January 1, 2020 • 38 mins
Welcome to My Year in Mensa, episode one!
NOTE: ALL NAMES IN THIS PIECE HAVE BEEN CHANGED. This is a first-person account based on my own writing and experience within the group, and the rest is sourced below. If you have further questions, feel free to reach out at myyearinmensa@gmail.com.
Theme song by Sadie Dupuis (@sad13)
Featuring the voices of Miles Gray, Caitlin Durante, Jacquis Neal, Anna Hossnieh, Danl Goodman, Ify Nwadiwe, Dani Fernandez, Maggie Mae Fish, Shereen Lani-Younes, Isaac Taylor, and Jack O'Brien.
Music used in this episode:
"Through the Crystal" by Jeremy Blake: from the free YouTube Audio Library
"Absolutely Nothing" by Jeremy Blake: from the free YouTube Audio Library
"Lost and Found" by Jeremy Blake: from the free YouTube Audio Library
Eric Andre goes to Mensa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-pAWbqdyuY
"Welcome to HorrorLand Kevin MacLeod" (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
All sources for this series can be found at: http://jamieloftusisinnocent.com/myyearinmensasources
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Is that smarts. Hi. My name is Jamie Loftus, and
this is the first episode of My Year in Mensa,
(00:22):
a four part podcast series about that time I joined
Mensa as a joke and then nearly got kicked out
of it after getting targeted by a secret Facebook group.
There's obviously more to it than that, but I've got
to get you interested now. I want to be clear
that I am not doing this podcast series too strictly
dunk on the mensines. I will be dunking on them occasionally,
(00:45):
but I'm more doing this to analyze how these sorts
of groups came to be in the first place and
sort of what they have evolved into. Because it definitely
did start as a dumb joke on my part, but people,
unfortunately contain multitudes awful and so what I'm gonna do
is take you through the story via my experiences and
(01:06):
then go back in time to trace the history of
these organizations and ultimately figure out what the fucking point
of any of it was in the first place. And
if you are listening from Mensa right now, Hi, maybe
we've met before, maybe we haven't. Um. I hope you
enjoyed this, and congratulations and doing well on that test once.
(01:30):
So before we unpack this ship show as a whole.
Hot is MENSA. I'm glad you asked. I have a
prepared answer. MENSA is a high i Q organization founded
in the UK and that requires that members take a
test for admission or submit test scores within i Q
beginning at one thirty two, then pay about seventy five
(01:51):
and member dus a year and hopefully participate in local activities.
So you know, it's it's a smart people club and
people absolutely love to make fun of it. I used
to love making fun of it, and now it just
makes me tired to think about. But in short, MENSA
is the most popular high i Q club on the planet.
So we're gonna be skipping around in time, gonna go
(02:11):
a little memento on this one. So we're gonna make
a really fun turn the page noise. Listen to this
noise I found online. Oh so bear that in mind.
All right, podcast is starting to the disclaimer at the top.
Let's hit a little a light music bed just to
ease us in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a degree
(02:35):
in radio production and and here I am using it
for the first time, and so to be clear, All
of the names in this story, even ones that it
agreed to or previously one on the record, have been changed.
We're just keeping it clean here. So MENSA has three purposes,
which are outlined in its constitution. According to the MENSA
(02:58):
website this year, they are one to identify and foster
human intelligence for the benefit of humanity. Two to encourage
research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence, and
three to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for
its members. So we're gonna jump around in time a
(03:19):
little bit. So we're gonna start towards the end on
July four, day one of the MENSA Annual Gathering. M
you do have to question the intelligence of anyone who
holds a week long conference in Arizona in July, But hey,
this event was planned by some of the brightest minds
(03:41):
in the world. I'm told Jamie right. I've been at
the MENSA Annual Gathering in Phoenix, officially titled MENSA Rising
for all of five minutes, and one of the few
faces I recognized from the mostly forgotten high i Q
Society has already spotted me. It's ten thirty in the
morning on the fourth of July and my sweat from
the walkover hasn't dried at and I'm sort of slumping
(04:01):
in the back of one of the Sheraton Grands millions
of beige conference rooms. There's a speaker at the front
for the Afrodds Acts Forbidden Food and Beverages talk, and
he's going on about millennials in their avocado toast, and
there's a room full of medicines who are just laughing
it up. And as I said, joining this group was
supposed to be a joke originally, but here I am
(04:24):
full year later, traveling seven hours by greyhound to try
and take it seriously. So who is the victim of
the joke? But this guy and I started conversation and
I whisper yeah and angle my body away because I'm
sweaty and it's Arizona. He's quick to remind me of
his name and standing as the second most blocked, reviled,
(04:44):
and harassed member of an American MENSA Facebook group, the
unmoderated chaotic online landscape that is cursed and fascinated me
for over a year. It's called Firehouse, and I incidentally
am the number one blocked member, even though I've only
posted there twice. In fourteen months. At an average MENSA
(05:05):
annual gathering, about two thousand members of American Mensa, which
hold more than fifty thousand members as of this recording,
attend the organization's city of choice, and I would estimate
that about four hundred of them in Phoenix know exactly
who I am and have a strong opinion about me
one way or the other. So the man I'm talking to,
who I'm going to refer to as two, is a
(05:25):
self described communist originally from Puerto Rico and is one
of the few people in the MENSA endorsed group that
regularly posts about radical left politics, only to be excoriated
by the majority conservative and far right leanings in that community.
