My working hypothesis (small certainty, but I have no better explanation at the moment) is that:
smart people are better at cooperation;
but worse at cooperation with normies than with their own kind;
and if they grow up exclusively among normies, their ability to cooperate may be damaged in general.
In other words, the smart people we see in Mensa or various online debates are the smart individuals who were damaged by growing up among normies. The smart people growing up among smart people already have a successful career at university or elsewhere, and don’t care that much about places where the former congregate.
but worse at cooperation with normies than with their own kind
That’s a good insight.
But I would probably add a caveat that the “smart people” population is quite diverse, in some ways more so than the normies, so “our kind” can cooperate well with others of our kind, but not necessarily with smart people not of our kind.
The hypothesis that “growing among normies can damage a high-IQ kid” is more or less based on Terman’s research (sorry, too lazy to find a link now) done a century ago, and seems to fit my experience (which of course may be a confirmation bias). Essentially, high-IQ people who have the chance to copy the life strategies of their family and friends are usually successful at life, while high-IQ people who don’t have anyone around them to copy in some critical stages of life, tend to become… dissatisfied with their life outcomes.
More generally, when you look at humans, culture is often more important than individual skills. Obvious examples are the “feral children” raised by animals; regardless of their IQ, they often fail at some basic human skills, such as walking straight. Seems to me that high-IQ people growing up without the “high-IQ culture” suffer from something similar. They somewhat learn the normie skills (similarly how children raised by wolves somewhat learn the wolf skills), but they have no one to learn high-IQ skills from. And reinventing civilization from scratch usually doesn’t get you too far.
If your parents are e.g. successful professors, and you have high IQ, then pretty much all you need to do is to copy what they did. Also, they can provide you useful advice and other help at every step; because they have been there.
If you are a high-IQ kid that appeared as a weird mutation in the middle of nowhere, your environment is just going to be “you are weird”, and in best case it is “oh man, if I were as smart as you, I would certainly do something more awesome than you are doing” and if you ask “what specifically?” you get “dunno, would buy a lottery ticket and win tons of money, or program a new Facebook… you know how to program web pages, right?”. In other words, you rarely get actionable advice, and the advice you get is often actvely harmful, or just leads you into blind alleys.
When I look at smart people who succeed in life, seems to me that maybe 4 out of 5 simply do something similar to what their parents did. And they are usually too busy doing their stuff to participate in Mensa or similar.
And when I look around in my local Mensa (which may be specific for my country, dunno), I mostly see people who tried to do their best, exceeded their local environment, only to find out that they still fail at life somehow. And then they construct various hypotheses for why that happened, usually all kinds of bullshit.
I have also seen a few high-IQ people whose lives changed a lot after they met other high-IQ people, realized “oh, I am not the only person like this on Earth, there are also others of my kind”, and then started copying each other’s successful strategies. This is my most near-mode evidence that presence of similar people is indeed very useful. (And if you turn the sentence around, you get that isolation from similar people is very harmful.) Now some people need to travel across the world to find people like this at a LW meetup. Some people just grow up with parents, and siblings, and neighbors like that. The universe is simply not fair, and I guess we already know this in some sense.
Thanks for the repply. :)
I’m glad to see your hypotheses is actually based on evidence—anecdotal evidence is better than nothing—and not pulled out of your ass or based on stereotypes, and dumb misconceptions. Mensa seems to get a lot of backlash (I’m not a member and there’s no presence in my country), but Mensa does sound like an organisation I’d (want to) join if they had a presence in Nigeria, plus I have a friend who’s a member.
I guess Mensa may differ between countries a lot, even if some criticism seems common. example, reading somewhere in Asimov’s autobiography about his first visit in Mensa, I just sighed, yeah it would be equally bad here, despite being a different country.
Please note that I don’t have bad opinions about people with high IQ in general. Quite the other way round! My hypothesis is that (in some countries?) Mensa is not representative of that group, but rather of its somewhat problematic subgroup.
