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Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#61

Post by johnhenry »

torstenvl wrote: post #19
oppositelock wrote: post #4

I've met plenty of incredibly intelligent people in my life, and very few mentioned Mensa. Those who did had a yearning for being recognized as smart or exceptional. Perhaps using Mensa membership to draw inferences about smart people in general isn't statistically applicable. It could be that people who want to be recognized as smart have those mental issues, which other smart people don't.

Mensa is not exceptionally smart. It's 2% of all people. [removed a distracting point about social group size.] Most people are likely to know someone who could qualify for Mensa. Mensa is quite smart, but I wouldn't use the word "exceptional." If you write a method that throws an exception on 2% of all inputs, I think maybe you're doing it wrong. 2% is still too common, in my opinion, to be considered an exception.

In this case, the word "exceptionally" may have some connotations associated with it that you've applied, but it really should be treated as your "quite".

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#62

Post by thaumaturgy »

oppositelock wrote: post #4

I've met plenty of incredibly intelligent people in my life, and very few mentioned Mensa. Those who did had a yearning for being recognized as smart or exceptional. Perhaps using Mensa membership to draw inferences about smart people in general isn't statistically applicable. It could be that people who want to be recognized as smart have those mental issues, which other smart people don't.

I tried out Mensa briefly some years ago. I was just looking for new social circles. I have some pretty sharp older buddies that I play Go with weekly, they're a blast to talk to, and I thought I'd find some more of that.

It was bad. Really, really bad. The local chapter had a tiny handful of post-retirement members. I knew a ton of folks in my community at the time, a bunch of them were smart, active people, and none of them were members. It really looked like the only thing the Mensa folks had going for them was having done well on a test.

The newsletter was hilarious. One of them had a feature article on which was the better superhero, Batman or Superman? The article and the responses to it mostly centered around which of the fictional comic book characters had a bigger IQ. The writing was juvenile (and not because it was written by kids), and there was a regular feature that would pick some kind of trouble in the world and ask readers how they'd solve it. None of the responses ever argued from any kind of expertise or domain knowledge or offered any new insight; the theme tended to be, "well, I'm pretty smart, so this seems like an easy problem to solve..."

The discussion on HN on any given topic -- and the topics themselves for that matter -- tends to be a heck of a lot more interesting. I keep coming back here because of the people that just randomly show up in discussions who are actual experts on the topic. That doesn't really happen in Mensa.

My takeaway from that whole thing pretty much agrees with what you're saying. People who are Mensa members are members because their IQ is really important to them to an unhealthy extent. That would seem to correlate well with other psychological and physiological problems.

Probably anybody who reaches the level of 1 dan or higher in Go has at least a Mensa-level IQ. Researchers wanting to do further work in this area could try polling those folks too.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#63

Post by dnautics »

ajmurmann wrote: post #34
chrisseaton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some argue that a platoon or troop is a natural number of men you can get to know well, and a company or squadron the number you can be well acquainted with. Not saying that’s true, just explaining.

That makes a lot of sense, just like Dunbar's Number does. However, at least from my personal, anecdotal experience my number of friends and acquaintances isn't currently capped or was ever capped by my cognitive capability of being well acquainted with them, but rather by not actually meeting that many people and having very little time and energy to get to know the people I meet better. And on top of that things li…

> my number of friends and acquaintances isn't currently capped or was ever capped by my cognitive capability of being well acquainted with them, but rather by... having very little time and energy to get to know the people I meet better.

What's the difference between "cognitive capacity" and "time and energy"?

I have a near photographic memoy for faces and an exceptional ability to remember details about people's lives; I have to limit the number of friends o have for precisely that reason, my cognitive capacity to care would overshadow just about everything else in life.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#64

Post by Alex3917 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #62
oppositelock wrote: post #4

I've met plenty of incredibly intelligent people in my life, and very few mentioned Mensa. Those who did had a yearning for being recognized as smart or exceptional. Perhaps using Mensa membership to draw inferences about smart people in general isn't statistically applicable. It could be that people who want to be recognized as smart have those mental issues, which other smart people don't.

I tried out Mensa briefly some years ago. I was just looking for new social circles. I have some pretty sharp older buddies that I play Go with weekly, they're a blast to talk to, and I thought I'd find some more of that. It was bad. Really, really bad. The local chapter had a tiny handful of post-retirement members. I knew a ton of folks in my community at the time, a bunch of them were smart, active people, and non…

> Probably anybody who reaches the level of 1 dan or higher in Go has at least a Mensa-level IQ.

