Back when I was a teenager and in the grip of that peculiar feeling of isolation which I now recognize to be the average teenager's lot, I whiled away many an hour dreaming of escape to a place where I would find others who shared my abstruse preoccupations, and where for once I could openly be the person I felt myself to be in my private hours, without having to worry about being thought "strange", "geeky" or anything of the sort. As such, high IQ societies like Mensa held a certain interest for me, but though I did actually join Mensa for a while, I found that the atmosphere of the meetings was not an iota more stimulating than what I could obtain exposure to anywhere else: although I was still a high school student at the time, it was plain to me that the participants were mostly unaccomplished middle-aged types with sub-par social skills and in need of an outlet for engaging in mutual ego-boosting. Naturally, I quickly stopped going to meetings and let my membership lapse.
What I didn't do, though, was lose my fascination with the general concept of the "high IQ society"; I spent a lot of time wondering if my disappointment with Mensa wasn't due to the relatively lax criteria it employed for membership, and if I wouldn't have better luck participating in a more selective organization, so it was only natural that I would eventually become aware of the existence of a certain Ronald K. Hoeflin, founder extraordinaire of too many such organizations to mention. Due to the willingness of these societies to take the SAT in lieu of an IQ test I already knew that I qualified for several of them, but their sheer numbers and the tiny size of their disclosed memberships made me wary of actually applying for membership. Instead I contented myself with observing these groups and their members as closely as was possible for an outsider to do, which was rather closely at a time when the Internet was already becoming a mass phenomenon (though the WWW hadn't yet displaced Usenet, Gopher and Archie).
As I quickly came to realize from reading the exchanges between the members of these various organizations (whose enrollments clearly overlapped to a considerable degree), my wariness about joining any of them was justified. Reading between the lines, I could see that the problems which drove me away from Mensa plagued all of these organizations in an even more intense manner, and nothing the members had to say to each other went beyond either fooling around with tiresome puzzles lacking in any greater intellectual significance or utilizing their organizational publications to lay out why all their failures in life were due to their being just so much smarter than everyone else. To put it plainly, all of these ultra-high IQ organizations seemed to be watering holes for mediocrities whose sole distinction in life was almost invariably the ability to pass the IQ society's membership criteria. I can still remember the keen sense of disappointment I felt at realizing this much, but fortunately I was soon thereafter on my way to university, so all of this nonsense quickly ceased to matter: I would soon be in an environment in which at least the professors and the graduate students could be counted upon to actually know something and eager to learn more - even if, disappointingly, most of the undergraduates didn't meet either criterion ...
When all is said and done, I don't regret my teenage fascination with high IQ societies, even if it did end in disillusionment, for it taught me a very important lesson I have never been in danger of forgetting: an IQ is just a number which may tell you how good someone is at passing a certain kind of test, but which provides absolutely no insight into the presence or absence in a person of all those characteristics which matter the most in terms of the life of the mind: curiosity, enthusiasm, focus, dedication, a willingness to admit gaps in one's knowledge and a desire to participate in intellectual give-and-take. What I have found is that a person with an IQ of 115 who has all these qualities will not just be more interesting to talk to than an individual who can boast an IQ of 160 but lacks all of these traits, but the former will also almost invariably be much more accomplished than the latter; all too often, people who do very well on IQ tests seem to take this as a license to avoid any serious effort, cursed as they are with the expectation that their sheer "brilliance" will carry them through, and when this naturally fails to be the case, they just sit back and make excuses about being so profound that they cannot but be misunderstood.
Having an unusually powerful mind can certainly give rise to problems in communication if one desires to share one's all of one's enthusiasms with everyone one runs into - the average person will not be interested in discussing the significance of the Historikerstreit, the merits of the Bourbaki program, the shortcomings of endogenous growth theory or the prospects of bosonic strings - but part of what it means to become an adult is learning to live with the fact that not everyone will be interested in all of the things you are, no matter how lofty or lowbrow your concerns may be, and in any case the task of finding like-minded individuals has become a great deal easier than it used to be thanks to the ascendance of the web. As such, there is simply no good rationale for blaming one's social failings on having a sky-high IQ, let alone resorting to seeking the company of people who share nothing else in common other than passing some arbitrary cutoff on a test - especially when the test is as obviously lacking in validity* as the "Mega" or any of the other tests cooked up by a certain Ronald K. Hoeflin. Anyone who's of even average intelligence ought to know when and where to introduce a particular topic into conversation, and how to find a subject of broad enough interest to facilitate interchange with people about whom one knows very little. The most I'll grant with regards to the supposed interaction between "intelligence" (not IQ) and sociability is that individuals who really are preoccupied with profound thoughts simply might be too busy working out their ideas to want to socialize much, not that they don't know how to do so. Staying at home to read and write is not the same thing as becoming a hikikomori because you don't know how to get along with others.
*No properly normed test can be expected ever to turn up an individual with an IQ six whole deviations above the mean, as the line in the article about Hoeflin having a "190" IQ number would indicate, and a guy living in a $150/month flat can't even dream of having the resources to carry out such a norming. Worse yet is that many of the questions in Hoeflin's tests are either about items of obscure knowledge that can easily be looked up, or are simply lacking a single right answer, for reasons I've explained before. Hoeflin's "IQ" tests are bunk.
Thanks for further debasing the significance of the "I.Q.," as I remember quite well how obsessed I used to be about it too. It all began when my stupid AP Psychology teacher presented it to us back then (about 3 yrs ago) as not only a substantial, but a fairly accurate measure of intelligence. Having neither the courage nor the money (I would later learn that some places administer it for free) to take a formal I.Q. test, I resorted to taking the online ones and finally had my "intelligence" validated after getting the minimum score needed to gain entry into the highiqsociety (highiqsociety.com). They afterwards asked me to pay some money to become an "official" member, and well, that was the end of our relationship. I would credit time (maturity) and some Foreign Dispatches reading as the main catalysts for my increasingly growing disinterest in the whole "I.Q." crap.
Posted by: Jubril | December 20, 2007 at 04:00 PM