I scored high enough on an official IQ test (as in, from a clinical psychologist who tested me professionally in person, not some illegitimate online test) to get accepted into Mensa. Should I do it? Some people love it, others claim that it's just a bunch of pretentious cunts playing board games and bragging about how smart they are. What do you think? What have your experiences in Mensa been like?
Being smart autists, I figure that at least some of you might know what Mensa is like. I would appreciate any and all serious insight.
>>8
There's a layer of the human population that joins honours societies etc. for much the same reason. Mensa is merely one of those, but based on IQ and not grades. They have no purpose except to facilitate the grouping of like-minded individuals, just like Rotary International or the modern Freemasons, and have no relevance in the real world unless you're chin-deep in the business culture of Good Old Boys.
They'll probably die out in a few more generations, or at least be reduced to Facehug groups, which is all that they should be.
Also, these like-minded individuals are obsessed with status and having more of it. They're generally the sort of people who seem mildly uncomfortable when they hear the vapid platitude "money can't buy happiness."
IQ Ideal group of peers
<55 Euthanasia facility–beast-like, unable to cope with any form of societal structure or logic.
55–70 Zoo, chimpanzee community—severely retarded with primitive social tendencies; able to use tools.
70–85 Worship place—unable to reason without external influences but highly social; capable of the rudiments of abstraction.
85–115 Facebook, twitter, digg, reddit—majority of the world's population... Able to gain from the experience of others. Mild abstraction abilities.
115–130 Hacker News, Mensa, /prog/, Stack Overflow—sharing knowledge and ridiculing lesser lifeforms gives an inflated sense of satisfaction that helps to cope with the ability to ask interesting questions and the inability to answer them.
130—145 Academia. Most proficient scientists fall here.
160–175 Mega, Glia, Pi and other High IQ Societies—Highly intelligent, capable of profound abstraction and with a knack to solve difficult puzzles as an act of mental masturbation; usually polyglots, and polymaths.
>175 Seclusion—most peers would give the intellectual satisfaction of a pet.
>>1
Hey OP, if you're serious, skip Mensa. It's a waste of your time and does not maximize your potential marginal impact on society. A better use of your time would be to hang out on http://lesswrong.org or contribute to http://opencog.org/
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Anonymous2011-05-28 19:49
>>22 high IQ writing AI in C/C++
you must be joking.
>>23
Lisp is dead, even among AI researchers. In fact, it could be said that Lisp was solely responsible for the high expectations that never materialized during the Era of Great Expectations in the 50s and 60s, and ending with The Great AI Winter. And that has to do with the fact the Lisp community is highly fractured.
OpenCog is written in C/C++ and OpenCL, and while these language choices are perhaps not as a "productive" as a functional languages in the short term, offer far more potential for heterogeneous computing and low-level close-to-the-metal performance tuning, while still offering suitable third-party abstractions for concurrency and parallelism, and having the most mature compiler tool chains on the planet out of any language.
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Anonymous2011-05-28 20:29
I BANGED YOUR MENSA MOM, SHE COULD ONLY SAY "HARDER"
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Anonymous2011-05-28 20:37
>>25
X86 Assembly offers far more potential for heterogeneous computing and low-level close-to-the-metal performance tuning, while still offering suitable third-party abstractions for concurrency and parallelism, and having the most mature compiler tool chains on the planet out of any language.
>>27
>X86 Assembly offers far more potential for heterogeneous computing
I don't think you know what heterogeneous computing means. It means you have different types of specialized processors running in the same system.
OpenCL allows heterogeneous computing, allowing low-level vectorized and highly parallel code to be retargeted and run on on multiple processors simultaneously, whether they be general purpose CPU cores, DSPs, GPUs, or FPGAs.
>>29
OpenCL is C99 with builtin functions that map directly to SIMD instruction sets and image-sampling gate array hardware, which implies a non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA). Lisp's garbage collection would only get the way.