Mensa is quite smart, but I wouldn't use the word "exceptional." If you write a method that throws an exception on 2% of all inputs, I think maybe you're doing it wrong. 2% is still too common, in my opinion, to be considered an exception.
Not saying that’s true, just explaining.
What's the difference between "cognitive capacity" and "time and energy"?
I have a near photographic memoy for faces and an exceptional ability to remember details about people's lives; I have to limit the number of friends o have for precisely that reason, my cognitive capacity to care would overshadow just about everything else in life.
It’s a cognitive blind spot to assume communities you’re a part of have a higher mean intelligence than the general population :)
Simply the writing quality, grammar and sentence structure of the comments on HN would easily be enough to prove that HN readers (well, commenters) are above average.
I spend enough time glazing over headlines, stories and comments from other sites out of casual interest and I'll bet any amount of money this is true.
I like HN, but can’t see it as a social space like most forums are. (And yes I like HN for that reason too!)
Some might wonder what relevance this soap-opera-ish tale has to the stated goals of the high-IQ societies. I would argue that in order to understand what these societies are about, one should understand their history, including the very human motivations that drove their foundings.
Although I agree that depending on your circles (college anyone?) 98th %ile isn't much of a stretch. Further, not having a 2% one-sided outlier in your 30-60 person uncorrelated sample set ranges from 45-70%... but you're not likely to know it, and they're not likely to be Mensa members. Wanting to be a member, may be a bigger indicator for the disorders question.
This is one of the problems with IQ as a measure of intelligence. IQ 150 doesn’t mean doing mental arithmetic faster than IQ 100 by the same margin that IQ 100 beats IQ 50, only that IQ>150 is as rare as IQ<50.