> <i>It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ. For example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction, both of which have been shown to have broad benefits for psychological and physical health.</i><p>Is Mensa really an "intellectual pursuit"? I'm not sure exactly what Mensa does, but maybe people insecure enough to join an IQ-restricted club are more likely to be those who suffer from setbacks in other parts of their lives.
This is a survey of people who joined MENSA. I would posit that most normal, healthy, high-IQ folks never bother, and there's a selection bias at play.
Long, long ago, I came to the conclusion that intelligence was inversely related to sanity. Not a scientific observation, just that people who I knew who were very smart also tended to have difficulties in more ways than the people I knew who had typical intelligence. Typical issues were depression, insecurity, difficulty relating or communicating with others, ... Certainly you can find people with these issues in all groups who have these attributes, and certainly there were many very intelligent persons who had their shit together, but issues seemed to be more common among the very intelligent persons.
> researcher Ruth Karpinski and her colleagues emailed a survey with questions about psychological and physiological disorders to members of Mensa.<p>I think at least part of the conclusions can be attributed to selection bias.
It's not true. No high-quality study, some of which go much higher than MENSA level, corroborates anything remotely like what they claim from their doubly-selected MENSA respondents self-reports: <a href="https://www.gwern.net/SMPY#fn1" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/SMPY#fn1</a><p>For example, <a href="http://programme.exordo.com/isir2017/delegates/presentation/35/" rel="nofollow">http://programme.exordo.com/isir2017/delegates/presentation/...</a> looks at health in SMPY participants, which are a full SD or so above Mensans. If OP were true, they would have odds ratios of scores or hundreds (or higher!) compared to normal people of serious psychopathology, and SMPY surveys would be a staggering wasteland of mental illness; instead, they are very healthy and have rates lower or just slightly above normal people. Or even more recently, "Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good? Comparing Linear and Nonlinear Effects of Cognitive Ability on Life Outcomes" <a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf</a> , Brown et al 2021, finds absolutely no evidence of any quadratic trend remotely like OP claims.
Lots of hating on Mensa here (which sadly smacks of 'sour grapes'). But its a club like many others (e.g. Methodist Mens' Club) that is arranged around a commonality, not a specific activity. Its not perfect, but what club is?<p>Sure some folks have anecdotes about a poor local branch. You get out what you put in I think. If you want more interesting local meetings, then perhaps volunteer to find a speaker or event? Or even speak yourself?<p>Mensa members are smart, sure. But what does that mean? I once bought a book of 'Mensa puzzles' published by the organization (by Dr. Salny anyway, their national head). I went through it from end to end, and figured out most of the puzzles. They ranged from wordplay to story problems to logical reasoning and on and on. In the back were the solutions, and the percentage of Mensa members tested that got them right.<p>This was the most interesting part. For the math and arithmetic problems, from 10% to 25% of Mensa members got them wrong. How could that be right? Well, because (tested) intelligence isn't just about math. It ranges all over the map.<p>And so do Mensa members. They have curiosity about the whole range of the human condition. And (good) member meetings are all about that - discussing and enlightening and disputing things, to a deeper level perhaps than folks normally get at a family dinner or meetup at a bar.<p>Anyway for what it's worth the discussion here is more interesting for folks' reaction to Mensa, than for any real insight into what Mensa is about.
I some times wonder if the IQ of the people that conducts these studies is below average.<p>30 point of IQ of difference is with the average, an IQ of 70 or less is the IQ of a clinically retarded person. So, if you have 132 IQ, the average person is literally retarded compared to you. If you live in a world surrounded by retards you are going to be depressed and had all sorts of mental issues and a hard time to adapt, because everything is made to accommodate them, all of general society is designed for retards from your perspective.
When understanding any sort of genetically determined trait, it's important to remember that there are often two orthogonal forces at work.<p>One is the overall concentration of rare mutations. The vast majority of mutations have a negative impact on fitness, so rare mutations (which haven't had enough time to be selected by evolution), almost always are bad across the board. This is why we see an association between IQ and facial symmetry. A random cosmic ray that flips a bit in the genome will lead to transcription errors which cause subtle but persistent problems across the phenotype. Individuals with a high mutagenic load are more likely to have a whole cluster of unambiguously bad outcomes.<p>The second force at work though are specific tradeoffs made by natural selection. Unlike rare mutations, an allele that's penetrated some fraction of the population comes with both advantages and disadvantages. Otherwise over time, it's penetration would either fall to zero if unambiguously bad, or rise to one if unambiguously good. You're more likely to see this allele have varying penetration for populations in different environments. For example Africans have high rates of sickle cell, because the advantage of malarial protection outweighs the disadvantages. Northern Europeans have high rates of hemochromatosis, because a very high dairy diet creates a high risk of anemia.<p>With that in mind, it's very hard to disentangle the relationship between phenotypical traits. To a first approximation, high IQ people are mostly those who won the genetic lottery and have low mutational load. You'd expect them to be healthier along virtually every metric.<p>However, that doesn't tell you if there's a fundamental evolutionary tradeoff. It very well could be the case that intelligence increases the risk of anxiety, schizophrenia or autism. There may be certain design constraints that evolution's working with, where increasing intelligence on the population level comes at too high of a cost in other areas. One example of this is that we know that APOE4, a gene that drastically increases risk of Alzheimers, confers a significant memory and IQ advantage in youth.