I've never been able to get past 4k. But from having watched a bunch of Bats go lectures on YouTube, he says (and proves) that it's possible to get well past 1d on direction of play alone without having any problem solving ability.

https://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin/playlists

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#65

Post by DoreenMichele »

sndean wrote: post #49

Some of this reminds me of The Ph.D. Grind by Philip Guo [0] and my own experience when I was getting my PhD: "For those few months, I morphed into an antisocial grump who shunned all distraction and became deeply immersed in my craft. All I thought about was computer code; I could barely speak in coherent English sentences except during my weekly progress meetings with Margo. Even though I appeared and acted subhuma…

Achieving excellence has a personal cost. Imagine that.

The other thing is that the first test that gave rise to the concept of IQ tests was not intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness for rural French children who often did not have birth certificates, so age could not be used as an indicator of school readiness. The problem was complicated by the fact that rural kids and city kids had different experiences that left the rural children less equipped to cope with the school environment. City kids were more likely to have already participated in preschool, among other things. So, there was a cultural divide.

The idea that some people are simply innately smarter is something that is very much debatable. IQ tests are highly influenced by deep cultural knowledge that is typically available to cultural "insiders." In the US, this is typically upper class and upper middle whites.

If an American takes a British or Canadian IQ test, they will tend to perform more poorly and show as having a lower IQ than on American tests, even though these are all English speaking countries. The effect gets worse if you are taking it in a second language. But it still exists even if it is merely a different culture, not a different language.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#67

Post by llamaz »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #62
oppositelock wrote: post #4

I've met plenty of incredibly intelligent people in my life, and very few mentioned Mensa. Those who did had a yearning for being recognized as smart or exceptional. Perhaps using Mensa membership to draw inferences about smart people in general isn't statistically applicable. It could be that people who want to be recognized as smart have those mental issues, which other smart people don't.

I tried out Mensa briefly some years ago. I was just looking for new social circles. I have some pretty sharp older buddies that I play Go with weekly, they're a blast to talk to, and I thought I'd find some more of that. It was bad. Really, really bad. The local chapter had a tiny handful of post-retirement members. I knew a ton of folks in my community at the time, a bunch of them were smart, active people, and non…

How good you are at Go (or chess for that matter) has no correlation with your IQ. There are plenty of examples of people extremely good at chess that struggle, seriously, with academics (e.g. world champion Jose Raul Capablanca, and the youtuber and grandmaster Eric Hansen). Kasparov doesn't have 180+ IQ, which is a common myth. At some point he took the test and it turned out he had a respectable but definitely sub-Mensa IQ.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#68

Post by zerostar07 »

warent wrote: post #3

Their entire high IQ sample comes from Mensa. So this should be restated something like "Inclination to join Mensa correlates with mental and physical disorder"

"Because why not":

> While the ideal would be to individually test all participants for IQ we found no scientific data that would give reason to discredit Mensa members in any country from being representative of those with high cognitive ability.

https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0160289616303324/1-s2.0-S01602896163...

I think this entire paper is bogus, it reeks of lazyness. They did not have a control group either, they used general statistics:

> Although the national surveys would likely capture a broad range of intelligence, statistically only 2% of the national data would include those with a gifted cognitive ability such those who qualify for membership in American Mensa, Ltd.

Which is false, 2% of the population does not join mensa.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#69

Post by macos9point1 »

oppositelock wrote: post #4

I've met plenty of incredibly intelligent people in my life, and very few mentioned Mensa. Those who did had a yearning for being recognized as smart or exceptional. Perhaps using Mensa membership to draw inferences about smart people in general isn't statistically applicable. It could be that people who want to be recognized as smart have those mental issues, which other smart people don't.

A lot of people join Mensa not to brag about it. Mensa can be a really good group to join to meet interesting people and make new friends. Lots of members don't discuss their membership outside of Mensa meetups.

Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

#70

Post by csomar »

Is it possible that the average person has as much exposure to these disorders, however: They are not aware of it. And maybe they weren't as lucky to have it diagnosed.

If smartness is genetical and I'm born with it, then the disorder should have been present from the get go. But for me, these diagnosis only appeared when I got richer: First, I had fewer issues to worry about (like bills or rent to pay). Second, I'm more self-aware.

Imagine you are standing. You have a serious injury bleeding on your left hand. I put a hot metal to your right one. Do you feel the hot metal burn? Nah, you are too distracted by the serious injury.

Now if you have no injury, then you feel the burn. Smart people are usually successful financially. It means they don't worry about what other people worry about (rent, bills, food, etc...). So instead they focus on other stuff like does life really make any sense.

That, and this is the first time I hear about Mensa. Maybe I'm not that smart.

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