I’ve decided to revisit the Lost Column Archives with this reprise of a 1987 column I wrote about Mensa. Enjoy.
Mensa BumblersWhy would anyone join a club where people brag about their intelligence? This has to be the most irritating and boring group of people imaginable.
And, of course, I’m talking about Mensa, the most famous club of smarties. The funny thing is, now I’m not so sure that they’re smart
Well, at least that’s the impression I get when I see a Mensa mini-test in a recent issue of Cosmo.
Cosmopolitan, this month, had one of those “”theme” features where it discusses all aspects of intelligence. In one of the sidebars there was a mention of Mensa and a sampler of a Mensa smartness test. Let’s take it.
There are five questions. They are:
1) Unscramble the following word: HCPRAATEU
2) What number is one half of one quarter of one tenth of 400?
3) The same three-letter word can be placed in front of the following words to make a new word: LIGHT, BREAK, TIME.
4) Pear is to apple as potato is to…(a) banana (b) radish (c) strawberry (d) peach (e) lettuce
5) If two typists can type two pages in two minutes, how many typists will it take to type eighteen pages in six minutes?
You’ll be astonished at the bogus answers given by Mensa. They got four out of five wrong. I couldn’t believe it. Their answers were as follows: 1) PARACHUTE, 2) five, 3) DAY, 4) b. both grow in the ground, and 5) six.
How could these people be so mistaken? And they purport to be geniuses. Give me a break. The correct answers are:
1) A trick question with no answer. HCPRAATEU is not a word. The question says that it is. If they asked you to “”make a word from the following scrambled letters” then it would spell parachute. That’s not what they said.
2) This question is so easy it’s dumb. Take a calculator and put in .5 X .25 X .1 X 400 and you get 5. A ten year old could do it. Big deal. Is this the mathematical prowess needed to join Mensa?
3) Add the word DAY to these words and you get NO “”new” words. You get a bunch of old words that date back to the 16th century. What’s so “”new” about the word DAYBREAK, for example? The real answer is “”BUD.” You get BUDLIGHT, BUDBREAK, and BUDTIME. All are “”new” words.
4) The answer is lettuce. Both a potato and a lettuce make salads. While a potato and a radish both grow in the dirt they are both served differently. Since all the references are to food, one must assume food aspects. Therefore, where something grows has nothing to do with it. Otherwise the word “”gopher” would be picked if listed. Obviously, the correct answer is lettuce.
5) Another trick question. The answer as to how many typists does it take to type doesn’t exist. It’s a variable. It depends on how long they chat with each other, who is the supervisor, and whether they get a break during the job. Six typists (the MENSA answer) may take forever.
So MENSA gets four out of five wrong on its own test. I sure don’t want to have anything to do with a group that gives these naive and fallacious answers to sometimes complex questions.
–end
Column © 1987 by John C. Dvorak. This column first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on Sept. 15, 1987.
ya gotta be smart enough not to make the questions complex…
Yeah, most Mensa members I have known are extreme a-holes who take frequent opportunities to let you know how smart they are. They are very often social misfits and take to going to Mensa meetings to meet others like themselves! Yikes!
Oddly, I was in a cemetery recently and saw the Mensa logo on somebody’s headstone. Sad way to be remembered (in my opinion.)
I’m a pretty intelligent guy, and I prefer to hang out with smart, intellectually-inclined people. I once thought about trying to join Mensa to meet other smart people, but when I gave it some serious thought, I realized that it was a bad idea. First off, I’d have to pay just to take a longer version of the exam above, then I’d be hanging out with other schmucks who did the same. No thanks.
3) what’s wrong with TEALIGHT, TEABREAK and TEATIME ?
[Duplicate comment. – Deleted. – ed.]
MENSA is like those “Who’s Who” directories. Virtually anyone can get in if you just pay the requisite fee.
I’m more interested in becoming a Mason. That’s a more interesting social club.
Try Intertel then. Mensa is the top 2% and Intertel is the top 1%.
