What are the benefits of being a member of Mensa?
It means there's a chance you're no longer the most boring person you know.
I thought the reverse.
My IQ
91–100 of 294 posts
Re: My IQ
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
"And what did the genius do when not teaching LSAT prep courses? Why, he worked at Target." Kafka was a clerk at an insurance company. Einstein was an assistant patent examiner. Wittgenstein was a gardener at a monastery and then a primary school teacher. Van Gogh only ever sold one painting during his life, and that was to his brother. There are hordes of other people widely regarded as "geniuses", who lived and die…
Kafka and Einstein had white collar jobs when those were rare and Wittgenstein gave away his (inherited) fortune.
The OP was judging a person by his job, and implying that the person in question couldn't be a genius because he worked at a menial job.
I simply provided some counterexamples.
Furthermore, white collar or not, I doubt that many would contend that Kafka or Einstein were some sorts of models of "success" if judged by their jobs, and few would judge them "geniuses" solely by looking at what they did for a living.
The fact that Wittgenstein gave away his inheritance is completely irrelevant. We were talking about jobs as marks of genius, not about inherited wealth.
However, I will grant that being born in to a wealthy family, being given a first-rate education, and being surrounded by highly accomplished individuals (as Wittgenstein was) does usually give the beneficiary a tremendous head start over most people.
I would certainly have bet on someone born in to Wittgenstein's highly privileged position making something of himself than on someone born in to poverty.
That said, plenty of people born in to tremendous wealth squander it and their lives. A couple of interesting, relatively recent documentaries on the subject are "Born Rich"[1] and "The One Percent"[2].
Re: My IQ
#93What are the benefits of being a member of Mensa?
I suspect it was far more valuable in pre-Internet non-population-dense America, where it was one of the few effective ways to connect with other smart people. It is extremely obsolete now. But "they" (whoever "they" is in practice) publish some nifty puzzle books.
Re: My IQ
#94Re: My IQ
#95tl;dr Not bragging at all: I'm so creative and the IQ test is so culturally unfair that I just barely made it into freakin' Mensa .
I think you'll find that Tanya Khovanova is in easily the top 0.1% of any general intelligence test you'd choose.
Re: My IQ
#96IQ tests share this property of undervaluing creativity and overvaluing conformity with academic work in general. Witness my favorite renegade intellectual, Robert Pirsig, from his Wikipedia page: 'While doing laboratory work in biochemistry, Pirsig became greatly troubled by the existence of more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, and, indeed, that the number of hypotheses appeared unlimited…
Witness my favorite renegade intellectual, Robert Pirsig
I went to high school with a classmate who used to have the Pirsig family over for dinner fairly regularly. Robert Pirsig's father Maynard Pirsig was a law professor at the University of Minnesota, where the classmate's father (and, years later, I) studied for a law degree. I think, having read only Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance among Robert Pirsig's writings, and after limited personal acquaintance with Maynard Pirsig, that Robert Pirsig takes a lawyer's "that's debatable" attitude as he approaches scientific and philosophical questions, which bogs down his quest for certainty.
AFTER EDIT: I've seen an interesting pattern of drive-by voting on this comment, but I'd like to know more about what other people who are acquainted with the writings of Maynard Pirsig (father) and Robert Pirsig (son) think about the influence of the one writer on the other.
Re: My IQ
#97Maybe you got a lot of those questions right, despite having reservations about them, and perhaps that's the whole point of the test. Despite there being confusing or ambiguous questions, maybe the test is designed to determine your ability to figure out what the test-makers designated as the correct response.
Re: My IQ
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually an impossible solution, since Kolmogorov complexity is uncomputable. However, there are some related complexity measures which are computable, so that they are merely impractical rather than impossible to apply: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_complexity#O... Of course, you can bet that the writers of the test did not use anything related to algorithmic complexity when deciding the corre…
1. Someone named "mistercow" is obviously biased on this question. 2. Another item to factor in, beyond lookup table size, is that questions are written in English, and the medium (spelled words) should not be snuck in as part of the content, except where sometimes it is done intentionally :) Also, in classification problems like these, one should also consider not just how efficiently a solution chooses an answer fr…
>Another item to factor in, beyond lookup table size, is that questions are written in English, and the medium (spelled words) should not be snuck in as part of the content, except where sometimes it is done intentionally :)
That just strengthens my point. The word-length hypothesis doesn't require any information about English. If we change our assumptions to say that the program is being fed the raw visual stimuli (as a human is), then the word-length hypothesis gets even stronger, since it merely involves comparing the widths of the stimuli.
But most of the information about the medium can be ignored when comparing hypotheses because it is constant across them.
Re: My IQ
#99Ask HN: what is the acceptance/rejection rates for Mensa tests?
On average they reject 98%. Mensa's cut off is the top 2% of IQs
>On average they reject 98%. Mensa's cut off is the top 2% of IQs
These two statements are not congruent unless the distribution of IQs in people applying to Mensa is equal to the ditribution of IQs in the general population. I doubt that to be the case.
Re: My IQ
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kafka and Einstein had white collar jobs when those were rare and Wittgenstein gave away his (inherited) fortune.
The OP was judging a person by his job, and implying that the person in question couldn't be a genius because he worked at a menial job. I simply provided some counterexamples. Furthermore, white collar or not, I doubt that many would contend that Kafka or Einstein were some sorts of models of "success" if judged by their jobs, and few would judge them "geniuses" solely by looking at what they did for a living. The f…
The OP was judging a person by his job, and implying that the person in question couldn't be a genius because he worked at a menial job.
No, I was judging him by his accomplishments -- a measure by which your counterexamples shine, and the LSAT instructor falls down. All of the people you mention were successes in some way outside of their job, and they met my other criteria: they disproportionately advanced the state of the world.
We were talking about jobs as marks of genius ...
You were talking about that, but nobody else was.