Officially, Mensa selects for:
high IQ.
But de facto, Mensa more or less selects for:
high IQ;
desire to have your high IQ recognized;
lack of other existing projects that would compete for your time with Mensa.
It is the latter two points that are problematic. If you are a high-IQ person well integrated in the high-IQ culture—for example a computer science professor at a good university—you are probably not going to join Mensa. Why would you? Your need to interact with smart people is already satisfied at your workplace. And you are too busy learning new stuff, doing research, teaching students, and having non-academic hobbies. On the other hand, if you are a high-IQ person doing some depressing nine-to-five job surrounded by normies, Mensa may seem very attractive. Thus the latter will be overrepresented in Mensa, compared with the base group of high-IQ people in general. What is worse, this may create a feedback loop, where the former will recognize Mensa as a group composed mostly by the latter, and will avoid it on purpose.
I have also seen many Mensans engaging in endless pissing contests. Instead of, dunno, changing the world, they keep bringing yet another puzzle, or in worse (but quite frequent) case, yet another crackpot explanation of theory of relativity and/or quantum physics, without actually being familiar with the very basics. Now again, imagine an actual physics professor joining them for an evening; he or she would run away screaming.
My local Mensa even seems to be sabotaging itself at every step. It’s as if they try to keep the membership small. They have no blog; no recruitment; minimum cooperation with Mensas in other countries. It’s as if they fear that if too many people join Mensa, the ones already there will stop being special. In a country with 5 mil people, the top 2% equals to 100 000 potential members; of those 10 000 potential members in the capital city. Yet the actual number is maybe 300 members country-wide, which means 10 − 20 of them meeting regularly at one place. If you are a student at a good university, you already have more high-IQ people around you at school! As if these people fail to understand that it’s supposed to be about having a wide network.
A few random things I would do as a dictator of my local Mensa:
Have an official blog. Probably without comment section, because all the crackpots would immediately go there. Or perhaps a public blog, with a private comment section. This should take like one day to set up. Have some editors filter the content for quality, so it won’t be full of e.g. conspiracy theories on youtube, just because an active Mensan happens to be a fan. Hope that one day a cool article will be shared on social networks, and people will want to join you.
Have two tiers of membership: paid and unpaid. In other words, if someone passes the IQ test, and wants to be recognized as a Mensa member, keep them in the fucking database, even if they refuse to pay the fee. Because Mensa is a network, and a value of a network generally increases with the number of nodes, even if the nodes don’t contribute financially. (Why are people on Facebook? Because other people are on Facebook. Why do you have a phone? Because other people have phones.) Keep the unpaid members in a database, let them select the topics they are interested in, and send them various announcements and invitations—it doesn’t cost you anything extra. Don’t let them vote if they don’t pay the fees; but keep them connected.
Instead of each country playing on its own playground, recognize that the world is connected and people speak foreign languages. Create international websites. Or just use the existing infrastructure, such as Reddit—create a subreddit with limited membership, when only people certified by their local Mensa can join. But don’t make a subreddit per country; make a subreddit per language, with some people in more than one. With enough members, make a subreddit per language and topic. It is utterly stupid for a country with 20 − 50 active Mensans to pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
What I am trying to say here is that my local Mensa seems like they don’t even try, and sometimes actively oppose any attempts to change the status quo, which a few years ago was “the same ten people keep meeting once in a month in a room, discussing latest conspiracy theories and crackpot quantum physics”, but these days it’s more like “once in a few months we invite a speaker from outside Mensa to tell us about some interesting topic” which is a huge improvement, mostly made by 1 very assertive and popular person.
Maybe the situation in other countries is different, but from what I heard, the endless pissing contests (yet another puzzle to solve), crackpot physics, and meta debates about IQ (without knowing the elementary facts about psychometrics, replacing them with random “opinions”) seem to be everywhere. Perhaps the difference is that in some countries the member base is large enough that it also includes a few people who actually get things done.
