As it may be pertinent to this op, what is the appeal to joining Mensa?
And an old bad joke to play -
You: "I hear there’s a newsletter for those with IQ’s more than two standard deviations below the mean. [pause] It’s called Densa! … Get it?
Victim: “Yeah, I get it.”
You: “Really? I didn’t know your IQ was that low!”
Malleus …, your post didn’t qualify as the sort of behavior I was talking about. I do find what happened to you interesting though. A bright kid with a documentable high IQ who was labeled as special ed. Now a bright child not fitting in and getting teased by other kids, that I am familiar with, but the system labeling him/her as special ed … were you very uneven in your scores? Some kids who are overall well above average and very high in particular subtests have problems if there is a large discrepency between subtest abilities, even if the lowest is still average or above. Those kids often need services but it is often hard to get the school to pony them up.
As I understand it, basically it serves as a social club, under the theory that the commonality of high IQ makes it more likely that the members will interact positively than other common qualities would. In other words, it’s based on the same theory that this whole thread is about; if a 30-point IQ difference makes it difficult for two people to interact with each other, then someone with a 150 IQ is likely to be pretty isolated in ordinary life. But when they go hang out with the Mensa crowd, they would find a much higher proportion of people who they can relate to.
I’ve been to a Mensa convention once (as a guest of a member–although I do qualify, I’ve never been a member myself), and everyone did seem to be having a great time. But that’s true of other types of conventions I’ve been at as well. I have to think that people who don’t have a good time at Mensa conventions don’t join Mensa, or at least don’t attend the conventions.
Exactly why I asked the question. The existence of Mensa, the fact that some people feel they socialize better with those closer to their IQ range than those significantly away, supports the contention made in the op.
OTOH over five and half million Americans qualify for Mensa (conservatively, as you only need to be in the top 2% on any one of the qualifying tests, and more than 2% will score in the top 2% on one of them if several are taken) and of those five and a half million 99 out of a 100 don’t join Mensa.
Any Chicago area Mensa members here? Checking Wikipediafor the size of Mensa in America I found this
Anyone here heard one of those joke-telling competitions? Are those jokes different than other jokes?
and see the point. It reassured me that I don’t have to worry about having too high of an IQ too, as it took me a second to get it. Of course reading it quickly doesn’t work as well as saying it out loud. And I do like the poster’s comment about the joke:
Sorry, missed this. The highest in the class got over 170. I don’t know if the teacher did anything weird with the scores. I was 14 at the time and didn’t really question it. But I believe that there is more than one IQ test and they are measured differently. The test that got me in Mensa years later, I scored 145 or so.
I wasn’t trying to brag with my score, I think a high IQ is pretty useless and having a high score didn’t really get me anywhere in life. And I was in Mensa for a year, never attended a meeting, thought that was pretty useless and also a waste of money.
Don’t know if they do this in other places but at the Mensa meetings I went to years ago in Las Vegas they sometimes played a game called Count. The rules were simple; at any time anyone could call out “Count.” and everybody had to honestly tell how many people in the room they had been to bed with.
There was one very large woman who, when somebody was there with a spouse / parter, would wait for their answer and then shout out “What about me, you son of a bitch!” Now that’s a high IQ joke.
I’m not intellectually disabled, as far as I can tell (although I recently found out that I probably have dyscalculia). I was in special ed for emotional/social reasons. I have mild Asperger’s syndrome. I needed small classes, special attention, and teachers who wouldn’t freak out when I broke down into tears. I still tend to freak out when something scary or unusual or upsetting happens- my first year at college, people used to call the security guards. I also miss instructions and have trouble not blurting out things in class.
(That’s another reason I have smartness self-esteem problems. When I have trouble controlling myself, I hate myself for being immature, which equals stupid).
Could you explain to us non-Mensa types how this is a high IQ joke? I get the joke (or at least think I do) but I don’t get how that wouldn’t work for non-genius folks.
