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Comment by toyota86 | Hacker News Reader

> people insecure enough to join an IQ-restricted club

I don't understand this sentiment. There are race/ethnicity-restricted clubs, men-only clubs, athletic clubs, equestrian clubs, farmers clubs, car ownership clubs. However, when it's about IQ (something which you say you hold in disdain), suddenly out come the insults. Insecure nerds, right? They only have their insignificant test scores, they must be a despicable lot!

Did you ever stop to consider that people might be seeking something different, that this is their attempt at finding other people with similar interests? There is nothing wrong with one valuing their own high IQ test score.

Disclaimer: I have never taken an IQ test, but if I did I probably wouldn't get into Mensa, extrapolating from previous test scores and grades.

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A score on a test doesn't imply enough for you to actually have things in common. (However, just being in a secret club might motivate you enough to find some things to talk about.)

You can get the Mensa experience without joining by having a Quora account - their AI always picks the oddest topics to send to you. For the longest time it would send me all the "what's it like to have a high IQ?" questions and I noticed 1. it wasn't really like anything, and 2. I didn't want to hang out with the people answering them.

You could also read rationalist-associated blogs, several of which are written by people who if you leave them alone for ten minutes try to reinvent eugenics.

e.g. I was linked this one yesterday: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the... and there is like no self-reflection on the concept that maybe optimizing babies for "IQ" will not get you what you want, and that maybe Singapore is not actually genetically better or worse than other places, and neither was John von Neumann.

Some people prefer face to face interaction.

Maybe this analogy will help: joining a high-IQ club is not like joining just any athletic club. It's like joining an athletic club that's restricted based on a metric. What if you wanted to join a hiking club in your area but found out the only way to join was to prove you hiked X mountains first? I could see why that would turn some people off. It's not the interests; it's the cutoff.

Huh? Plenty of clubs are like this, especially athletic clubs, but all sorts of clubs have cutoffs. E.g. improv clubs have auditions, chess clubs have ELO rankings, and so forth.

Sure. My point was only that Mensa is not _just_ a club about a shared interest, which was implied by the examples given by the person I responded to. I suspect it's the cutoff that people don't like.

I never said I hold IQ with disdain. It's just an attribute, not a hobby. Mensa is more like a tall-people's club (descriptive, generally regarded as positive, quantitative cutoff) than it is like an ethnic club (shared culture) or an equestrian or car owner's club (shared interest).

> There is nothing wrong with one valuing their own high IQ test score.

To me it suggests someone who's more concerned with being something special than doing something interesting. It seems like a kind of narcissism, and suggests that they're probably pretty boring.

How do you feel about identity based clubs such as LGBTQ-positive spaces etc?

I think LGBTQ-positive spaces are ideally supposed to operate as support groups for people at high risk of ostracism by conventional social groups. That's very different from a group celebrating possession of a marker of conventional success/moral value.

I was just about to make the exact same comment, but I think you articulated it perfectly. People are fine with literally every other type of neurodiversity but god help you if you so much as mention intelligence.

I mean just look at all the negative sentiment going on in the rest of these comments. Guys, there’s nothing wrong about seeking out people similar to yourself.

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