Wall Street Journal Apr 9, 1992
For Minds of Mega, The Mensa Test Is a Real No-Brainer --- Rival IQ Societies Bicker Over Scores and Styles; Cindy Brady's Velocity
Abstract (Summary)
Rick Rosner, for one, has made a science of ferreting out underage drinkers in his work as a bouncer at two Los Angeles bars. Mr. Rosner, a 31-year-old college student with "Born to Do Math" tattooed on his foot, uses his 180-plus IQ to calculate the unlikely odds of slipping a phony ID past him.
Like some others in super-IQ circles, Mr. Rosner spends a fair amount of time burnishing his spectacular intelligence quotient. He is among the highest scorers on the "Mega Test," a self-administered ordeal containing 48 questions such as: "What is the maximum number of completely bounded volumes that can be formed by three interpenetrating cubes?"
Only 12 of the 4,000 people in the world who have taken the Mega Test scored at least 43, enough to qualify for the Mega Society. Mega is the most elite of about a dozen high-IQ societies claiming intellectual superiority to Mensa International, the oldest and largest. But given the slippery nature of IQ testing, retaining a toehold in this pantheon has become a stormy and all-consuming pastime for some.
Full Text (1258 words)
Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Apr 9, 1992
Just what do the great minds of our generation fixate upon?
Rick Rosner, for one, has made a science of ferreting out underage drinkers in his work as a bouncer at two Los Angeles bars. Mr. Rosner, a 31-year-old college student with "Born to Do Math" tattooed on his foot, uses his 180-plus IQ to calculate the unlikely odds of slipping a phony ID past him.
"Catching fake IDs gives the pleasure of watching probability in action," he wrote in the journal of the Mega Society, a group that skims the IQ cream at the one-in-a-million mark.
Like some others in super-IQ circles, Mr. Rosner spends a fair amount of time burnishing his spectacular intelligence quotient. He is among the highest scorers on the "Mega Test," a self-administered ordeal containing 48 questions such as: "What is the maximum number of completely bounded volumes that can be formed by three interpenetrating cubes?"
Only 12 of the 4,000 people in the world who have taken the Mega Test scored at least 43, enough to qualify for the Mega Society. Mega is the most elite of about a dozen high-IQ societies claiming intellectual superiority to Mensa International, the oldest and largest. But given the slippery nature of IQ testing, retaining a toehold in this pantheon has become a stormy and all-consuming pastime for some.
When, for example, the Mega Society recently decided to merge with another IQ group, some members were told they might have to requalify for the new society. An uproar ensued. The proposal "shows some animals to be more equal than others," carped Mega member Christopher Harding, of Australia, who decried the "orgy of bloodletting." The retest was hastily rescinded.
When Mensa was founded at Oxford University in 1946, the idea was to encourage fellowship among highly intelligent people. But fellowship soon gave way to one-upmanship. "Some people found they were associating with a lot who really weren't at their level," explains the Mega Society's president, Jeff Ward, a San Diego tax consultant.
Mensa, with a current membership of 100,000 world-wide, is open to anyone who scores 132 or above on a standardized intelligence test -- the top 2% of the population. But the various IQ tests all have different scales, so a score on one isn't necessarily equivalent to the same score on another. Standardized tests, moreover, don't discriminate accurately above 150 or so.
So a few hair-splitters in Mensa set to work pushing the IQ envelope. One of them was New Yorker Ronald K. Hoeflin, a 48-year-old onetime librarian who created the Mega Test in 1985. Mr. Hoeflin and a couple of rival test designers went on to found societies to embrace top scorers. As some of these groups were torn by schisms -- usually over entrance requirements -- they divided into new groups with ever-more-exclusive standards.
Teetering above Mensa, the hierarchy now stands in ascending order: The Top One Percent Society (which culls below the 99th percentile), the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, the Cincinnatus Society and the Triple Nine Society (all homes for the 99.9th percentile and above), through the Prometheus Society (the 99.997th percentile). At the zenith is Mega, which selects at the 99.9999th percentile -- the equivalent of a 176 IQ.
In trying to explain the ferment, Prometheus's president, Richard W. May of Buffalo, quotes Nietzsche: "Where the rabble also drink, all wells are poisoned."