Hasn't been bad so far, he says, saying that he
met some of the far right group members that he
regularly spars with the night before. He shares an anecdote
(05:48):
of an older white woman telling him in a black
man that Donald Trump is a better speaker than Barack Obama,
which okay, and he sounds equally annoyed and entertained when
he's telling me this, You feeling okay about being here?
And while I'm improvising a lie about how I think
this will actually be really good for me. There's a
deep sense of dread, just like adding another layer of
(06:09):
sweat to my body, because I am genuinely pretty nervous
to be here, and it's not entirely paranoia. There was
an internal poll of who is the most despised mencin
and Firehouse, and I won by an absolute landslide, although
because I'm blocked by most of the people in the group,
I couldn't witness the victory personally, and feeling nervous around
(06:30):
a group of two thousand random smart people does sound
a little far fetched, but there's already a low humming
of safety concerns surrounding this event. The annual gathering in
Indianapolis was a pr disaster, ending with one arrest, allegations
of harassment that it resulted in a man being banned
from a part of the event space, and two members
(06:52):
reporting that their drinks had been drugged after official bartenders
had gone off duty. And believe me, the smarts know
how to party, and the smarts fiercely protect their own.
So the backtrack. A little over a year ago, I
tested into the High i Q Mental Society as an
overpriced joke for a satirical column that I was writing,
(07:14):
and the whole admittedly underthought idea was to just kind
of make fun of what I thought then to be
an outdated organization of people who had paid these steep
dues to announce that they were smarter than of the planet.
So too jokey columns into this conceived project. The online
trolls of Firehouse discovered my writing and just attacked from
(07:36):
every angle and for any woman who has expressed an
opinion online before, I received what I think most would
consider the starter pack of like online harassment, so middling
insults about my appearance, guessing who's dick I had sucked
to get such and such job, demands that I be
removed from the group and was unfit to be there
(07:58):
at all, and what most of our house insists to
this day was a death threat presented as a joke
because the prevalent idea in this group, The argument then
and the argument now, is that who you are online
is not who you are in real life. So after
(08:19):
posting a few of these comments to my Twitter last
October without the names redacted, an action I have lived
to regret. In the preceding months, the satirical column was off,
and it sort of had to be because the high
browed dorks I thought I was making fun of it
didn't actually exist. When it comes down to it, mensa
is a group of thousands of people who did well
(08:42):
on a test one time, and the rest is completely unpredictable.
The people I've interacted with online and in real life
this past year are protective, They're more right leaning than
I could have imagined, and they are highly effective organizers
of the occasional online mob. Sometimes their families who are
trying to have something in common with each other, and
(09:04):
sometimes they're older, single people who are seeking community, and
sometimes there are people from remote areas looking to just
meet up with other smart people to relate with. There're
sometimes impossibly kind and other times alarmingly not so. A
lot of them are misfits, and some of them are
on the autism spectrum. And at least one lunged and
accused me of being a spy and a share it
(09:25):
and suite where a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump was
looming in the background at one in the morning on
the fourth of July, and at least one comforted me
for an hour after that happened. The Mendicines contain fucking
multitudes and they're more complex than I ever gave them
credit for, and for that I would suffer. So after
the organized blocking and harassment campaigns against me started last fall,
(09:47):
I stopped making fun of the Mentions who did not
exist and started reporting on the Mentions that did. Going
to their annual conference called the Annual Gathering in Phoenix
is what I hope will be my last stop and
a to finally understand them, as many members have requested
I do, instead of making fun of them, which is fair,
and to be clear, I was not here to cause
(10:10):
any sort of commotion or really rock the boat in
any way. Uh. Eric Andre already did that, and he
did it way funnier than I would have, so I
was truly just there. I'll play you a thing from
eric Andre's episode. Anyways, Hey guys, I'm here for they
can mention. Well, I have a I have a fo Q.
