Mensa

Peter Stevens

Pete Stevens, the president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Mensa, recently visited the Right Angle Club and entertainingly told us about his organization. Mensa is the Latin word for table, alluding to a round table, as in discussion group. It is primarily a social organization of people who are very smart, but are otherwise drawn from all races, genders, and levels of income and profession. To be eligible to join this organization, an applicant must somehow prove that he or she is in the top 2% or percentile of the population in intelligence. The organization has a standardized 90-minute test, but will accept certified copies of evidence from a long list of other established tests of intelligence, to the effect that the applicant is in the 98th percentile of intelligence.

Dr. Lance Ware

Mensa was started in England in 1946, by two lawyers, Roland Berrill and Dr. Lance Ware, who also had a scientific degree. The English have a fondness for classifying the population; aristocracy is sort of a public label of superiority, which most people would admit seems to have a hereditary tendency. At Oxford, there is All Souls College, which is five or six hundred years old, and admits two new members a year. The eligibles are selected from among the valedictorians of the thirty-nine component Oxford colleges, and once admitted to All Souls, spend most weekends for the rest of their lives eating dinner and talking to each other "in hall". It would be interesting to know the scores on the Mensa test of such intellectual elites, although one supposes they have nothing to gain by taking the Mensa test, but -- from their viewpoint --might just happen to have a bad day, and flunk it. Bad show.

Mensa Test

There are now over 150,000 members of Mensa International, enrolled in any of over 200 SIG, or special-interest-groups, ranging from butterflies to astrophysics. In Philadelphia, they have a monthly meeting with speakers, dinners, and outings. There is a scholarship fund, and various other volunteer activities of a Philadelphia character. They now have a major handicap that Senator Fumo is a member, but in fact that is not completely surprising. Lawyers who specialize in embezzlements frequently remark on the high intelligence of these defendants, because embezzlement demands the keeping of two separate accounting books, in order to remember what you have done and said. Most embezzlers are caught because they lose track of the trail. Since Mr. Bernie Madoff has successfully concealed the whereabouts of sixty billion dollars, and seemingly did so for twenty years, there is little doubt of his quick thinking and retentive memory, so he could probably pass any test of it.

Bernie Madoff

Our speaker introduced himself by admitting he has dyslexia and attention deficit, and in fact cannot read his own handwriting. So that introduces the interesting question of how much of specialized intelligence is actually a compensation mechanism for certain other neurological handicaps. It may of course only represent, in some, the need to display a hidden talent, as well as over use it. In any event, we are told that membership in the Mensa society includes examples from all levels of human success, as measured in other ways, like fame and income.

Warren Buffett

The other 98% of us are a little miffed at being excluded from eligibility in the Mensa society, sometimes adopting the sour grapes approach. There is Kingsley's text of "Be good, sweet child, and let who will be clever." But the most devastating retort is that of Warren Buffett, who said that a person with an IQ of 180 ought to sell fifty points to someone who could use it.

It makes you wonder just who is over-compensating for what.

(1695)