By the way, I don’t know where that test came from but it is certainly nothing like the one that appears on the Mensa site. In fact, it almost appears bogus…
Tom
#4, Mensa and the Masons are just grown-up version of college fraternities. I never joined a fraternity in college. Since I had friends who were fratboys, I could go to their kickass parties without paying thousands of dollars to be hazed.
P.S.: Former pornstar Asia Carrera is in Mensa, so yeah, I think they’ll let just about anyone in.
I always had trouble with the idea of hanging around with people who are all just being intellectual bullies. I went to a few meetings once as a guest… and everybody was always correcting things others would say. A whole bunch of very, very pedantic people. You had to qualify everything you said, to the point that you began discussing all the exceptions to the topic you wanted to discuss, rather than the topic itself.
A whole of bunch of people wearing their IQ’s as badges of honor, rather than as just one good quality about themselves.
I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.
(Groucho)
J/P=?
Mensa is for people that need affirmation that they are smarter than other people.
Top 10 stereotypes of Mensa members:
1. The guy who tries to end an argument by claiming he is an expert.
2. The guy who gets mad in an argument and then tells you are wrong because “My IQ is higher than yours”.
3. The guy who views exam scores as some sort of metric to measure human value.
4. The guy who views mastery of statistics as validation of his point of view.
5. The guy who corrects everyone’s English and spelling [not realizing many of us who are perfectly capable of both just aren’t going to waste time proofreading trivial stuff].
6. The guy who needs a plaque on the wall for self-esteem purposes.
7. The guy who wins board games, but is an absolute doormat at poker.
8. The guy who is really good at writing his resume, but is not the best at his job.
9. The guy with a black and white view of the world, whose logic crashes badly in real world gray-area situations.
10. The guy who rocks at gaming the test system, and doesn’t realize that although he’s way above average, his test results more measure his mastery of test taking than his mastery of the subject at hand.
But most, the guy who could be twice the man he is, if he didn’t overestimate himself all the time.
If you are confident in yourself, you aren’t always looking for affirmation you are smart.
The typical MENSA member is a tool who, at every opportunity, will show off this MENSA card to illustrate how ‘brilliant’ he is.
Meanwhile, he has the social skills of an earthworm and the appearance to boot.
#10 – It wasn’t Groucho asshole, it was Woody Allen.
^^ Mr. Catshit is the Mensa nerd who is always wrong, LOL.
It was Groucho Marx, foo.
#14, H Meyers,
Hey foo, guess which category you fall into.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Here is the full quote:
I sent the club a wire stating, “PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER”.
* Telegram to the Friar’s Club of Beverly Hills to which he belonged, as recounted in Groucho and Me (1959), p. 321
Cursor_
The extreme’s of both religion and reason have a way of making you lose sight of reality.
Isn’t there a song by Louis Jordan – “If you’re so smart how come you aint rich”
#15 “There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. Oscar Wilde”
Nope, it’s too late. Now everyone knows they can’t trust you as a reliable source of information.
I do give you credit for trying again, though.
But, alas, I still regrettably cannot recommend you as a source of accuracy.
If you think Mensa folks are weird, try a meeting of the Triple Nine Society. (That’s 99.9 percentile and they consider Mensans inferior) Some 999s are very polite, others are like Mensans on acid.
While I disagree with John’s literal, picky analysis of some of the questions, I agree with most comments above, especially Groucho’s quote.
I’ll give John the creative answer award for “lettuce.”
That does sound like a “special” Mensa test for Cosmo readers?
Quite a few “intelligence tests” have negative correlations to intelligence. The most common one might be counting the number of “f’s” in a sentence. The smarter you are, the more you miss them, typically when the f’s appear in prepositions that add little to the meaning of thought conveyed. Smart brains gloss over the insignificant. So, I wonder how many brains just accepted the fact the questioner didn’t use the word “word” correctly and went on with the “obvious” intent of the question? Once again, the test did measure intelligence, in this case, a type of social intelligence, or ability to deal with ambiguity. Who is the god that defined intelligence in this situation?
