Well, I think it’s a bit tacky to go on about how intelligent you are. Mensa this, Mensa that, my IQ is 340, blah, blah, blah…So I usually steer clear of those threads. (Hehe, I’m sure it’s just sour grapes, but there you have it.)
I am quite daft. I find it amazing that I can get out of bed without tripping over the cat for goodness sake.
Uh, that’s a big fat no to being Mensa eligible. Hope that makes your day brighter lel ! 
Can someone whose been in Mensa tell me what it’s like? I discovered last year that I (just barely) qualify for membership, and I’ve been thinking of joining.
You know, some people get sick and tired of being the smartest person in the room. Makes you feel like an asshole sometimes. And playing dumb gets old quick.
And mhendo: it’s attitudes like the one behind this thread which make people embarrassed of their IQs, that’s why they say it with a self-depreciating tone. They want to share but don’t want to come off like they’re bragging.
Yes, I am a geek. So?
Morrigoon, the point is that there is NO way an adult can achieve a score of 160 on any of the currently normed IQ tests. The new Stanford Binet 5 is supposed to go to 200 for adults and children but I’m doubting many of the people here have had that test yet.
An IQ above 160 is very rare indeed. Statistically it’s really unlikely that we have dozens of them here on the SDMB. And yet every time there’s a thread on IQ, lots of people pop up and say their IQ is ::insert unlikely number::. When an IQ of 180 occurs at the rate of about 1 in a million, how realistic is it that we’ve got several here? And how come almost none of them are able to say what IQ test was used, who did the test and at what age? It matters whether it was a group test or a test administered by a psychologist.
Your question on Mensa – I think it depends on your local chapter and your personality as to whether it’s a Good Thing or not something you’ll go back to.
Why worry about eligibility for such a silly organization?
Be comfortable in your own skin.
I personally have no idea whether I would qualify or not, but the concept of a club for “smart” people in which one pays frankly strikes me as fundamentally a stupid idea based on some fairly bankrupt ideas about intelligence.
But if it floats their boat, fuck em, let em plump the money, and no skin of your nose.
Primaflora: the simple answer is that they were tested as kids. Your IQ score is a base score divided by your age. As your age goes up, your IQ goes down unless you’re able to massively increase your base score. But IQ isn’t the only way to get into Mensa. You can also do it off several other standardized tests. Up until they changed the SATs to their new format, you could even use SAT scores (the standard by which I barely qualify, as I tested just before they changed it). I believe you can still use LSAT, GMAT etc.
I have no clue what my IQ is 
Oh, and I’m absolutely horrible at learning math. (Just goes to show, there’s all kinds of 2%ers)
Ummm, Morrigoon? That they were tested as kids is not the simple answer. I know about IQs and IQ testing and MA etc, etc. Even as kids and even using ratio IQs, an IQ of 160 is rare. It still occurs at the rate of one in 100 000, no matter what age the kid is.
IQ doesn’t actually drop – our ability to measure IQ becomes less as people age. As kids get older, they hit ceilings within the confines of the test. The only IQ test which is getting IQ over 180 is the SB LM and that’s highly controversial. Even with the SB LM you need to test before the age of 8 or you’re going to hit ceilings if you’re testing a profoundly gifted kid. And the SB LM was last normed in 1976 and I’ve yet to see an argument which convinces me that this one IQ test is exempt from the Flynn effect. The new SB is apparently returning scores which are 20 points lower than the SB LM so who the fuck knows?
It’s still absurd to claim that on the SDMB we have dozens of people at the far extremes of the bell curve.
Though I agree about the point that some people who talk about a crazy high number, especially one they got online are just silly, some big numbers mentioned aren’t crazy impossible, just highly unlikely. Some fun numbers:
Stanford Binet (one of the more well-respected IQ tests) is defined as mean of 100 and standard deviation of 16. (Others use 15 as sd, which isn’t far off for below numbers)
IQ Percentile People in world one out of
100 50 3b 2
133 98 117m 50 (Mensa-able)
138 99 53m 114
150 99.9 5m 1,125
160 99.99 530k 11k
169 99.999 48k 124k
200 99.99999998 1 6b
Plato? . . . Socrates? . . . Morons!!!
I’ll fess up cheerfully. According to my GRE test results, at least, I’m about 5% too low for the Mensa range. I’ve resigned myself to my non-Mensahood, because I have other hobbies.
That was my plan, until I found out that it costs money to take the Mensa test. Sod that.
I was eligible, based on tests I had taken as a kid (although I never got anything even close to 160). But now? Nope, I couldn’t pass the test now.
I even joined once, just to see what it was like. It got me a year’s subscription to the national magazine, and a few contacts with the local organization, who didn’t really do anything. I decided my $60 (at that time) was better spent in other ways.
If the local organization is active, and if you like the people, it’s no better (and no worse) than joining any other social club.
Well, I have no clue what it takes to qualify for Mensa, and to the best of my knowledge have never taken an IQ test. I really couldn’t care less about that stuff, although if one can qualify on the basis of SAT scores, then I’d be in the top 2%.