High IQs also associated with being irritated by editors who write headlines like this. (n=1)<p>They buried the lede: "It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ. For example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction, both of which have been shown to have broad benefits for psychological and physical health."
Makes sense, we see more clearly how fucked up the world is :) That's a heavy burden.<p>But I think it stems also from being an outlier, never quite fitting in.
Gwern's Algernon Argument is relevant here: <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/Drug-heuristics</a><p>Logically, it's likely there must be trade-offs for higher IQs or it would have been selected for more strongly.
A more accurate title would be:<p><i>"Mensa membership is associated with mental and physical disorders"</i><p>because the authors of the study base it on a survey of Mensa members.
My opinion is that ultimately IQ is only a measure of performance on IQ tests. There is a positive correlation between IQ and performance in some tasks, but calling someone with a high IQ "smart" or "more intelligent" is a far reach in my experience, which is having an IQ over 179 (I did the test stoned and hungover in order to not score too highly) and being an idiot.
Aside from this being particularly focused around Mensa members rather than the population at large, it's unsurprising to me that there's a correlation between IQ and anxiety/depression. I'm reminded of a quote from Jiddu Krishnamurti:<p>"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
Want to learn a bit more about Mensa?<p><a href="https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-my-year-in-mensa-55379945/" rel="nofollow">https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-my-year-in-mensa-55379945...</a><p>Probably no better piece on it, if you want to consider Mensa as a group of interacting people
There's a lot of “smart” people who were forced to be so by their parents, and suffer as a result of it. (Bad childhood experiences can cause all sorts of lasting damage.) I can see that being a possible factor for high IQ being associated with e.g. anxiety.
Mensa is so passe. Everyone is in the Triple Nines Society these days:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Nine_Society" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Nine_Society</a><p>Edit: I am not in the 99.9% society<p>Edit: /s
There's a theory that says that the factors that increase IQ are the same that, at very high levels, suppress species' innate characteristics, which can cause autism: <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271507751_A_Theory_of_General_Reduction_of_Gene-Expression_Manifesting_as_Autism_1993_with_2014_revisions_of_presentation_-_now_2020_rev" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271507751_A_Theory_...</a>
Dabrowski's overexcitabilities and his theory of positive desintegration is a deep rabbit hole. Simply put, he argued that gifted people transcended levels of humanity through their emotional intensity.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration</a><p><a href="http://positivedisintegration.com/" rel="nofollow">http://positivedisintegration.com/</a>
"Mensa is associated with mental and physical disorders"<p>FTFY<p>Postscript: I am merely clarifying the title: whether the title is true or false is not my concern.<p>PPS: Lots of dissing Mensa here! But Mensa members score higher on IQ tests and, on average, are <i>significantly</i> brighter than non-members.
High IQ people seem to give off different vibes. :) <a href="https://vole.wtf/coder-serial-killer-quiz/" rel="nofollow">https://vole.wtf/coder-serial-killer-quiz/</a>
Semi tangent: I would really recommend watching "Is Success Luck or Hard Work?" By Veritasium<p><a href="https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I</a>
They define high IQs as off the normal curve (on a given side), in the same way they define disorders. Why would they scream surprise when they correlate both factors?
High IQ: Your brain perceive and process much more data than people with less IQ. If you don't filter and process them adequately you're prone to disorders.
My pet (and layman) theory is that people with exceptionally high IQs might have a higher rate of genetic mutation compared to the general population. In my experience people with exceptionally high IQs often look unusual.<p>If that relationship is true, it might also explain a higher rate of mental and physical disorders, many of which can result from genetic mutations.
As I am currently watching a documentary on the college admissions scandal I would love to see a correlation between standardized test scores, preparation in dollars, and IQ.<p>My initial assessment is that there isn’t any correlation between IQ and test scores, ergo the tests are measure of preparation and preference not merit or performance.
If they compared existing averages to results from a survey that only went to Mensa members, then that doesn't prove anything.<p>Need to send the same survey with the same intro letter to normal people also.
> Although the reasons are not fully understood, they also tend to live longer, healthier lives, and are less likely to experience negative life events such as bankruptcy.<p>I’ll tell you why. Smart people listen to experts. Dumb people listen to other dumb people based on feeling.<p>Case in point, the current pandemic. High-IQ people will get vaccinated. The people who won’t because of various conspiracy theories and misinformation are probably all low-IQ, so more of them will die.