(10:31):
I'm in super Men, So okay, well let me just
go on this board and I read quick very wait
wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait how high
is the guy? Wait? Wait wait wait? I have questions? Question?
And is that the best? Yes, but it wasn't what
I was trying to do here. So no, this is
not an outsider story of random millennial inserting themselves somewhere
(10:54):
they don't belong and making fun of it. And trust me,
I was alive and I've written those stories. I didn't
spend seven d dollars of my own money to come
to Phoenix in July to tease two thousand people that
hate me. I was actually invited. The member of Firehouse
who invited me insisted, as is the company line, that
I needed to meet them mentions in real life instead
(11:14):
of judging them from their direct online death threats. And
so for one second, let's return to that conference room
on the fourth of July. Two says he's going to
go to a different talk after growing board with the
speaker regaling us on the horny properties of chocolate. I stay,
and I pushed myself up against the wall, and as
(11:36):
I'm writing a few things down on a pad of
paper that has the mental logo just burning at the top,
one of the favorite insults directed at me and Firehouse
over the past year is just like pulsing through my
head and it goes like this, I am a mentioned
the comment says towards the end of a multi paragraph taunt,
(11:56):
so presumably not a total idiot. M all right, I'm
taking you back a full year to summer when I
first decided to take the MENSA test. And I'm sorry
if you're feeling time jump whiplash, but you know, keep
up smarty. You know, mensa means stupid lady in Spanish,
(12:19):
right like crazy lady. This is my friend MICHAELA. And
we're drunk on those hangover in a bottle shandies they
sell at CVS the night before I take the MENSA
admission test. And at this time I did not know
that mensa meant stupid lady in Spanish, nor that I
would be reminded of this once a week by someone
or other for the next year, because it didn't matter
to me what MENSA meant. Really, the point of what
(12:41):
I was doing was to not get in and dump
on the whole experience and in six hundred words or less,
for what I considered to be my birthright as a
millennial woman, which is of course an underpaid personal experiences
column on a Middle and culture website. The concept of
a pay to play high i Q society is ripe
to be fun of, and a lot of people have
done it before. So as we kept drinking and watching
(13:03):
King of the Hill, I built out my flawed vision
of who I thought Amensum member was. So I thought
all men, for sure, fiscally conservative, ideologically liberal, just solving
puzzles and discussing the comedic merits of the Big Bang theory.
And this is all wrong except for the last part
(13:24):
mentions love the Big Bang theory and they're not funny.
What I had not considered was that having sixty dollars
and the willingness to wake up on a Sunday to
take the test at all made me a perfect candidate
for this group. My entire generation has been hardwired to
excel at standardized tests at the expense of all else.
(13:44):
And to be honest, I had been taking practice tests
in secret because I'm very insecure, and because I wasn't
having a lot of sex at this time. Besides, at
this time, I thought that the concept of i Q
tests had been proven over and over to be elitist
pseudo science designed to elevate a group who were good
at multiple choice tests and deciding that makes them intellectually superior.
(14:08):
Was this assumption as far off as my first picture
of a mention was. Well, like so many parts of
this story, that's a complicated question. There's rumblings of talk
about the role of i Q tests throughout history and
the high i Q societies that have sprung into occasional
relevancy over the past hundred years or so. So it's
kind of hard to say. And the mensine I was
(14:28):
picturing would probably tell you to look at the evidence
and decide for yourself. The actual medicine might just tell
you what they think with little or no sourcing whatsoever,
which is why I feel comfortable telling you that I
think i Q testing is still more or less bullshit
does more harm than it does goods. But please, perceived medicine,
decide for yourself. So before we can talk about the test,
(14:53):
we have to talk about how and why the test exists.
I know, I'm sorry, but we need to do it,
interrupting this biased gonzo piece to lay out some facts.
So there's a great podcast released as an offshoot of
Radio Lab called g Show, which examines the perception of
the idea of general intelligence. And I'm gonna start by
(15:15):
citing an episode called the Miseducation of Larry p which
is an in depth look at how i Q tests
have been used to racially discriminate, beginning with its inception
in the early nineteen hundreds and into now they were
culturally specific to European Americans. This is black psychologist Brandon
Gamble talking to Radio Lab in the episode, and he
(15:37):
goes on to explain that contemporary i Q tests were
designed using only white children as the control group. Now,
to be clear, MENSA does not use the conventional i
Q test that the criminal justice system, the NFL, and
American schools used, but the tenants of the test are identical.
