I was thinking whether Mensa could be used for CFAR purposes (raising the rationality waterline), and I would like to hear your opinions. Also, I am interested how many LWers are in Mensa, and how many think that Mensa is useful for anything more than satisfying social needs of its members.
For me personally, Mensa was a huge disappointment. (I am not sure how much that reflects only Mensa in Slovakia, and how much applies for other countries too. I know many people in other countries are disappointed too, but it also seems to me that Mensa in other countries does more useful activities.) The easiest way to explain it is that when I first heard about Mensa, I imagined something like CFAR Minicamps. It did not occur to me that someone would spend their energy to create a worldwide organization for highly intelligent people, only to do… nothing. Because that is exactly what most Mensa members do, in my experience. They meet, they talk about something, but usually only to signal their own superiority, then they solve puzzles. Everyone wants to be a leader; almost no one is willing to be a team player. So all they do is confirm each other’s superiority, and then lament about why the world does not hold highly intelligent people in higher esteem.
Yet I am somehow not ready to give up on the idea that selecting people with high IQ is potentially very useful. Many intelligent people are irrational. But still, higher intelligence should mean higher chance to become rational, and higher possible benefits from rationality. I mean, if you want to make someone interested in LW-style rationality, you should have better chances with “random person with IQ over 130” than with “random person”. It’s just that both of those chances are rather low. Selecting highly intelligent people could be a good first step toward some goal—the problem is that for Mensa, selecting them is the goal. (To avoid misunderstanding: I don’t think that a person must be Mensa-level to benefit from rationality. I just think that if you can do the IQ-testing cheaply, e.g. by outsourcing it to Mensa, your resources could be better spent on people who pass the test, than on random people.)
If many people have similar experience like me (tried to find rationality in Mensa, became disappointed, and eventually left), perhaps we could try to gain these people for rationality. Don’t search among long-term Mensans; look at the fresh ones. They are preselected for IQ, and also for wanting some new experience—we could offer them an alternative to Mensa, while outsourcing most of the costs of finding them.
This is the outline of a plan: Create a local rationalist organization. Become members of Mensa (even if you don’t care about Mensa). Create a “special interest group” within Mensa. Get information about when the new members are tested. Go to the meetups with the new members, and try to recruit them for your organization. (If your organization is a subgroup of Mensa, there is nothing wrong about contacting new Mensa members, right?) But besides this, just ignore Mensa, and keep your group informally open for non-Mensans too. -- Simplified version: Create flyers about CFAR, with links to LessWrong and “Facing the Singularity”, and give them to the new members.
Expected result: cheapest way to find new fellow rationalists in your area. Do you think it could work?
Might work, depends on how inconspicuous and patient your were. Certainly not the first time people have been trying to recruit from/take over another organisation. Writing about it on the internet however will make what you’re doing so much more obvious if someone started noticing.
Writing about it on the internet however will make what you’re doing so much more obvious if someone started noticing.
One of the reasons I wrote this in Open Thread, instead of a separate article. :D
But even if they notice, can they prevent it? I don’t think so. If a group of rationalists decides to become Mensa members, who can stop them? If they pass the entry test (in my estimate, 9 of 10 would pass), they cannot be stopped from becoming Mensa members. If they are Mensa members, they cannot be denied information about the new tests, and they cannot be denied contact with the new members. Nothing in the current rules of Mensa prevents this. Actually, the whole “special interest group” system encourages this—of course, assuming that the group wants to remain a subset of Mensa. So we just need to have a subset of rationalists who are both rationalists and Mensa members, and this subset is a completely valid group within Mensa. This is not even exceptional; for example there is a group of Mensa members who love classical music, and I assume nobody expects them to avoid non-Mensans who share the same hobby. In the same way, rationalist Mensans could have meetups with rationalist non-Mensans, and ignore the whole Mensa, except for fishing for new members.
Certainly not the first time people have been trying to recruit from/take over another organisation.
Sure, the same strategy could by used by… well, anyone, unless they are strongly anticorrelated with IQ. But it would be most useful for groups strongly correlated with IQ. Seems to me that rationalists are such group. (I assume that most high-IQ people are not rationalists, but most rationalists are high-IQ people.) Any other groups like this? Probably many of them, for example entrepreneurs, programmers, mathematicians, etc. But each of them already have their specialized communities, probably larger than Mensa, so it does not make sense for them. When we will have local rationalist communities of size comparable with local Mensa, it will stop making sense for us too. But today, we are not there yet (at least in my country).
If many people have similar experience like me (tried to find rationality in Mensa, became disappointed, and eventually left), perhaps we could try to gain these people for rationality. Don’t search among long-term Mensans; look at the fresh ones. They are preselected for IQ, and also for wanting some new experience—we could offer them an alternative to Mensa, while outsourcing most of the costs of finding them.