I feel there should be an organization for highly intelligent people. I just think Mensa mostly fails at this goal.
I feel there should be an organization for highly intelligent people. I just think Mensa mostly fails at this goal.
I don’t see a reason for the organization to have intelligence as membership criteria. There are people who used to be Mensa members in our local Lesswrong group and according to their impression the IQ according to them most people in our LW group would likely pass the entrance criteria of Mensa.
The Chaos Computer Club would be another organization full of intelligent people. The Chaos Computer Club happens to be a community that doesn’t let crackpots on it’s stage. I heard there years before the Snowden releases that the NSA has access to German internet traffic and it turned out to be right.
Julian Assange whose talks I heard to times at the congress when he could still travel to Berlin (and the congress was in Berlin). You have a bunch of people who can really clearly think about real-politics and who’s opinions of political opinions I trust more than the opinion of some random journalist.
As a third group the debating club at university is also full with very smart people. No one of the groups needs IQ as a criteria.
My idea is that a Mensa-like organisation should essentially do two things.
1) Allow you to easily filter for high intelligence. You have no problem to find e.g. a highly intelligent programmer, because programming and high intelligence are related. But if you want to talk about something different, which is not related to intelligence, but you still prefer talking to highly intelligent people, it could be difficult to find them. But for this to work correctly, you need a lot of members, like thousands. So that for many traits X there is a sufficient subset of “highly intelligent and X”.
It is probably easier to explain using the status-quo-reversal technique. Imagine that you live in a country where the average IQ is 70, and only one person in fifty has the IQ of 100 or higher. Do you think it would be useful to create a place for these people to meet each other outside of their professional boundaries?
2) A specialized part of the organisation should spread general information about intelligence, and counter the typical myths. How necessary this seems probably depends on how often you find people believing various myths. I often meet people who are quite hostile towards the idea of intelligence, especially the idea that some students could learn faster than others, and that it would be better to provide them education better adjusted to their abilities and needs. I imagine the organisation should advocate for better education of highly intelligent students.
But of course an organisation with only handful of members and crappy web presence is unable to achieve either of that.
The examples you provided—yeah, there are places, such as computer science universities, where people are already indirectly filtered by high intelligence. But imagine having the same thing across professions, across social class boundaries, etc. Which more or less was the original idea of Mensa founders.
1) Allow you to easily filter for high intelligence. You have no problem to find e.g. a highly intelligent programmer, because programming and high intelligence are related. But if you want to talk about something different, which is not related to intelligence, but you still prefer talking to highly intelligent people, it could be difficult to find them.
Neither LessWrong nor the Chaos Computer Club requires people to be programmers and both draw highly intelligent people. In contrast to Mensa (or at least the Mensa that you described that’s full of crackpots), they also happen to filter for high epistemic hygiene.
Thanks for the opinion; it is much appreciated. I cannot give an informed opinion on this, as I’m not a member of MENSA. Since you see a problem, why not work towards fixing it?
I joined the local Mensa, observed the problem after a few meetups, and proposed some changes. Most people opposed them. Blog is not necessary, because supposedly everyone already knows what Mensa is. We don’t need unpaying members; if they are not willing to pay the small fee, they don’t deserve to be listed as Mensa members. My disagreement with conspiracy theories on youtube means I am a sheep brainwashed by the mainstream media. And I don’t appreciate the new theories on relativity and quantum physics, because I am too stupid to understand them. We don’t need to cooperate with Mensas in other countries.
At last, some people agreed that the current web forum was horrible, and that it needed to be changed. But the discussion about possible replacement went exactly according to the Mensa stereotype—everyone proposed a different weird solution, and threatened to ragequit unless it is done exactly as they want it. And of course no one volunteered to actually do anything. I volunteered to install PHPBB, which at that time seemed like a standard solution, but people voted against me. Also, people insisted that the new forum must be visible only to Mensa members, to make Mensa even more invisible. At the end someone else installed their solution (I think it was the guy who installed the previous forum, so he had all the passwords, and could do it regardless of the opinions of others), with minimal functionality, and made it only for members.
