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Comment by D-Coder | Hacker News Reader

The paper says, "Of course, high-IQ societies exist, but then most of their members appear to be rather successful and hence limited in their understanding of people who never achieved much, if anything, in life."

Some people join high-IQ societies because they haven't achieved a lot, and any society where they share an important attribute is a place where they can fit in. And Mensa, at least, has a good deal of support for gifted children.

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Right; Mensa demographic is high-IQ non-achievers. Kind of the point - a club where you can feel appreciated even though you don't find that anywhere else.

69% of Mensa members make more than $50,000/year, and 47% of them make more than $75,000/year. I'm sure they have some non-achieving members but it doesn't look like their main demographic.

That sounds sort of average or even below. The Elks club probably looks like that. For the top 2% intelligent people in the world, that counts as non-achieving. Working in a bookstore or running a gas station is not what you'd expect from geniuses.

How about working as a patent clerk or a lowly mathematics lecturer.

Median income in the US is not quite $52,000, so Mensa is somewhat above average.

That's the median household income; i.e. two incomes. The median personal income is more like $30,000.

Whoopsie. Thanks for pointing that out.

Yearly earnings is not the sole measure of success.

I don't disagree with you completely, just want to make a point that you can have an unfulfilling job and still make a lot of money.

The article is talking about people who drop out of school or don't go to college in the first place, and can't hold down a job. 82% of Mensa members have a four-year degree, and their median income is above average. Their demographic is clearly not concentrated on people like this. I'm sure many of their members have unfulfilling jobs or unfulfilling lives, as is the case with many people in general, but that's a different thing entirely.

(I feel like I should clarify that I'm not a Mensa member and don't really care about the organization one way or another. I was just curious about the initial claim and looked up the basic membership demographics.)

Mensa is just the top 2%, though. The top 0.1% are to Mensa as Mensa is to society as a whole. For the reallllllly high IQ people, your average Mensa member can be the worst. Smart enough to know they're smart, but unable to see how much higher the scale goes

Don't even start with Mensa. You'd be hard pressed to find a more smug collection of assholes on this planet

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