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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

Update: I'm reading people with (more) negative experiences. I guess YMMV :) Still, I wouldn't draw absolute conclusions based on this.

I was a Mensa associate, and participated to evening meetings in two countries (evening meetings are only part of the activities).

You're assuming, with "people insecure enough to join an IQ-restricted club", that associates sit on a high horse due to their IQ. It was quite the opposite; the clubs are very friendly, and what I remember is actually, fun nights playing board and social games (it's amusing to think that a significant part of a "high IQ" club is games :)). Definitely, nobody would recognize it was a Mensa meeeting if they didn't know it already.

In my personal view, joining the club because of (relatively) high IQ was no different than joining, say, a chess club - meeting people who have something in common.

Needless to say, there were lots of programmers :)

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That's interesting. I joined and was immediately turned off by the group.

The difference with joining a chess club is you get to play chess.

So let's turn your proposal around: What do you get to do in a High IQ club that is different from any random collection of people?

Besides talk about how you are in MENSA?

Just like in a fraternity, you get connections. Mensa is basically a network of highly intelligent people (or at least people with high IQ) that help each other in different ways for further their education and career. Being part of Mensa can open doors that would otherwise be locked or very hard to open.

> Just like in a fraternity, you get connections.

Gender segregated groups in the year 2021 have just entered chat.

Nepotism has just entered chat.

You have left chat.

Is there a handshake or signal?

Perhaps people rub their temples or chins contemplatively.

I don't really care one way or the other, but my impression is the group offers a setting for like-minded (read 'higher-IQ') individuals to come talk about anything and not just the thing they are there for.

> like-minded (read 'higher-IQ') individuals

But what topic are they of like mind about? "High IQ" individuals might be left-wing or right-wing, religious or secular, capitalist or communist, etc. The only theme likely to be in common among all Mensa members is a pride in their IQ.

That seems like quite an assumption, friend.

I think most people in that category love having people to have intellectual conversations with. I've been in a space with people who are naturally incredibly high IQ, and there's a special kind of comraderie that comes from not having to go through the lonely exercise of scaffolding everything that you're deeply passionate about.

It's community. Pride in IQ != The main reason to be centric around an IQ.

I've tested well in that sphere. It's an incomplete measure, but it does measure something, and I like being around/with people at that caliber in the "IQ" arena.

I want to be challenged. I want to have community where my heart is in intellectual things. I don't want someone to just absorb my information-excited rants, I want someone to fight me on them and challenge me to grow.

Most of all, I don't want to feel isolated or lonely in my experiences. We all desire community around what makes us us. It's a fundamentally human thing, I think, and denying it because it's some measure that some people use to prop up their insecurity feels a bit hurtful and/or harmful to people really seeking community there.

Not currently a member of any sigma-type IQ-only organizations. Just my thoughts. I love other kinds of people too. But people who think in that level and way are my safe people, and I can feel seen and heard with them.

Note: there's EQ and a host of other things not mentioned here. I'm just talking about the above specific insight in general. :)

> The only theme likely to be in common among all Mensa members is a pride in their IQ.

This is wrong in two ways. 1) IQ is not among the most discussed topics, not even close; so presumably other themes are in common. 2) Pride is not the prevalent emotion, generally or specifically with regards to the own IQ.

If it's a group in real life, then you also have the common factors that you wanted to join a social group and you live near each other.

That can mean a lot - it's why meetup.com has always worked for me when I've tried it, even if the group has no official topic. (Of course I stopped after I'd gotten enough out of it.)

No interest group or club that I've belonged to has ever stuck only to that topic in discussion.

Of course not, but it does provide an easy conversation starter that paves the way for other topics.

Are you referring to the IQ? So, a conversation starter like "Hi! What's your IQ"?

I've never heard it, and I don't think anybody, except people with incredibly poor social skills, would use it.

I'm thinking about more typical clubs and interest groups. In a chess club, you can talk about chess without worrying about whether the person is interested in chess. In an underwater basket weaving club, you can talk about underwater basket weaving without worrying about whether the person is interested in underwater basket weaving.

Social clubs aren't rare. Most people like to discuss current events. And few turn down opportunities to talk about themselves.

The irony is: by your own definition, what makes you like minded is that you are all in MENSA.

Hey, let's start a "people who wear blue shoes" society. We're all like minded, I bet the conversation will be fascinating.

Put another, less sarcastic way: there's no guarantee they will be interesting because there is literally nothing guranteed to be in common except we're smart. But a chess club will be, because everyone talks about chess. This is why I found MENSA dull.

But also, this isn't a subjective analysis: it is a logical deduction. I'm identifying sets and drawing conclusions. You know, rational Ayn Rand stuff.

I'd rather hang out with dumbasses who can woodwork, or dumbasses who can tune car engines, or dumbasses who can cook, or dumbasses who can run marathons, over smart people who have no other connection to me other than we all scored high on an arbitrary test.

But as you said, YMMV.

> Besides talk about how you are in MENSA?

I was in an ultra-high IQ society called The Thousand. Not because my IQ is in the 99.9%, but because they weren't smart enough to figure out how to password protect their Ning group.

There was very little content, and the average poster was probably less intelligent than the average HN poster.

No idea and not vested. I don’t see the difference between that and a group of friends, because not all groups of friends exist because of a shared activity, some exist because they like to be around each other

It's disingenous, or, more precisely, rhetoric, to state that there are no correlations at all between people with certain IQ and traits/interests/likemindedness.

You've asked questions of whom you don't have interests in the answer (it's fairly easy to find correlations, in particular, reading the whole conversation), so this classifies as trolling in my opinion. If you had this attitude when you joined the club, I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't been treated friendly.

Many who join Mensa are/were developmentally gifted children/adults. For many such folks, finding a peer group with similar experiences (owing to them being precocious, not fitting in, not often meeting people with similar interests -- especially before the advent of the Internet) was/is generally harder (or at least low probability).

Mensa was one avenue where they could bond over those shared experiences with people of like-mind. It certainly wasn't perfect -- gifted children often struggle with loneliness and isolation, and don't have the easiest time with social interactions, hence the manifested social dysfunction in certain local chapters -- but sometimes it works out and they find a community of diverse individuals with whom they relate (as was my case).

No need to walk back your comment! I'm glad you had a positive experience, and didn't mean the "insecure" thing as an attack.

I guess it feels weird to me because according to the scores page, I could join this club, but my brother would be excluded. We could both join a chess club.

> [...] it's amusing to think that a significant part of a "high IQ" club is games :)

That is exactly what I expected.

> [...] In my personal view, joining the club because of (relatively) high IQ was no different than joining, say, a chess club

Because in a certain sense, they attract the same people? Both seem a little bit competitive: One defines their members by IQ and the other by ELO.

Glad to know.

I've indeed heard about many good experiences. In my country they weren't particularly active (maybe still aren't, it's been a long time I don't follow their news any more).

My experience wasn't good. I think it was the most heterogeneous group I've ever met. That's not bad by itself, but it was detrimental under the circumstances.

Besides, almost 100% of them were at least 20 years older than me, so our interests didn't match. I think that that might have played a role on my discomfort -- I had the high IQ but didn't had the repertoire and experience to hold constructive conversations with them. And being extremely socially awkward didn't help me either.

However, between them, there were many disputes over silly subjects, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, a constant, extensive and aggressive use of irony, and other "unanticipated" stuff.

I only paid the first annuity and didn't want to participate any more.

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