(To compare, during the same time period I started a local Esperanto group with my four friends; we organized a few meetups, including an international one, published a few books, and a promotional multimedia DVD. The difference in productivity was shocking. In our Esperanto group, we had the same goal, and everyone wanted to try things. In the Mensa group, there was no goal, and everyone wanted to signal sophistication by disagreeing.)
Later I made a talk about Less Wrong in Mensa. Explained the cognitive biases, etc. Zero interest.
Then I started going to LW meetups and mostly forgot about Mensa. The LW meetups are much better, and the people there are much smarter. Unfortunately, the LW meetups I attend are in the neighbour country. I organized a local LW meetup for a year or two, but it didn’t grow beyond maybe 5 really interested people.
If I could succeed to find 10 rationalists in my country, I would probably try to take over Mensa. Seems simple: if everyone would join Mensa (IQ is not a problem for an average rationalist), we could win the election and make the new rules. Problem is, I haven’t succeeded at finding 10 wannabe rationalists in my country yet. (Also, recently I am busy having a small child, not enough time and energy for doing stuff outside my job and home.)
I would have helped you if I were in your country. It seems like the MENSA in your country is a waste of time, and hardly worth saving. Create a new organisation if you must. Though saving your local MENSA may be the decision with the higher payoff (imagine the possibilities if you showed them the way).
Cooperation can get harder when projects get more complex. The coordination skill that you need to succeed with a project like going drinking at a pub together is a lot less like the coordination skill you need to get a project like Dragon Army working.
So… is your hypothesis that high IQ gives more of an advantage in clearly defined mathy situations, such as playing a Prisonners’ Dilemma tournament, but less of an advantage in real-life situations where e.g. the coordination skills are more important?
My hypothesis is that smart people try problems where coordination is harder. That means even if they have the same skill level, they will have less success.
Some evidence that seemingly goes again the widely known “Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate” phenomenon:
Are Smarter Groups More Cooperative? Evidence from Prisoner’s Dilemma Experiments
Hive Mind
What is your opinion on this?
My working hypothesis (small certainty, but I have no better explanation at the moment) is that:
smart people are better at cooperation;
but worse at cooperation with normies than with their own kind;
and if they grow up exclusively among normies, their ability to cooperate may be damaged in general.
In other words, the smart people we see in Mensa or various online debates are the smart individuals who were damaged by growing up among normies. The smart people growing up among smart people already have a successful career at university or elsewhere, and don’t care that much about places where the former congregate.
That’s a good insight.
But I would probably add a caveat that the “smart people” population is quite diverse, in some ways more so than the normies, so “our kind” can cooperate well with others of our kind, but not necessarily with smart people not of our kind.
Curious why you posit that
The hypothesis that “growing among normies can damage a high-IQ kid” is more or less based on Terman’s research (sorry, too lazy to find a link now) done a century ago, and seems to fit my experience (which of course may be a confirmation bias). Essentially, high-IQ people who have the chance to copy the life strategies of their family and friends are usually successful at life, while high-IQ people who don’t have anyone around them to copy in some critical stages of life, tend to become… dissatisfied with their life outcomes.
More generally, when you look at humans, culture is often more important than individual skills. Obvious examples are the “feral children” raised by animals; regardless of their IQ, they often fail at some basic human skills, such as walking straight. Seems to me that high-IQ people growing up without the “high-IQ culture” suffer from something similar. They somewhat learn the normie skills (similarly how children raised by wolves somewhat learn the wolf skills), but they have no one to learn high-IQ skills from. And reinventing civilization from scratch usually doesn’t get you too far.
If your parents are e.g. successful professors, and you have high IQ, then pretty much all you need to do is to copy what they did. Also, they can provide you useful advice and other help at every step; because they have been there.
