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.
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.