Beyond Mensa - High IQ Societies

I've always been interested in IQ tests and how they work. There's an interesting, and deep, conversation to be had about the issues with IQ tests. Without going into too much detail, although IQ tests appear to have some utility, there are problems for example when it comes to cultural differences among the people being tested. If an IQ test has been written from a single cultural perspective, and makes assumptions based on that culture, people who haven't been brought up in that culture can do badly on tests because of their differences in understanding of the questions being asked.

For example, often idioms are used in tests - and someone who's learned the language they're taking the test in as an adult might well have never learned about that idiom. I've seen a specific example online of a test for children where a tea cup was shown, and the child had to match it to another object - the given objects were a truck, flowers, a saucer and a pot. The point was made that many children won't come from houses where cups and saucers are used together, and might think it's a plate - so a child might guess that a cup could be used as a vase for flowers, or that maybe hot chocolate or soup that had been made in the pot and would be poured into the cup.

And, of course, the IQ tests that we use today only really test reasoning, and don't delve into parts of intelligence like creativity or emotional intelligence that are also part of being “intelligent”. Even the writer of the first IQ test, Alfred Binet, was apparently concerned that IQ tests are inadequate to properly test someone's intelligence. And there's a less savoury side of the history of IQ tests as well, with some people using them as a way to “prove” that white people are superior - a belief that a culturally biased IQ test is only going to reinforce, giving it a veneer of “science”.

Despite these issues, I think that a well written IQ test can be useful, if you understand the limitations of what you're testing for - to use an idiom that some people might not understand, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Most people will have heard of Mensa, a high IQ society that people are able to join if their IQ is in the top 2% - or 1 in 50. It's an international club, and you are able to join (usually for a fee) if you can score well in a recognised IQ test. In New Zealand, Mensa appears to run tests in different parts of the country every so often. They also have an online test that you can take to give you a rough idea of how well you'd do.

(I once took a Mensa test, a long time ago when I was about 14, but needed to pay money to have proper adjudication done - something I was not keen to do! And now that I'm an adult, I have no interest in joining a group like Mensa. I worry that it all seems a little self-congratulatory, and I'm somewhat glad I never ended up joining)

A few years ago I learned about some even higher IQ clubs than Mensa - the Prometheus Society, and the Mega and Omega Societies. They mentioned high IQ tests like the Titan and Ultra tests, which I printed out and then stared at like an idiot for a few hours. I took a guess at some of the answers, but honestly I wasn't left with any kind of confidence that I was getting them right. Let's have a quick look at a couple of questions from each:

Firstly, from Titan, the test at least starts off a little easily. It asks us to find a word's pair after being given an example pairing.

Question one says: Strip is to Mobius as Bottle is to something - and I think the answer is probably Klein, as a Klein bottle is a bottle that folds in on itself and is continuous, like a Mobius Strip does.

Question four is Mice are to Men as Cabbages are to, and I presume the answer is Kings. This is because there's a book called Of Mice and Men, and another book (based on a line in Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass) called Of Cabbages and Kings.

Now, don't fret, I had to look some of these details up, I didn't know all of this already. And you'll have noticed I skipped questions two and three, because I'm really not sure of the answers to them. And as we get further down the list, I quickly get to the point where I have no clue, like with the questions:

_LANGUAGE GAMES are to LUDWIG as PIANO CONCERTI FOR THE LEFT HAND is to…

IDOLS are to TWILIGHT as MORALS are to…_

(On Friday I asked our local Skeptics in the Pub group to try to figure out the answers to these word puzzles, and I reckon we figured most of them out - although some we still weren't sure of)

Jumping to the Ultra test, a sample question is:

Suppose an octahedron consists of twelve rods all of equal length and forming eight equilateral triangles -- the eight sides of the octahedron. If any two of the rods are painted white and the rest black, how many distinct patterns are possible?

I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure I'd need a pen and paper to even try to work it out! And even then, I'm not sure I'd get it right. I guess you have to think about how many potential configurations are duplicates of each other, just with the shape rotated.

A lot of these questions, especially the word matching ones, appear to be testing how widely read someone is, rather than their intelligence level. Asking questions that rely on knowledge of topics like Greek mythology (which these tests do heavily) doesn't seem like a very good way of figuring out how clever someone is.

What's more fascinating to me is that, as well as these more well known High IQ societies, it turns out there's a whole heap of societies out there, documented by RationalWiki, that cater to the entire range of someone's ability to do well in an IQ test - from the top 10% High IQ Forum, through the “One Percent Society” and “One in a Thousand Society” (I'll leave it to you to figure out the requirements for those ones!) all the way up to the Tera society (we'll come to them later). And some of them are really weird!