It would probably work better if you do not present it as an alternative to Mensa, and do not think of LessWrong and CFAR as rivals to Mensa. Just start a special interest group within Mensa on the subject of practical rationality. To avoid the taint of entryism it would be best if it were started by people already in Mensa, if there are any such LWers.
Within Mensa, “if we’re so smart, why aren’t we rich?” is a FAQ. If the Rationality SIG could be started by people who actually are rich (or otherwise successful), so much the better.
The general impression that I get is that smart and effective people are too busy doing awesome things to join Mensa. If I wanted to recruit rationalists I think I would do better by looking for effective people and picking the smartest ones instead of looking for smart people and picking the most effective ones, especially if the process I’m using to look for smart people actively puts selection pressure against effectiveness. (CFAR running workshops directed at entrepreneurs seems to be a strategy in this vein.)
I think the focus on new comers to Mensa may reduce this. I also think it would depend partially on why Mensa people are ineffective. If there ineffectiveness is set, or due to something that we don’t have a comparative advantage at fixing then yes we shouldn’t focus on recruiting them. However, its possible that many of them are ineffective due directly to rationality failures, or some other problem that the LW community could help fix (e.g. they lack something to protect, but would find existential risk reduction very compelling if they heard the arguments for it). In than case Mesna would make a good recruiting ground.
I also know a few smart and successful people in Mensa. However, they were all successful before joining Mensa, and as far as I know Mensa did not help them become stronger. Their “being successful” and “being in Mensa” are just two traits that randomly happened to the same person; there is no synergy. They are successful during their time outside Mensa, and they come to Mensa only to relax.
(As far as I know the only way to use Mensa to become more successful is this: Do something that you would be doing outside of Mensa anyway, but convince your fellow Mensans to let you use the logo of Mensa in advertising your product. If you make a logical computer game, a board game, a mechanical puzzle, write a book, or create your own IQ test… for all these things a “Mensa recommended” logo could increase sales. And if you are an important person in your local Mensa, it should be trivial to get the permission from your friends. I know two people who use this strategy, and at least for one of them it makes decent money. But the only real help they get from Mensa is the advertising.)
I agree that effective people are generally more busy, but it’s not “all or nothing”. Someone like Steve Jobs would have no time for Mensa. But there are many young people doing awesome things and exploring the world. As a part of exploration, some of them come to Mensa, and then many of them soon leave. The advantage is that they are willing to try something new. -- Looking for the most effective people you would have a problem to make them listen to you. Of course, unless you are even more awesome. Which I am afraid I am not (yet).
I was thinking whether Mensa could be used for CFAR purposes (raising the rationality waterline), and I would like to hear your opinions. Also, I am interested how many LWers are in Mensa, and how many think that Mensa is useful for anything more than satisfying social needs of its members.
For me personally, Mensa was a huge disappointment. (I am not sure how much that reflects only Mensa in Slovakia, and how much applies for other countries too. I know many people in other countries are disappointed too, but it also seems to me that Mensa in other countries does more useful activities.) The easiest way to explain it is that when I first heard about Mensa, I imagined something like CFAR Minicamps. It did not occur to me that someone would spend their energy to create a worldwide organization for highly intelligent people, only to do… nothing. Because that is exactly what most Mensa members do, in my experience. They meet, they talk about something, but usually only to signal their own superiority, then they solve puzzles. Everyone wants to be a leader; almost no one is willing to be a team player. So all they do is confirm each other’s superiority, and then lament about why the world does not hold highly intelligent people in higher esteem.
Yet I am somehow not ready to give up on the idea that selecting people with high IQ is potentially very useful. Many intelligent people are irrational. But still, higher intelligence should mean higher chance to become rational, and higher possible benefits from rationality. I mean, if you want to make someone interested in LW-style rationality, you should have better chances with “random person with IQ over 130” than with “random person”. It’s just that both of those chances are rather low. Selecting highly intelligent people could be a good first step toward some goal—the problem is that for Mensa, selecting them is the goal. (To avoid misunderstanding: I don’t think that a person must be Mensa-level to benefit from rationality. I just think that if you can do the IQ-testing cheaply, e.g. by outsourcing it to Mensa, your resources could be better spent on people who pass the test, than on random people.)
If many people have similar experience like me (tried to find rationality in Mensa, became disappointed, and eventually left), perhaps we could try to gain these people for rationality. Don’t search among long-term Mensans; look at the fresh ones. They are preselected for IQ, and also for wanting some new experience—we could offer them an alternative to Mensa, while outsourcing most of the costs of finding them.