For its part, Mensa doesn't recognize what its supervisory psychologist, Abbie F. Salny, calls "homemade" tests like the Mega. Mr. Hoeflin, she contends, "has never professionally published validity, reliability or correlation statistics" for his tests. And because they are unsupervised (the Mega takes about a month to finish), Dr. Salny says, "they would not be considered valid by most psychologists."
High-IQ scoring, in fact, is so problematical that the Guinness Book of World Records has dropped the category entirely. (In 1989 it listed Parade magazine columnist Marilyn vos Savant's IQ of 228 as the world's highest.) Mensa's Dr. Salny says one reason there are no standardized tests at the top of the scale is that "there's no market. Who wants to know you're one in 10,000?"
Many people do, it seems. "It's a birds-of-a-feather thing," explains Mega Society member Chris Cole of Newport Beach, Calif. Mr. Cole, the founder of three software companies, simply enjoys matching wits with his peers. He argues that Mr. Hoeflin's tests are as valid as any others, but adds: "I'm agnostic towards all of it. We don't really understand how the brain works, so being dogmatic seems foolish."
Rick Rosner is also a skeptic. "There's a kind of snottiness among high-IQ people," he says. "In our secret hearts we believe we're as smart as our tests say, but we try to short-circuit the derision by saying we know it doesn't really mean anything." The Mega Test, he says, measures "doggedness and reference skills."
For others, high-IQ groups are havens in a lowbrow world. "You can use big words and have abstruse theories of the universe and never have to apologize," says Grady Ward of Monterey, Calif., president of the 200-member Cincinnatus Society. Mr. Ward, who compiles lexical data bases, hopes to salvage "the next Newton or Voltaire," who is lonely at the top.
Still, these enclaves are riddled with petty rivalries. Prometheus's Mr. May recalls discussing Mega's "three interpenetrating cubes" problem with a mathematician friend, who sneered: "Oh, Richard, that's merely a problem in combinatorics." Mr. May felt vindicated when the mathematician later took the Mega test and got only three nonverbal problems right. "I got 17 right," he gloats.
Most super-IQ groups are far too exclusive to hold regular meetings. "Because of the very nature of the societies, there aren't a whole lot of us," explains 31-year-old Romero Anton Montalban-Anderssen, a spokesman for the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry and a systems analyst for Chrysler Corp.
Mensa, by contrast, is a whirlwind of activity. As those in super-IQ circles tell it, Mensa's fondness for bowling parties, beer bashes and such give it all the intellectual cachet of a Moose lodge. "Most people in the high-IQ societies find Mensans relatively unintelligent, like a bunch of jocks or party-goers," says Mr. Hoeflin, who is still a member but earns a modest living from $40 subscriptions to the twice-monthly journal of the Top One Percent Society and from scoring the Mega Test, the answers to which are confidential.
Mensa's lively social calendar, in fact, is its most potent recruiting tool, helping dispel the taint of elitism that has dogged the group. Lisa Roschewsk, spokesman for Brooklyn-based American Mensa, cites a convention at which 100 Mensans who had met their mates through the club reaffirmed their wedding vows en masse. Even a 1985 Playboy feature, "Women of Mensa," she says, "reinforced the notion that you don't have to be nerdy to belong." Of the super-IQ groups, she says: "They probably are elitist."
The heart of any IQ society is its journal, a forum for exchanging pet theories, posing puzzles or pursuing personal vendettas. Letters to the editor may begin: "Picture the universe as a circle or disc . . ." In Mega's journal, Mr. Rosner likes to throw out "Brady Physics" problems. One involved calculating the velocities of various spaceships, each carrying a member of "The Brady Bunch" family. (Little Cindy Brady's velocity was 29524/29525 the speed of light.)
The threat of one-upsmanship is everpresent. For a while everyone was buzzing about the imminent formation of "the Omega Society" to top even Mega. But that proved only a rumor.
Credit: Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Indexing (document details)
For Minds of Mega, The Mensa Test Is a Real No-Brainer --- Rival IQ Societies Bicker Over Scores and Styles; Cindy Brady's Velocity
Abstract (Summary)
Rick Rosner, for one, has made a science of ferreting out underage drinkers in his work as a bouncer at two Los Angeles bars. Mr. Rosner, a 31-year-old college student with "Born to Do Math" tattooed on his foot, uses his 180-plus IQ to calculate the unlikely odds of slipping a phony ID past him.
