My IQ

Great insight.

Regarding Mensa itself, or any claims to intellectual superiority: one of the big lessons of my life has been that being intelligent has no intrinsic value. If you are unable to manifest your intelligence in a way that can substantially (disproportionate to your effort) improve your life or the lives of others, then your mind doesn't matter. It has no impact in the world, and I am not the first person to observe that having a powerful mind is at many times a burden.

You can see that other people may be more stupid than you, forwarding simpler arguments and relying on less rigorous thinking than yours, but if they don't want to be convinced of that, then you are powerless to make them see it. They go off blissfully, and you burn with anguish. Again, if you cannot manifest your intelligence in a way that forwards your agenda, who cares?

To phrase it in a more confrontational way: if nobody is forced to contend with your mind, nobody knows it exists. Or to summarize it in a quote:

"[Intelligence] is like being a lady: if you have to tell people you are, you aren't." -- Margaret Thatcher

This clicked for me during my final year of college, when a friend of mine was taking an LSAT preparation course. During a break, he was chatting with the instructor about realistic outcomes, and said earnestly that he hoped to get a score of 168 (which IIRC is a very high score.) The instructor, a man of maybe 30, who had been out of school for several years, scoffed and replied, "Good luck, I only got 165 and I'm a genius."

And what did the genius do when not teaching LSAT prep courses? Why, he worked at Target.

Edit: expanded a little on the first couple of paragraphs.

IQ tests have long been criticized by a variety of groups. At the end of the day, it merely measures your ability to perform well on tests that are similar to an IQ test. Traditionally, this set was populated with academic tests, so the IQ could be used to predict your performance in schools (it was actually designed to predict the performance of French schoolchildren.)

However, as the school based subjects have broadened out from traditional liberal arts conceptualizations to include more serious discussion of alternative conceptualizations (CompSci being one example), the IQ test may be decreasing in efficacy of prediction even with regards to academic tests. I have no evidence for this, just an opinion. The issue you ran into seems to be a result of these differing conceptualization paradigms.

At the end of the day, it's an assessment of performance in a very limited subfield of life. I try not to take it too seriously.

In theory, I believe there could be an objective way to determine the "simplest" answer if it is defined as having the lowest Kolmogorov complexity among valid answers (if I read the Wikipedia article correctly) [0]. In the context of an IQ test though, it is not a very practical solution.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

    > But it bugs me that I might not have been
    > creative enough to fail their test.

I know Tanya, and she most certainly is creative enough to fail their tests. It's clear she was trying to conform, and did a job that was good enough for its purpose.

But she is certainly creative enough to fail, and way more intelligent (for pretty much any meaning of the term) than the test will have indicated.