This is the outline of a plan: Create a local rationalist organization. Become members of Mensa (even if you don’t care about Mensa). Create a “special interest group” within Mensa. Get information about when the new members are tested. Go to the meetups with the new members, and try to recruit them for your organization. (If your organization is a subgroup of Mensa, there is nothing wrong about contacting new Mensa members, right?) But besides this, just ignore Mensa, and keep your group informally open for non-Mensans too. -- Simplified version: Create flyers about CFAR, with links to LessWrong and “Facing the Singularity”, and give them to the new members.
Expected result: cheapest way to find new fellow rationalists in your area. Do you think it could work?
Might work, depends on how inconspicuous and patient your were. Certainly not the first time people have been trying to recruit from/take over another organisation. Writing about it on the internet however will make what you’re doing so much more obvious if someone started noticing.
One of the reasons I wrote this in Open Thread, instead of a separate article. :D
But even if they notice, can they prevent it? I don’t think so. If a group of rationalists decides to become Mensa members, who can stop them? If they pass the entry test (in my estimate, 9 of 10 would pass), they cannot be stopped from becoming Mensa members. If they are Mensa members, they cannot be denied information about the new tests, and they cannot be denied contact with the new members. Nothing in the current rules of Mensa prevents this. Actually, the whole “special interest group” system encourages this—of course, assuming that the group wants to remain a subset of Mensa. So we just need to have a subset of rationalists who are both rationalists and Mensa members, and this subset is a completely valid group within Mensa. This is not even exceptional; for example there is a group of Mensa members who love classical music, and I assume nobody expects them to avoid non-Mensans who share the same hobby. In the same way, rationalist Mensans could have meetups with rationalist non-Mensans, and ignore the whole Mensa, except for fishing for new members.
Sure, the same strategy could by used by… well, anyone, unless they are strongly anticorrelated with IQ. But it would be most useful for groups strongly correlated with IQ. Seems to me that rationalists are such group. (I assume that most high-IQ people are not rationalists, but most rationalists are high-IQ people.) Any other groups like this? Probably many of them, for example entrepreneurs, programmers, mathematicians, etc. But each of them already have their specialized communities, probably larger than Mensa, so it does not make sense for them. When we will have local rationalist communities of size comparable with local Mensa, it will stop making sense for us too. But today, we are not there yet (at least in my country).
It would probably work better if you do not present it as an alternative to Mensa, and do not think of LessWrong and CFAR as rivals to Mensa. Just start a special interest group within Mensa on the subject of practical rationality. To avoid the taint of entryism it would be best if it were started by people already in Mensa, if there are any such LWers.
Within Mensa, “if we’re so smart, why aren’t we rich?” is a FAQ. If the Rationality SIG could be started by people who actually are rich (or otherwise successful), so much the better.
The general impression that I get is that smart and effective people are too busy doing awesome things to join Mensa. If I wanted to recruit rationalists I think I would do better by looking for effective people and picking the smartest ones instead of looking for smart people and picking the most effective ones, especially if the process I’m using to look for smart people actively puts selection pressure against effectiveness. (CFAR running workshops directed at entrepreneurs seems to be a strategy in this vein.)
I think the focus on new comers to Mensa may reduce this. I also think it would depend partially on why Mensa people are ineffective. If there ineffectiveness is set, or due to something that we don’t have a comparative advantage at fixing then yes we shouldn’t focus on recruiting them. However, its possible that many of them are ineffective due directly to rationality failures, or some other problem that the LW community could help fix (e.g. they lack something to protect, but would find existential risk reduction very compelling if they heard the arguments for it). In than case Mesna would make a good recruiting ground.
I also know a few smart and successful people in Mensa. However, they were all successful before joining Mensa, and as far as I know Mensa did not help them become stronger. Their “being successful” and “being in Mensa” are just two traits that randomly happened to the same person; there is no synergy. They are successful during their time outside Mensa, and they come to Mensa only to relax.
(As far as I know the only way to use Mensa to become more successful is this: Do something that you would be doing outside of Mensa anyway, but convince your fellow Mensans to let you use the logo of Mensa in advertising your product. If you make a logical computer game, a board game, a mechanical puzzle, write a book, or create your own IQ test… for all these things a “Mensa recommended” logo could increase sales. And if you are an important person in your local Mensa, it should be trivial to get the permission from your friends. I know two people who use this strategy, and at least for one of them it makes decent money. But the only real help they get from Mensa is the advertising.)
I agree that effective people are generally more busy, but it’s not “all or nothing”. Someone like Steve Jobs would have no time for Mensa. But there are many young people doing awesome things and exploring the world. As a part of exploration, some of them come to Mensa, and then many of them soon leave. The advantage is that they are willing to try something new. -- Looking for the most effective people you would have a problem to make them listen to you. Of course, unless you are even more awesome. Which I am afraid I am not (yet).