High-IQ Society Displays Low-IQ about Intelligence


Michael Jordan, considered by many to be the greatest basketball player of all time, had a B+ average in high school. He would not be considered intelligent enough to join Mensa.
In a display of tragic irony, the most famous club for so-called “high IQ” individuals is founded on a deeply low IQ understanding of unintelligence.

Mensa, “the organization for smart people like you,” accepts people in the top 2% of “standardized intelligence tests.” These intelligence tests include:

  • the LSAT — a test for law school admissions. Taking a pricey Kaplan test-prep course can significantly improve your score, thereby, according to Mensa, making you more intelligent in general.1
  • the GMAT — same as above, but for business graduate school.
It doesn’t take a Mensan to figure out that a business school test doesn’t measure your overall intelligence.

It may be difficult for overachieving academics to accept that logic and language skills aren’t the only types of intelligence humans possess. For instance, athletic, social, musical — and most importantly, satirical writing — abilities also come from the same piece of gray matter.

IQ tests also happen to be racist2 and classist3 — which makes Mensa perhaps the largest promoter of the widely debunked “Bell Curve” IQ-model.4

Mensa, more than a high IQ society, is a sort of nerdy networking club for the upper-class.