My wife was a member of Mensa and quit it to join Intertel (I guess that was it as I couldn’t remember the name–thanks #7). I don’t recall ever hearing about the 999 club. She probably wants to avoid hurting my feelings.
Anyway, its kinda fun to see how certain subject reveal a bias in a group. Here, I’d say a significant number want to dump on Mensa members. What does that mean?
JOHN==please post an article about how much sex men with big dicks get and lets see who posts about size doesn’t mean anything.
You know who you are.
1) Intelligence tests measure your ability to take tests. Does that make them worthless? No, not if that’s something you’re interested in. In the real world, it does matter sometimes.
2) “Intelligence” can mean a lot of different things. Common sense is certainly one valuable type of intelligence, but everybody can think of some example of a person who is competent in some way but not others. Being rich, to me, probably IS a measure of some type of smarts (unless, of course, you inherited it or won the lottery.)
3) Mensa, intertel, etc, are just like any other group of individuals. Some members are assholes, some are sensitive and kind, some don’t stand out in any way whatsoever. The assholes, of course, are the most noticeable as a rule.
4) I’m a former member of Mensa (from a LONG time ago) and (more recently) TNS. I went to a few mensa meetings, but never attended any TNS events. Mensa has changed A LOT over the past 20 years… for one thing, it’s about 1/5th the size now that it was when I joined; i.e. less diversity. Anyway, see point 3. You can find what you’re looking for, unless you’re an asshole yourself. Judge people as individuals.
LOL
i’ve always thought of mensa as a group of people who have to pay to make themselves feel better about themselves.
#21–Ubiquitous==no doubt a very weak correlation between “being” rich and intelligence, given the bottom of intelligence scale doesn’t make much money–there just aren’t that many Brittany’s?
I’ve met a few rich people. What impressed me is how few interests they had outside of making money and how easily outraged they could get at the idea of anyone, be it the government or “the competition”, taking their money.
I’ll bet being rich correlates more strongly with being a self centered asshole, but perhaps I reveal too much.
They lost me at: “In Cosmo”.
So Asia Carrera is in Mensa. That gives a new answer to the “create new words” question…
ASSLIGHT, ASSBREAK, and ASSTIME
I am probably the smartest person on this list and I grow tired of the bickering.
Ah shit! I was reading my name upside down again.
I am the Anti-Christ and with my large penis I shall screw you all.
John was right about the answer to q4 being lettuce, but for the wrong reason, it is obvious when you count the letters in the words.
Pear(4) is to apple(5)
as potato(6) is to lettuce(7)
easy
😉
“5) If two typists can type two pages in two minutes, how many typists will it take to type eighteen pages in six minutes?”
How can the correct answer be six? If two typists type two pages in two minutes, that means each typist does a page a minute. Six typists would produce 36 pages in six minutes, NOT 18. Am I overlooking something here?
[No, two typists do one page in one minute. Each typist does ½ page a minute. – ed.]
I think john was trying to start his comic writing career back in 1987. I laughed at his responses. They were very clever. It is clear to me that few of you know anything about Mensa and have never discussed what Mensa is with a Mensa member. I noticed most if not all of you looked right past the comedy in Johns post and went strait to attack mode.
#2 Big Joe
It is clear you know nothing about Mensa.
#4 toms
TEABREAK is not a word.
#6 Lou Minatti
No you can not.
#8 Esteban
Mensa does not exclude anyone for any reason other than meeting the test requirements. There are members of Mensa from all walks of life.
# 10 John Paradox
I agree. LOL just kidding.
# 11 HMeyers
No it is not. The people you describe in that top 10 list are people who lose arguments on blogs.
#12 Brian
Not true. It is frowned upon to do so.
# 17 Jess Hurchist
Money and Intelligence are not directly connected.
#22 SomeDumbGuy
Not at all.
#27 The DON
Good show!. Although IQ tests do not ask “trick questions” Your answer would be the “trick answer” but good show none the less.
# 28 tvindy
Each typist types 1/2 page a minute. In 6 minutes that would be 3 pages per typist. 18 pages total / 3 pages per typist in six minutes = 6 typists