That’s because they really aren’t that dramatically different. First off, IQ is a pretty meaningless measure of anything, and swings of 10+ points on retakes of the WAIS-IV are fairly common.
Secondly, we don’t yet even have a good definition of intelligence. Spacial perception and manipulation are part of the tests for both intelligence and IQ, but don’t necessarily correlate with IQ. Add this to continuing mental growth, educational differences, and the multitude of other factors, and you are basically measuring the subject’s performance on a certain test. We can make broad generalizations about someone’s predicted performance in other tasks, but the number itself is unreliable at best, and probably doesn’t mean very much. (And I’m not even going to go into the normality of the distribution, because it isn’t perfectly normal, though the tests are calibrated to make it appear that way.)
Finally, a person with an IQ of 70 would have some substantial difficulty in a lot of life situations. Moving up a couple of standard devs from there and a person has a lot less trouble. But what is the difference between someone at 130 and at 160? They both will have adequate life skills. Mathematical performance isn’t linear with intelligence, nor are vocabulary and other language skills. You also can’t count on things like “discovered relativity”, because a lot of that supposed intelligence is a social construct.
When you talk to someone who is actually retarded, you’re going to know right off the bat, whereas you aren’t going to get that same effect with someone who is at 150 or whatever, nor would I wager that some supergenius is going to think everyone else is intolerably slow and realize it immediately. There are very few ways to demonstrate a supposed genius level of intelligence as compared to a merely better than average one, and that is even given the mistaken assumption that intelligence is linear, meaningful, and determinable.
Malleus, thank you for the additional information. Asperger’s actually was what I was suspicious of from your description as those with Asperger’s syndrome are notably uneven in their skill sets, and would sometimes at least get services because of their social issues even if the uneveness of their other skill sets was not recognized or addressed.
Your not understanding the joke yet immediately keying in on the concrete fact that a newt is not a lizard also fits that label. You very likely have a great strength in remembering details and lists of facts and specific cases and likely had more trouble on essay questions that asked you to compare and contrast different circumstances. The fact is that many with Asperger Syndrome, even those of very high overall IQ, do not get the jokes that others do; they often also have difficulty telling when someone is joking and when a joke is good-natured versus one at their expense. It can cause painful misunderstandings and many with the syndrome get very anxious in social situations.
Having comorbid dyscalculia is plain unfair. Dysclaculia usually affects more than just math classes: individuals with dyscalculia may have problems with direction, with reading clocks well, and even checking change. Together those two issues may make it very hard for you to show the world how smart you are. And that can be very frustrating indeed.
Are you in college still or in the working world?
BTW, the joke hinges on the fact that “my newt” sounds very similar to the word “minute” (as in very small, not the unit of time).
There is a lot else to disagree with of what you said, but this statement is most pertinent to the discussion at hand. “Intolerably slow” was not the point posited. The claim made was that someone who has an IQ of 150 can, during the course of a reasonable interaction, relatively easily tell whether or not they are talking to someone with an IQ if 120 or below vs someone with an IQ as high as theirs or higher. They may tolerate them and even enjoy their company but someone 150 or above was talking to them instead they would notice the difference. And they would be able to say with some confidence that the person whose IQ was 120 and claimed that their IQ was 150 was just shitting. The person who is 120 may not notice the difference between someone else who is 120 and someone who is 150 however.
“A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says to the horse-”
“Wait… what? There are establishments which serve alcohol to horses? Why would the bartender speak to the horse? There are horses which understand English?”
“Well, not really, but just pretend-”
“That’s stupid.”
And why would you suspect so? My point was that there just aren’t the same sorts of differences. I’d be glad to see some examples of yours, but I can’t think of anything that’s even equivalent to the difference between an average person and a borderline retarded one.
You disagree with everything I said and I accept that. I suspect, however, that if I mention I disagree with what you said … it would somehow be perceived as somewhat unacceptable, particularly if I said you have precisely demonstrated my points … so I won’t say that.