I do, however, know a lot of really smart people, including several friends who got perfect 800 scores on the math SATs and placed out of semesters of calculus that they’d never formally studied. Not one of them has ever given a damn about joining Mensa. While Mensans may be smart in certain respects, membership is certainly not the be-all and end-all of intelligence indicators. Intelligence somes in many flavors, and IMO some of those types of intelligence, particularly creativity and emotional intelligence, will never show up accurately on any test.
But lel, the point of the thread was to see who was eligible. Why would they feel compelled to post there if they weren’t eligible?
Now, me… I’m a member of Densa!
And of course, just for the sake of fair and balanced threading …
How do most people even know their actual IQ’s? It’s not like an IQ test is given to everyone, or even most people. I would never know mine except a friend gave me one when she was taking her Psychology Masters’ classes and was becoming qualified to give them. She had all the materials and I was curious, and she had to give one anyway for her class, so I took one. I don’t think I ever would have otherwise, it’s very time-consuming and would have been expensive.
Are people using scores they got from tests they took themselves off the internet or from a book or whatever? If so, that would account for a lot of inflated scores. I think people here overall are very intelligent, but I am a little suspicious of all the genius level IQ’s people have too.
Well, I was tested as a child, so I know what that number was. And oddly enough, when I take those ubiquitous Internet IQ tests, it’s around the same result.
Mensa-related threads are easily the most predictable threads on SDMB. They are comprised of four basic kinds of posts:
Post 1:
Post 2:
Post 3:
Post 4:
The Four Basic Mensa Posts often include riders, such as:
The I Did Crappy At School Because I Was So Smart rider. Very commonly used, in many threads. Usually along the lines of “My brain was so enormous I was reading Camus instead of Clifford the Big Red Dog so I failed, and everyone hated me for my 189 IQ.” I have seen people actually, seriously argue that geniunely smart people never succeed at school, which I will admit is in total opposition to anything I’ve eprsonally observed. Remember, nobody on the SDMB was just a lazy, antisocial jerk in school.
The I Don’t Beleive In IQ Tests But Here’s My IQ rider. Similar to Post #1, but often tacked onto other types of posts in excruciating detail, citing scientific “fact” that intelligence is untestable while repeating over and over how they did on IQ tests.
The Hey, This Was My IQ, But That’s When I Was A Kid rider. Used to claim ridiculously unlikely IQs with the caveat that it may be inaccurate (but the implication is that it’s not) because it was a test for kids, which are scored differently (which is true.)
In one thread I’m too lazy to look up and link to, we had at least 3 posters who claimed to be among the 10,000 smartest humans on the planet, and pretty much everyone else was a genius, and it went on for THREE PAGES. 150 straight posts of “I Am A Rocket Scientist, But I Am So Humble.” One poster actually used the “I was reading at a college level when I was three” line - that is an actual quote - though he later admitted he had just meant he could read out words in a college-level text, not actually comprehend it.
I will freely and openly admit thjat I think 75% of claimed IQs on this board are total bullshit. I think it is likely that a great many of the Einstien-level IQs are just the highest number the person ever got on any sort of online or self-administered IQ test, which of course have all the scientific validity of just picking an IQ from today’s Lotto numbers. If the person does 10 online IQ tests and the scores range from 109 to 151, you can be damn sure 151 will be the number they use in a Mensa thread. Even accepting that the SDMB is a self-selected population, it just defies belief that this many people are actual according-to-Hoyle tested geniuses. I don’t think people appreciate how high some of these claimed IQs are. It’s a logarithmic scale, folks.
DISCLAIMER: I have no idea what my IQ is.
I don’t know what meetings are like, and I suspect it varies. I think there is a local chapter which plays board games. They also meet monthly for a dinner at… wait for it… OLD COUNTRY BUFFET.
Now, I confess that sometimes a buffet-style place hits the spot; I loved it when I was preggers. But I always feel sheepish going in there. It ain’t haute cuisine, it’s a pig trough of mediocre food. Now, I could see its appeal for some large groups, as everyone pays up front and there is no figuring of checks, but I can’t believe that’d be a factor for Mensans because surely with all that brainpower someone could divide up a bill. I can’t figure why they wouldn’t go somewhere better. Or even somewhere like Bennigans, which ain’t haute cuisine either but at least doesn’t feel like a school cafeteria.
Mensa–or our local chapter, anyway–must appeal to a certain select type of brainiac. I was in grad school here for ten years, meeting a lot of people from different programs, some of them in departments rated tops in the country. Lots of smart, even brilliant people, and I never heard a one of them mention membership.
This is my absolute favorite line from that movie.
Somebody on this board who I like a lot is an active MENSA member, and I wouldn’t want to offend her, but I have to say I have a hard time seeing the appeal of such an organization. It’s not as if people who do very well on standardized tests are that much more likely to have anything else in common, is it? I suspect I could probably elbow my way into MENSA if I wanted to, but who wants to hang out with a bunch of nerds?
I’m kidding! I kid!
Seriously, I’d rather join a club dedicated to some hobby I was interested in, or a cause I was especially passionate about. No smartness clubs for me, thanks.
[Carl Carlson]Let’s make litter outta’ these literati![/CC]
Hmph! You might not know your IQ, but you can’t be in Mensa! For a Mensa member would know that one cannot admit a claim! One makes a claim! Ha, ha! I have you know! Now who’s the cock o’ the walk?