As others note, large areas make finding good groups much easier. Population density, and type of density is key.
I’ve never been a member of Mensa or attended a meeting, but I’ve been uniformly unimpressed with Mensans. (Isaac Asimov reported similarly many years ago.) In general, the people who are grouping solely by intelligence are, predictably, not often successful. If you’re working at Google or have a Harvard law degree or won the state chess championship, you don’t need some symbol of “Top 2%,” and you’d rather hang with doers than people who are proud of their testing skills. (And on LW, top 2% is not an especially high bar.)
It seems to me that intelligence is an enabling thing; higher intellgence people can achieve certain things that others can’t. But if you’re focusing on the raw skills rather than the actual achievement, you’re probably not interesting.
I was always under the impression that the point of Mensa was that smart people have difficulty finding others they can meaningfully communicate with, and having a community of their own helps. I was also under the impression that its decline in status was related to the rise of the internet. Now that it’s easier to find communities of very smart people online, Mensa’s purpose is less necessary, and it will be populated more by older existing members and those who want proof-of-smartness, rather than by people who just want a peer group. I would expect actual meeting attendees to be heavily slanted towards the former group, and that was the experience I had at meetings—most of the people there were ~20 years older than me, and I didn’t get a negative impression so much as have very little in common to talk about.
A friend suggested I should go to meetings anyway for professional-networking reasons.
Interesting side note: In real life I hesitate to mention Mensa membership because it feels like I’m boasting. Here on LW I hesitate to mention it because I expect it to be looked down on.
I was also under the impression that its decline in status was related to the rise of the internet.
This seems very credible to me. Also, it seems to me that Mensa does not use internet well.
For example, as a member of a small local Mensa (50 or 100 members in Slovakia), I was surprised why we don’t use some international web forum to discuss with Mensa members from other countries. I mean, speaking with 100.000 people worldwide could be more cool that speaking with 100 people in my country, and even that would be more cool than meeting 10 of them in person and realising we share no common interests. Okay, not everyone speaks English, but there should be no problem to create subforums for each language, and let any member participate in any forum they understand. I would expect a smart international organization to do this as one of their first steps—especially if their #1 goal is networking.
Mensa can be meaningful only if it will contain many subgroups with various goals. The organization as a whole should only provide universal support for those groups, such as filtering new members (which it does), and providing useful tools (which it does not).
As others note, large areas make finding good groups much easier. Population density, and type of density is key.
I’ve never been a member of Mensa or attended a meeting, but I’ve been uniformly unimpressed with Mensans. (Isaac Asimov reported similarly many years ago.) In general, the people who are grouping solely by intelligence are, predictably, not often successful. If you’re working at Google or have a Harvard law degree or won the state chess championship, you don’t need some symbol of “Top 2%,” and you’d rather hang with doers than people who are proud of their testing skills. (And on LW, top 2% is not an especially high bar.)
It seems to me that intelligence is an enabling thing; higher intellgence people can achieve certain things that others can’t. But if you’re focusing on the raw skills rather than the actual achievement, you’re probably not interesting.
I was always under the impression that the point of Mensa was that smart people have difficulty finding others they can meaningfully communicate with, and having a community of their own helps. I was also under the impression that its decline in status was related to the rise of the internet. Now that it’s easier to find communities of very smart people online, Mensa’s purpose is less necessary, and it will be populated more by older existing members and those who want proof-of-smartness, rather than by people who just want a peer group. I would expect actual meeting attendees to be heavily slanted towards the former group, and that was the experience I had at meetings—most of the people there were ~20 years older than me, and I didn’t get a negative impression so much as have very little in common to talk about.
A friend suggested I should go to meetings anyway for professional-networking reasons.
Interesting side note: In real life I hesitate to mention Mensa membership because it feels like I’m boasting. Here on LW I hesitate to mention it because I expect it to be looked down on.
This seems very credible to me. Also, it seems to me that Mensa does not use internet well.
For example, as a member of a small local Mensa (50 or 100 members in Slovakia), I was surprised why we don’t use some international web forum to discuss with Mensa members from other countries. I mean, speaking with 100.000 people worldwide could be more cool that speaking with 100 people in my country, and even that would be more cool than meeting 10 of them in person and realising we share no common interests. Okay, not everyone speaks English, but there should be no problem to create subforums for each language, and let any member participate in any forum they understand. I would expect a smart international organization to do this as one of their first steps—especially if their #1 goal is networking.
Mensa can be meaningful only if it will contain many subgroups with various goals. The organization as a whole should only provide universal support for those groups, such as filtering new members (which it does), and providing useful tools (which it does not).