About half way through the RationalWiki list, going from most inclusive to most exclusive, is the pretentiously named “Hall of the Ancients”. Thankfully this society appears to have disappeared. From what I can find out, the society was created by a psychic who had some weird ideas about eugenics - presumably wanting to kill people less intelligent than they (supposedly) are.

At one in a million there's the GenerIQ society which, like many others, has a website that looks like it was built in the ‘90s and never updated since then. There's Incognia and Pi, both of which seem to have lapsed, and then there's the first actual professional looking society, the Mega Society, that we talked about earlier.

At one in 10 million people, there are the Olympiq, Pars and Extreme Intelligence societies. The last of these, Extreme Intelligence, seems to have been created by someone who believes they are in contact with aliens. The Pars society website is dead. But the Olympiq society is going strong, with 62 members - and appears to be made by the same person who created the Pars society.

I can't help but think that the Olympiq society is a grift, as it's one of five high IQ societies all ending in the letters IQ (there's also HELLIQ, CIVIQ, GRIQ and QIQ) that appear to be run by the same person, Dr. Evangelos Katsioulis (MD, MSc, PhD). He's cheap enough that he runs all of the societies from a single domain name, although he only charges a one-off fee (of 80 euros) for membership. Thankfully, not too many people seem to have been scammed by this nonsense, with a few hundred members in the middle tier groups and only 48 members in the easiest group to join, the 1 in 6 QIQ society.

Getting close to the exclusive end of the scale, we have the Giga Society - which has a requirement of members' IQs being one in a billion. This one seems to be a bit weird as well. The society is run by their “Psychometitor”, Paul Cooijmans, who seems to be obsessed with IQ. It's a weird group, because at first glance the site appears to be serious, but at the same time in places it looks like a parody of other high IQ societies. There are some subtle jokes - like the list of accepted IQ tests, some of which are just vaguely funny acronyms:

• Problems In Gentle Slopes - (PIGS)
• Psychometrically Activated Grids Acerbate Neuroticism - (PAGAN)
• Cooijmans On-Line Test (Two-barrelled version) - (COLT)
• Integrity Must Prevail Above Loathsome Evil - (IMPALE)

But from what I can tell, you can actually pay money to buy these tests. Is this just a scam, or do you actually get sent a test? I want to know, but don't want to waste my money finding out! And several other high IQ clubs accept some of Cooijmans' tests as proof of high IQ, so I'm pretty sure this isn't just as simple as being a joke. I wonder if these acronyms are maybe just another way of looking clever.

There's also an obviously tongue in cheek section of the Giga site that talks about how people can communicate with members from the future using a system called t-mail. Answers from the future include, in response to a question about the best advice that future humans can offer, “Never stand behind a horse”. Despite this, I'm not convinced the entire site is just a parody.

The last group in the list, Tera, is fascinating as the most exclusive of all the high IQ clubs. Their requirements are that you need to be in the top 0.000000000001 percent of the population, which is one in a trillion people. Given that there are just shy of 8 billion people on earth, you'd expect that this particular group would have no members, and that maybe once in every few thousand years one person would become eligible to join - although it'd be a fairly lonely club to be a part of.

Somehow, though, there are currently several members in the club - and, surprisingly, it was created by a New Zealander called Roddy Young. Without meaning to be too dismissive, having Facebook stalked Rod and read through his Tera Society website and YouTube videos, I'm pretty sure he doesn't fit the criteria for membership of his own club - there are lots of obvious typos scattered through his writing, and grandiose claims of having calculated the odds of people with high IQ being born from evolutionary principles, but with absolutely no evidence to back those claims up. From what I can tell, at least some of the members of Rod's club are his close friends who live near to him in the Waikato - and, without meaning to be rude to anyone from this part of the country, it seems unlikely to me that Hamilton is a breeding ground for one in ten thousand year geniuses.

Looking to an actual intelligent person for their opinion, Piers Morgan asked Stephen Hawking about IQ a few years ago - and I can't help but agree with him:

“People who boast about their IQ are losers”

There's a lot of crossover of members of these societies, and the member lists that I can find online read like a who's who of egotistical narcissists rather than a list of eminent scientists and thinkers. I also found an interesting article from Cracked magazine that documents how the members of these societies have just as much internal bickering and pettiness as any other organisation - they certainly don't seem to have used their high IQ to evolve beyond the petty squabbles of us mere mortals.

It seems to me that these societies mainly exist to stroke the egoes of those people who want to think that they're intelligent, and are looking for membership of a group as a way to prove it to others. The way entry is controlled, mostly with tests that can be completed at home and with a lack of any kind of formal oversight, makes me think that a lot of the people on these lists are likely to be cheating in some way. And I'm not even convinced that these tests, often written by the founding members of these societies, are even any good at testing for high IQ at all. Does the fact that someone has no interest in the history of classical music or ancient mythology mean that they don't have a high IQ? That doesn't ring true to me.