Like some others in super-IQ circles, Mr. Rosner spends a fair amount of time burnishing his spectacular intelligence quotient. He is among the highest scorers on the "Mega Test," a self-administered ordeal containing 48 questions such as: "What is the maximum number of completely bounded volumes that can be formed by three interpenetrating cubes?"
Only 12 of the 4,000 people in the world who have taken the Mega Test scored at least 43, enough to qualify for the Mega Society. Mega is the most elite of about a dozen high-IQ societies claiming intellectual superiority to Mensa International, the oldest and largest. But given the slippery nature of IQ testing, retaining a toehold in this pantheon has become a stormy and all-consuming pastime for some.
Full Text (1258 words)
Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Apr 9, 1992
Just what do the great minds of our generation fixate upon?
Rick Rosner, for one, has made a science of ferreting out underage drinkers in his work as a bouncer at two Los Angeles bars. Mr. Rosner, a 31-year-old college student with "Born to Do Math" tattooed on his foot, uses his 180-plus IQ to calculate the unlikely odds of slipping a phony ID past him.
"Catching fake IDs gives the pleasure of watching probability in action," he wrote in the journal of the Mega Society, a group that skims the IQ cream at the one-in-a-million mark.
Like some others in super-IQ circles, Mr. Rosner spends a fair amount of time burnishing his spectacular intelligence quotient. He is among the highest scorers on the "Mega Test," a self-administered ordeal containing 48 questions such as: "What is the maximum number of completely bounded volumes that can be formed by three interpenetrating cubes?"
Only 12 of the 4,000 people in the world who have taken the Mega Test scored at least 43, enough to qualify for the Mega Society. Mega is the most elite of about a dozen high-IQ societies claiming intellectual superiority to Mensa International, the oldest and largest. But given the slippery nature of IQ testing, retaining a toehold in this pantheon has become a stormy and all-consuming pastime for some.
When, for example, the Mega Society recently decided to merge with another IQ group, some members were told they might have to requalify for the new society. An uproar ensued. The proposal "shows some animals to be more equal than others," carped Mega member Christopher Harding, of Australia, who decried the "orgy of bloodletting." The retest was hastily rescinded.
When Mensa was founded at Oxford University in 1946, the idea was to encourage fellowship among highly intelligent people. But fellowship soon gave way to one-upmanship. "Some people found they were associating with a lot who really weren't at their level," explains the Mega Society's president, Jeff Ward, a San Diego tax consultant.
Mensa, with a current membership of 100,000 world-wide, is open to anyone who scores 132 or above on a standardized intelligence test -- the top 2% of the population. But the various IQ tests all have different scales, so a score on one isn't necessarily equivalent to the same score on another. Standardized tests, moreover, don't discriminate accurately above 150 or so.
So a few hair-splitters in Mensa set to work pushing the IQ envelope. One of them was New Yorker Ronald K. Hoeflin, a 48-year-old onetime librarian who created the Mega Test in 1985. Mr. Hoeflin and a couple of rival test designers went on to found societies to embrace top scorers. As some of these groups were torn by schisms -- usually over entrance requirements -- they divided into new groups with ever-more-exclusive standards.
Teetering above Mensa, the hierarchy now stands in ascending order: The Top One Percent Society (which culls below the 99th percentile), the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, the Cincinnatus Society and the Triple Nine Society (all homes for the 99.9th percentile and above), through the Prometheus Society (the 99.997th percentile). At the zenith is Mega, which selects at the 99.9999th percentile -- the equivalent of a 176 IQ.
In trying to explain the ferment, Prometheus's president, Richard W. May of Buffalo, quotes Nietzsche: "Where the rabble also drink, all wells are poisoned."
For its part, Mensa doesn't recognize what its supervisory psychologist, Abbie F. Salny, calls "homemade" tests like the Mega. Mr. Hoeflin, she contends, "has never professionally published validity, reliability or correlation statistics" for his tests. And because they are unsupervised (the Mega takes about a month to finish), Dr. Salny says, "they would not be considered valid by most psychologists."