If you are a high-IQ kid that appeared as a weird mutation in the middle of nowhere, your environment is just going to be “you are weird”, and in best case it is “oh man, if I were as smart as you, I would certainly do something more awesome than you are doing” and if you ask “what specifically?” you get “dunno, would buy a lottery ticket and win tons of money, or program a new Facebook… you know how to program web pages, right?”. In other words, you rarely get actionable advice, and the advice you get is often actvely harmful, or just leads you into blind alleys.
When I look at smart people who succeed in life, seems to me that maybe 4 out of 5 simply do something similar to what their parents did. And they are usually too busy doing their stuff to participate in Mensa or similar.
And when I look around in my local Mensa (which may be specific for my country, dunno), I mostly see people who tried to do their best, exceeded their local environment, only to find out that they still fail at life somehow. And then they construct various hypotheses for why that happened, usually all kinds of bullshit.
I have also seen a few high-IQ people whose lives changed a lot after they met other high-IQ people, realized “oh, I am not the only person like this on Earth, there are also others of my kind”, and then started copying each other’s successful strategies. This is my most near-mode evidence that presence of similar people is indeed very useful. (And if you turn the sentence around, you get that isolation from similar people is very harmful.) Now some people need to travel across the world to find people like this at a LW meetup. Some people just grow up with parents, and siblings, and neighbors like that. The universe is simply not fair, and I guess we already know this in some sense.
Thanks for the repply. :) I’m glad to see your hypotheses is actually based on evidence—anecdotal evidence is better than nothing—and not pulled out of your ass or based on stereotypes, and dumb misconceptions. Mensa seems to get a lot of backlash (I’m not a member and there’s no presence in my country), but Mensa does sound like an organisation I’d (want to) join if they had a presence in Nigeria, plus I have a friend who’s a member.
I guess Mensa may differ between countries a lot, even if some criticism seems common. example, reading somewhere in Asimov’s autobiography about his first visit in Mensa, I just sighed, yeah it would be equally bad here, despite being a different country.
Please note that I don’t have bad opinions about people with high IQ in general. Quite the other way round! My hypothesis is that (in some countries?) Mensa is not representative of that group, but rather of its somewhat problematic subgroup.
Officially, Mensa selects for:
high IQ.
But de facto, Mensa more or less selects for:
high IQ;
desire to have your high IQ recognized;
lack of other existing projects that would compete for your time with Mensa.
It is the latter two points that are problematic. If you are a high-IQ person well integrated in the high-IQ culture—for example a computer science professor at a good university—you are probably not going to join Mensa. Why would you? Your need to interact with smart people is already satisfied at your workplace. And you are too busy learning new stuff, doing research, teaching students, and having non-academic hobbies. On the other hand, if you are a high-IQ person doing some depressing nine-to-five job surrounded by normies, Mensa may seem very attractive. Thus the latter will be overrepresented in Mensa, compared with the base group of high-IQ people in general. What is worse, this may create a feedback loop, where the former will recognize Mensa as a group composed mostly by the latter, and will avoid it on purpose.
I have also seen many Mensans engaging in endless pissing contests. Instead of, dunno, changing the world, they keep bringing yet another puzzle, or in worse (but quite frequent) case, yet another crackpot explanation of theory of relativity and/or quantum physics, without actually being familiar with the very basics. Now again, imagine an actual physics professor joining them for an evening; he or she would run away screaming.
My local Mensa even seems to be sabotaging itself at every step. It’s as if they try to keep the membership small. They have no blog; no recruitment; minimum cooperation with Mensas in other countries. It’s as if they fear that if too many people join Mensa, the ones already there will stop being special. In a country with 5 mil people, the top 2% equals to 100 000 potential members; of those 10 000 potential members in the capital city. Yet the actual number is maybe 300 members country-wide, which means 10 − 20 of them meeting regularly at one place. If you are a student at a good university, you already have more high-IQ people around you at school! As if these people fail to understand that it’s supposed to be about having a wide network.
