[james_s_tayler]

Yeah, you actually have to investigate two things

1) why people desire to actually become a member of Mensa in the first place

2) the population of people who are eligible for membership (2% of the whole population) yet are not members.

On cursory inspection it would seem if you just talked about the top 2% of the distribution you would likely get a different answer than if you just talked about the people who felt the need to self- select into the MENSA organization.

Ok, so what about the selection bias itself? What would drive you to join MENSA? If you were already "accomplished" to some degree that you felt satisfied with why would you necessarily feel the need to say "I'm in the smart people club". Yes, you've already visibly demonstrated that. So what if you haven't demonstrated that but you find everyone around you mildly maddening to deal with because they just don't get it. Well... you might be inclined to join the smart people club and find some interesting people to hang out with.

Makes sense to me.

[scotty79]

I "joined" the mensa shortly after I finished college (masters degree), moved in with my girlfriend and started freelancing. I always thought of myself as having high IQ but I was never formally tested before. I felt that I will no longer be intelectually challenged in my daily life anymore and I will never know if I'm intelligent or not. My aunt was recenly getting into police force and she had IQ test as a part of her recruitment. She had a book of IQ tests I borrowed and went through, in preparation of mensa exam. Mensa test was very easy. There was a lot of time. I solved every question then double checked every question, then triple checked, then finished with half an hour left. I made no mistakes. I left the test with the opinion that every programmer should do it because it's easy morale boost and if you ever done anything with bitwise operations and frame by frame animation, right solutions for some of the questions will be so easy for you.

Results came, I made no mistakes. I got it. Got my plastic membership card (with mistakes on it), email address, mailing list membership and yearly subscription for amateurish mensa paper mag sent to wrong address (same mistake as on the plastic card).

Mag was random (somehow it was finding way to me despite the wrong address), mailing list was random. I did not pay membership fee for second year and that was pretty much it.

I never sought any connection with my "fellow mensans" and felt no connection to them. I came just for the test to validate myself.

My mensa membership was useful for me once. After few years my gf started treating me like an idiot because I didn't immediately knew what she had in mind when she was saying something and was infuriated when I asked questions trying to figure it out.

I said something to the effect "You are treating me like an idiot, when I know for a fact that I'm not one. If I didn't know, at this point I'd be devastated and convinced by your behavior that I am, so please stop behaving like that." ... and she stopped.

She was later diagnosed with brain tumor, so her behavior might have been influenced by that and I don't know if she would be able to stop herself without solid evidence in the form of my mensa membership.

[james_s_tayler]

That is a mildly fascinating story.

The fact you had some frame of reference you could use to reason about who was likely right or wrong in the given situation is interesting. I don't need an IQ test or to join MENSA to figure that out but it did take reading about about 10 or so books on politics, philosophy and psychology to figure out "everyones thought process is extremely busted, some more so than others".

Otherwise how the hell do you even get that frame of reference?

People in general have very little understanding how they're more or less a murderous political machine running a large set of very low resolution models on garbage in, garbage out.

If you don't understand that then you have very little recourse on breaking out of an unhelpful program or loop you might be stuck in. Even if you know that, it's still very challenging to break out sometimes.

I'm thinking to get an IQ test lately out of curiosity. Ive known some people personally who I reckon I just can't touch intellectually... like I can feel the difference when I talk to them. So, I've never really thought I was highly intelligent, but I'm starting to get the feeling perhaps I'm not smack bang in the middle of the distribution either. Deeply curious to find out.