h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.h2g2.com/A167311

This one went through the old system twice, and was rejected both times with unilluminating and inexplicable (one said it might be considered offensive, which is rediculous when you consider that, through IRC, I had a pack of Mensans help me edit the piece) explanations. I am here to find out if there is any feedback that anyone could offer that would actually be helpful.

I would in no way shape or form consider this offensive. Right now, this entry does a very good job of explaining who Mensans are and how well they party. I definitely think it belongs in the edited guide, although I think it should probably be expanded some first, i.e.:

1) What is the purpose of Mensa?
2) How long has Mensa been around?
3) How many countries have Mensa chapters?
4) Maybe something on Mensa's special interest groups?
5) Maybe something on Mensa's efforts towards education for gifted children?
6) What does the word Mensa mean? (answer: table)
7) Who are some famous Mensa members?

Plus, I would suggest linking to the Mensa International website (www.mensa.org) rather than the site of the American Mensa organization -- after all, the title of the article *is* Mensa International.

I hope some of these comments are useful, although feel free to ignore them otherwise.


Michelle

hmmmm...offensive?

Perhaps the reader thought you were calling Mensans moronic in that last paragraph.

I felt this entry was very positive towards Mensans, when I've read much that isn't.

Perhaps the reader felt that someone might be offended by the suggestion Mensans are humans too. This is somewhat controversial you know --

Gavroche

I feel there is definately a need in the guide for an article on Mensa, but this article deffinately needs more flesh on the other activities of Mensa and on what members get out of Mensa.

ZOE ya round

I guess that's the problem... they want more info, but there really isn't much more to tell. It's a social club for nerds, is basically it. They're not tremendously active in the community at large. They test people and throw parties. I guess I could go on with the benefits members receive, and tell something about the SIGs, but the rest is really just trivia.

The link goes to the US site, but it points to the page that tells what tests and scores qualify you, which is why it is on the word "Qualification." I didn't see any such list on the international site.

You might point out the original point of Mensa - since carefully expunged from official histories of the organisation - which was to breed people of 'superior intellect' in order to create a super-human, eugenically 'perfect' race. There still seems to be more than a trace of that attitude about the current membership - the official magazine (in the UK) has printed poems before now calling for the gassing of those of lower intellect, and members include Norris McWhirter, the (former?) head of the Freedom Association - a fascist organisation.
Also you may want to include something about the lack of relevance of IQ to intelligence, and the racist bias of the eugenics pioneers who created these tests in the first place...

Oooh, eek! Is this true, Kernel Sellers?

I like this article, but I have to agree with previous comments - it seems a bit thin in places. Perhaps you could flesh it out with a bit of history on the founding of Mensa - even a bit about this deep, dark secret that S. Munchkin mentioned.

As far as I know, the whole super-race thing is hogwash. The original point was to bring the intelligentsia together in a common place, the idea being that, in the course of discussion, they would be able to come up with solutions to the world's problems. Plus, people feel more comfortable socializing with people at or near their own intelligence level (the adage goes +/- 10 IQ points), and this brings together those people in the top 2% who would otherwise have a difficult time finding each other.

As for racial biases, I'm curious. How does one engineer an IQ test so that only people of a certain race do well? Frankly, I have to admit, this sounds idiotic to me. You mean to tell me that white people think differently from others? Or that there are certain things that only a white person would know?

As for what the UK is up to, well, they're the UK. I don't know what they're about. But just because your McWhirter guy is a member doesn't mean that that's their goal. The only qualification for membership is IQ. Right-wing politicos are just as likely to score high as anyone else. If David Duke (famed KKK member who ran for governor (?) of Louisiana and nearly won... stupid rednecks) scored high enough and paid his dues, he'd be a member of the American chapter. Same with Jessie Jackson.

At any rate, this project is a low priority for me right now, as I am busy with other things. I just wanted to find out what the deal was. I may or may not ressurrect this thing in the future. Thanks for all the input.

The racial bias can be there. An example is in 'odd one out' questions, where the candidate might be unacquanted with american eating habits, and so not know that a fork is associated with food. Similarly, someone from a low social background might associate the TV with food, and the table with homework or playing cards. It is very easy to build such assumptions in by accident.

Other problems plague the purer tests, such as next in the series questions. EG:

3,3,5,4,4,3,5,5,?,?

Well - in practice nearly any answer could be correct - for a given infinite series. For example, it could be part of the series:

3,3 ; 5 ; 4,4 ; 3 ; 5,5, ; 1 ; 6,6, ; -1 ; 7,7 ; -3 ; 8,8 , ...

where the patter is that the doubles increase by one each iteration, and the singles decrease by one.

Alternatively, it could be the number of letters in each number as a word:

one(3), two(3), three(5), four(4), five(4), six(3), seven(5), eight(5), nine(4), ten(3), ...

So which is the 'right' answer? You have to guess, based on your knowledge of the correct answers to similar questions you have seen in the past, or on what you think the examiner is looking for. This depends on:

how much you know about IQ tests - bias
how closely your mental processes are to the examiners - bias
how many IQ tests you have done before - bias

Other problems can sneak in in all sorts of guises. Consider the following question:

Darlene the girl scout is making cookies to sell to people, but she has to decide how many to make. If she makes none it will cost her nothing. If she makes ten it will cost her £18, and if she makes twenty it will cost her £25. She can sell them for £1.70 pounds each. How many should she make?