High-IQ scoring, in fact, is so problematical that the Guinness Book of World Records has dropped the category entirely. (In 1989 it listed Parade magazine columnist Marilyn vos Savant's IQ of 228 as the world's highest.) Mensa's Dr. Salny says one reason there are no standardized tests at the top of the scale is that "there's no market. Who wants to know you're one in 10,000?"
Many people do, it seems. "It's a birds-of-a-feather thing," explains Mega Society member Chris Cole of Newport Beach, Calif. Mr. Cole, the founder of three software companies, simply enjoys matching wits with his peers. He argues that Mr. Hoeflin's tests are as valid as any others, but adds: "I'm agnostic towards all of it. We don't really understand how the brain works, so being dogmatic seems foolish."
Rick Rosner is also a skeptic. "There's a kind of snottiness among high-IQ people," he says. "In our secret hearts we believe we're as smart as our tests say, but we try to short-circuit the derision by saying we know it doesn't really mean anything." The Mega Test, he says, measures "doggedness and reference skills."
For others, high-IQ groups are havens in a lowbrow world. "You can use big words and have abstruse theories of the universe and never have to apologize," says Grady Ward of Monterey, Calif., president of the 200-member Cincinnatus Society. Mr. Ward, who compiles lexical data bases, hopes to salvage "the next Newton or Voltaire," who is lonely at the top.
Still, these enclaves are riddled with petty rivalries. Prometheus's Mr. May recalls discussing Mega's "three interpenetrating cubes" problem with a mathematician friend, who sneered: "Oh, Richard, that's merely a problem in combinatorics." Mr. May felt vindicated when the mathematician later took the Mega test and got only three nonverbal problems right. "I got 17 right," he gloats.
Most super-IQ groups are far too exclusive to hold regular meetings. "Because of the very nature of the societies, there aren't a whole lot of us," explains 31-year-old Romero Anton Montalban-Anderssen, a spokesman for the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry and a systems analyst for Chrysler Corp.
Mensa, by contrast, is a whirlwind of activity. As those in super-IQ circles tell it, Mensa's fondness for bowling parties, beer bashes and such give it all the intellectual cachet of a Moose lodge. "Most people in the high-IQ societies find Mensans relatively unintelligent, like a bunch of jocks or party-goers," says Mr. Hoeflin, who is still a member but earns a modest living from $40 subscriptions to the twice-monthly journal of the Top One Percent Society and from scoring the Mega Test, the answers to which are confidential.
Mensa's lively social calendar, in fact, is its most potent recruiting tool, helping dispel the taint of elitism that has dogged the group. Lisa Roschewsk, spokesman for Brooklyn-based American Mensa, cites a convention at which 100 Mensans who had met their mates through the club reaffirmed their wedding vows en masse. Even a 1985 Playboy feature, "Women of Mensa," she says, "reinforced the notion that you don't have to be nerdy to belong." Of the super-IQ groups, she says: "They probably are elitist."
The heart of any IQ society is its journal, a forum for exchanging pet theories, posing puzzles or pursuing personal vendettas. Letters to the editor may begin: "Picture the universe as a circle or disc . . ." In Mega's journal, Mr. Rosner likes to throw out "Brady Physics" problems. One involved calculating the velocities of various spaceships, each carrying a member of "The Brady Bunch" family. (Little Cindy Brady's velocity was 29524/29525 the speed of light.)
The threat of one-upsmanship is everpresent. For a while everyone was buzzing about the imminent formation of "the Omega Society" to top even Mega. But that proved only a rumor.
Credit: Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Indexing (document details)
Author(s): By Ellen Graham
Publication title: Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Apr 9, 1992. pg. PAGEA.1
Source type: Newspaper
ISSN: 00999660
ProQuest document ID: 27763123
Text Word Count 1258
Document URL: http://0-proquest.umi.com.wizard.umd.umich.edu/pqdweb?did=27763123&sid=1&Fmt=3&clientId=8511&RQT=309&VName=PQD
Publication title: Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Apr 9, 1992. pg. PAGEA.1
Source type: Newspaper
ISSN: 00999660
ProQuest document ID: 27763123
Text Word Count 1258
Document URL: http://0-proquest.umi.com.wizard.umd.umich.edu/pqdweb?did=27763123&sid=1&Fmt=3&clientId=8511&RQT=309&VName=PQD