort of timeshare scheme. The guy managed to sell timeshares in a property he didn’t in fact own, not a very sophisticated con really. The utter geniuses didn’t demand evidence that he actually owned the property before handing over cash.
I took a trip down the rabbit hole and tried to find any evidence - there is none. Even though this was happening before the www really took off there should be evidence on the net. A story hilarious as that would never die and would also be used as a warning against timeshare scams.
I don’t think mensa members are immune to scams, but timeshare? Even the legit ones are scammy IMO.
Yes. Yes we do.
Iq is no measurement of objective intelligence! Fuck you mcdonald crossword doing cuck!
Somebody failed the test
Physically not possible to fail them, go get another puzzle
So, do they?
Science still can’t figure it out
Iq is no measurement of objective intelligence but that of shape recognition, plus supposedly some other skills that they, the companies making IQ tests, actually made up
Tho I reckon personality is often more important than looks, but I would find it irrealistic for anyone to dislike them
shape recognition
Precisely why they would like big booty latinas.
Tho I reckon personality is often more important than looks
For long term attraction, I agree. However, if we’re just talking about looking at for science, I don’t think personality matters much.
Yeah, we do
The answer is yes, we do
I don’t think there is a correlation in either directed but I’m happy to be proven wrong