Easy, huh? Well, not if you only have £3 in cash. Or you are lazy. Or you don't know how to make cookies. Or you don't know how many pennies to a pound, come to that.

Names are another problem. Entering an exam where many of the names are not of your culture is marginally unsettling, and reduces marks. You may scoff, but it's true - and has the same effect on whites who enter exams where all the names are non-white in origin. A mixture of names will unsettle all people equally, which might not be ideal, but at least is fair.

I can agree that familiarity with the types of questions can lead to greater success. But some of your points, I have to argue:

Darlene the scout: This problem is only to be considered on its own merits. It's all about profit. Since they don't tell us how many she can afford to make, we can assume she can afford to make the max, 25. It doesn't matter if she has only a few pounds... it isn't important to the problem.

As for the rest... it is easy to see why a Brit would fail a test that was written by an American, and vice-versa, due to vocabulary differences like word associations and such. But the charge Stealth was making was that Mensa sought to exclude other races within the same nationality. In other words, an African-American would do far worse on those tests than a Caucasian one. In this sense, the charge is rediculous, because both are members of the same culture. They therefore have the same eating habits, same language, same names, etc. Therefore, neither has an advantage in the test. And if anyone mentions Ebonics, I'm going to throw things. The kids may pick up poor speech patterns from their parents, but proper American English dominates the schools, the media, entertainment, and so on. Every bright African-American I've ever known was articulate, and had the ability to properly conjugate the verb "be." My language skills surpassed my own parents' by the time I was 12.

I disagree - only certain outlooks on life would say it's all about profit. Less selfish outlooks might immediately think about other factors, before deciding that the examiner was probably only interested in profit. BUT - that's extra time spent, and IQ tests are very much against the clock.

This may be different in the US to UK, but I would suggest that many people living and working in the UK, even second or third generation immigrants, retain their traditional habits to a significant extent. Certainly the same is true in reverse amongst the ex-patriots I've met.

In any case, this process of absorbing and adapting to culture *does* take some time - years in fact. Even if only newcomers to your country are discriminated against, that's still racial bias.

Not so. All they have to do is prove evidence of having scored in the top 2% on a supervised test of IQ. It doesn't say where or when that has to take place. If they take such a test in their native environments, they can get in. And since Mensa is an international body, there are opportunities for that.

I'm going to have to ask my German ex-pat friend how he got into Mensa. I don't know if he joined in Germany or took the test here in the States. Either way, his example will certainly have bearing on this conversation.

Gotta love the internet. I caught the German in question on IRC. So, here's the skinny... after only four years in the US, he took the Mensa proctored exams. He was pretty fluent in English by that time, but, as he says now, "I STILL dont know how many gallons are in an acre."

I think one of the mistakes we're making here is that we're talking about IQ tests for the general public. In order to be Mensa quality, you have to be quite a cut above that.

Yes, they can take one from their native environment, if there is such a one at all. During apartheid, for example, you can bet south african tests were white-culture-centered. And any tests are liable to be upper-class-centered.

The point is that, here is a guy who took the test from OUTSIDE his native environment, and did splendidly. The only cultural bias he could detect was in the use of imperial weights and measures vs metric... hence, the gallons and acres joke. According to his expert opinion, no single group of Americans would have a better chance than any other on that particular test. That's not to say that all tests were that way, but that is his assessment of that particular one.

As for the Mensa proctored tests, I can't say that it was biased or not. I qualified for membership based on my SAT scores from high school. (The SAT is the basic college entrance exam, for those outside the States).

Fortunately they have improved since the early days. At one point they were used to 'prove' that blacks were less intelligent than whites...

I wasn't saying that *Mensa* was deliberately trying to exclude non-white people, although it *was* founded on eugenic principles, but the basic Stanford-Binet IQ test, which has become the standard, was created with a huge amount of bias inherent - essentially the top scorers will be white middle class protestant male Americans - and all other IQ tests are based on this faulty test...

Big can of worms opened up with this IQ test thingie.

In my opinion, minorities often score poorly on intelligence tests because the schools themselves have failed. The art of taking a test is as essential to the success of a student as knowing the material - it requires concentration, dedication, and comprehension of the questions asked. Troubles at home or at school will do more to distract the student than a lack of aptitude. I think as our society learns more about good nutrition, good study habits, and psychology, we'll see the IQ scores of minorities rise.

Lentilla

One thing that hasn't been mentioned in the culture discussion is that some subcultures of Americans don't value education. Chris Rock has an excellent parody of this in his first big standup routine... he was burned by the critics for it, but he made some elevant points, and good humor always contains a degee of truth. Intelligent kids at school are labelled "nerds," and parents actually get mad at their kids for being smarter than them. If you take my school as an example, the racial numbers looked about like this:

Hispanic: 51%
Caucasian: 35%
Asian: 8%
African: 6%

And the numbers in the AP classes (the advanced classes) went something like this:

Caucasian: 60%
Hispanic: 25%
Asian: 20%
African: 1% (or, to be more accurate, 1).

Extrapolate from that what you will.

Are you still working at this one? I'd like to see some of the early comments / suggestions reacted upon...

Err, isn't the name a contraction from 'mens sana in campari soda'?