A few random things I would do as a dictator of my local Mensa:
Have an official blog. Probably without comment section, because all the crackpots would immediately go there. Or perhaps a public blog, with a private comment section. This should take like one day to set up. Have some editors filter the content for quality, so it won’t be full of e.g. conspiracy theories on youtube, just because an active Mensan happens to be a fan. Hope that one day a cool article will be shared on social networks, and people will want to join you.
Have two tiers of membership: paid and unpaid. In other words, if someone passes the IQ test, and wants to be recognized as a Mensa member, keep them in the fucking database, even if they refuse to pay the fee. Because Mensa is a network, and a value of a network generally increases with the number of nodes, even if the nodes don’t contribute financially. (Why are people on Facebook? Because other people are on Facebook. Why do you have a phone? Because other people have phones.) Keep the unpaid members in a database, let them select the topics they are interested in, and send them various announcements and invitations—it doesn’t cost you anything extra. Don’t let them vote if they don’t pay the fees; but keep them connected.
Instead of each country playing on its own playground, recognize that the world is connected and people speak foreign languages. Create international websites. Or just use the existing infrastructure, such as Reddit—create a subreddit with limited membership, when only people certified by their local Mensa can join. But don’t make a subreddit per country; make a subreddit per language, with some people in more than one. With enough members, make a subreddit per language and topic. It is utterly stupid for a country with 20 − 50 active Mensans to pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.
What I am trying to say here is that my local Mensa seems like they don’t even try, and sometimes actively oppose any attempts to change the status quo, which a few years ago was “the same ten people keep meeting once in a month in a room, discussing latest conspiracy theories and crackpot quantum physics”, but these days it’s more like “once in a few months we invite a speaker from outside Mensa to tell us about some interesting topic” which is a huge improvement, mostly made by 1 very assertive and popular person.
Maybe the situation in other countries is different, but from what I heard, the endless pissing contests (yet another puzzle to solve), crackpot physics, and meta debates about IQ (without knowing the elementary facts about psychometrics, replacing them with random “opinions”) seem to be everywhere. Perhaps the difference is that in some countries the member base is large enough that it also includes a few people who actually get things done.
I feel there should be an organization for highly intelligent people. I just think Mensa mostly fails at this goal.
I don’t see a reason for the organization to have intelligence as membership criteria. There are people who used to be Mensa members in our local Lesswrong group and according to their impression the IQ according to them most people in our LW group would likely pass the entrance criteria of Mensa.
The Chaos Computer Club would be another organization full of intelligent people. The Chaos Computer Club happens to be a community that doesn’t let crackpots on it’s stage. I heard there years before the Snowden releases that the NSA has access to German internet traffic and it turned out to be right. Julian Assange whose talks I heard to times at the congress when he could still travel to Berlin (and the congress was in Berlin). You have a bunch of people who can really clearly think about real-politics and who’s opinions of political opinions I trust more than the opinion of some random journalist.
As a third group the debating club at university is also full with very smart people. No one of the groups needs IQ as a criteria.
My idea is that a Mensa-like organisation should essentially do two things.
1) Allow you to easily filter for high intelligence. You have no problem to find e.g. a highly intelligent programmer, because programming and high intelligence are related. But if you want to talk about something different, which is not related to intelligence, but you still prefer talking to highly intelligent people, it could be difficult to find them. But for this to work correctly, you need a lot of members, like thousands. So that for many traits X there is a sufficient subset of “highly intelligent and X”.
It is probably easier to explain using the status-quo-reversal technique. Imagine that you live in a country where the average IQ is 70, and only one person in fifty has the IQ of 100 or higher. Do you think it would be useful to create a place for these people to meet each other outside of their professional boundaries?
2) A specialized part of the organisation should spread general information about intelligence, and counter the typical myths. How necessary this seems probably depends on how often you find people believing various myths. I often meet people who are quite hostile towards the idea of intelligence, especially the idea that some students could learn faster than others, and that it would be better to provide them education better adjusted to their abilities and needs. I imagine the organisation should advocate for better education of highly intelligent students.
But of course an organisation with only handful of members and crappy web presence is unable to achieve either of that.
The examples you provided—yeah, there are places, such as computer science universities, where people are already indirectly filtered by high intelligence. But imagine having the same thing across professions, across social class boundaries, etc. Which more or less was the original idea of Mensa founders.
Neither LessWrong nor the Chaos Computer Club requires people to be programmers and both draw highly intelligent people. In contrast to Mensa (or at least the Mensa that you described that’s full of crackpots), they also happen to filter for high epistemic hygiene.
Thanks for the opinion; it is much appreciated. I cannot give an informed opinion on this, as I’m not a member of MENSA. Since you see a problem, why not work towards fixing it?
I tried, and failed.
I joined the local Mensa, observed the problem after a few meetups, and proposed some changes. Most people opposed them. Blog is not necessary, because supposedly everyone already knows what Mensa is. We don’t need unpaying members; if they are not willing to pay the small fee, they don’t deserve to be listed as Mensa members. My disagreement with conspiracy theories on youtube means I am a sheep brainwashed by the mainstream media. And I don’t appreciate the new theories on relativity and quantum physics, because I am too stupid to understand them. We don’t need to cooperate with Mensas in other countries.
At last, some people agreed that the current web forum was horrible, and that it needed to be changed. But the discussion about possible replacement went exactly according to the Mensa stereotype—everyone proposed a different weird solution, and threatened to ragequit unless it is done exactly as they want it. And of course no one volunteered to actually do anything. I volunteered to install PHPBB, which at that time seemed like a standard solution, but people voted against me. Also, people insisted that the new forum must be visible only to Mensa members, to make Mensa even more invisible. At the end someone else installed their solution (I think it was the guy who installed the previous forum, so he had all the passwords, and could do it regardless of the opinions of others), with minimal functionality, and made it only for members.
(To compare, during the same time period I started a local Esperanto group with my four friends; we organized a few meetups, including an international one, published a few books, and a promotional multimedia DVD. The difference in productivity was shocking. In our Esperanto group, we had the same goal, and everyone wanted to try things. In the Mensa group, there was no goal, and everyone wanted to signal sophistication by disagreeing.)
Later I made a talk about Less Wrong in Mensa. Explained the cognitive biases, etc. Zero interest.
Then I started going to LW meetups and mostly forgot about Mensa. The LW meetups are much better, and the people there are much smarter. Unfortunately, the LW meetups I attend are in the neighbour country. I organized a local LW meetup for a year or two, but it didn’t grow beyond maybe 5 really interested people.
If I could succeed to find 10 rationalists in my country, I would probably try to take over Mensa. Seems simple: if everyone would join Mensa (IQ is not a problem for an average rationalist), we could win the election and make the new rules. Problem is, I haven’t succeeded at finding 10 wannabe rationalists in my country yet. (Also, recently I am busy having a small child, not enough time and energy for doing stuff outside my job and home.)
I would have helped you if I were in your country. It seems like the MENSA in your country is a waste of time, and hardly worth saving. Create a new organisation if you must. Though saving your local MENSA may be the decision with the higher payoff (imagine the possibilities if you showed them the way).
Cooperation can get harder when projects get more complex. The coordination skill that you need to succeed with a project like going drinking at a pub together is a lot less like the coordination skill you need to get a project like Dragon Army working.
So… is your hypothesis that high IQ gives more of an advantage in clearly defined mathy situations, such as playing a Prisonners’ Dilemma tournament, but less of an advantage in real-life situations where e.g. the coordination skills are more important?
My hypothesis is that smart people try problems where coordination is harder. That means even if they have the same skill level, they will have less success.