It asks the question are you smarter than the average person?
(15:57):
And what does that mean? Our MENSA heads you use
the rate or r a I T scale that measures
the following categories. You can you can ask me what
these categories mean or to me, they all kind of
sound like the same thing. Crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, total intelligence,
(16:18):
quantitative intelligence, total battery intelligence. That sounds like a car.
And they have you take the Wonderlock Cognitive ability test.
And as far as I know, there is no precise
way to translate your mental scores into a traditional i
Q number score. But the mental website specifies that if
a member is hoping to join based on a previously
(16:40):
taken test, the lowest Binet i Q score accepted is
one thirty two And right, Banet, I should tell you
who that is. The originator of the i Q tests
upon which all of these societies are built is French
psychologist Alfred Binet, who spent his life studying how children
learn over time. I'm getting with the inch music, but
(17:00):
I mean, what if I stuck to it? Maybe I will,
and devised an exam that would theoretically reflect how the
student was learning based on an average for their age.
So if a six year old got a score of
one hundred on a Binet test, that would mean that
a six year old was comprehending at the rate of
Benet's average six year old, and a higher or lower
score would indicate proficiency on either side. However, and this
(17:24):
is very important, Benet's i Q test was not designed
to be exceptionalist in nature, and by exceptionalists in nature,
I mean you know, it wasn't invented for bragging rights
or as a value judgment on a person at all,
which is something that virtually every high i Q society misses.
It was not a test that was designed to say
(17:44):
this is how smart you are forever, and you should
consider yourself better or worse. It was supposed to be
a reflection of where you're learning is at in a
specific moment. And this distinction is something that MENSA and
all societies like it have completely ignored. High ACCU society's
view intelligence as a permanent and never fluctuating state of being,
(18:07):
rather than just a reflection of how you took a
test at one point in your life, the scores of
which could reflect a circumstance or a relationship to the
style and content of a single test. And Benet himself
was adamant on the fact that a score on his
test was not an enduring statement on what a person's
intelligence was. In ben I read a book called and
(18:30):
Get Ready for an incredible French accent les Ideas Mont,
and he said the following. Some recent philosophers seem to
have given their moral approval to these deplorable verdicts that
affirmed that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity,
a quantity that cannot be augmented. We must protest and
(18:50):
react against this brutal pessimism. We must try to demonstrate
that it is founded on nothing. So that's Benet's take.
You can get an accuse score, but it's not a
statement on who you are forever. It's a statement on
where you're at right now. And his work in stating
that intelligence was not fixed was more or less completely
undone by a British psychologist named Charles Spearman, who noticed
(19:14):
that if someone performed well in one section of a
Benet test, they tended to do well in the other
sections as well, and Spearman ended up describing this observation
as general intelligence. Under Spearman's logic, the amount of general
intelligence every person has is a fixed, unchangeable amount. And
(19:35):
not coincidentally, Charles Spearman was a eugenicist, and this fixation
on eugenics, which if you've managed to not have to
interact with the idea, it is a proven false pseudoscience
concept that states that the shape of the skull indicates
your intelligence. Charles Spearman believed this strongly, as did Men's
(19:57):
A co founder Roland Beryl, as do a lot of
racist people on the Internet. Unfortunately, Spearman started to introduce
this idea of general intelligence and the idea that i
Q is fixed right after Bannet dies. So Spearman's work
in the nineteen tens led to Bonet's i Q test
to be used for purposes that were the complete opposite
(20:18):
of its intent. And because Spearman just happened to start
spouting this bullshit right after Bannet died, Banet was not
able to call him from wherever dead people go to
correct it. The eugenics movement that Spearman believed in would
use a low i Q score under the idea of
intelligence being fixed, as an excuse to separate, discriminate against,
(20:42):
and even euthanize those that the test considered inferior. And
there's many examples of this happening in America any episode
of the Radio lab G series called Unfit, which discusses
the role of euthanization based on arbitrary and frequently biased
i Q tests, as well as the America and bugfeed
Bell Supreme Court decision which stated that the compulsory sterilization
(21:05):
of the quote intellectually disabled for the protection and health
of the state unquote was not unconstitutional. That is to say,
in certain cases, the i Q test could kill you
Menso wasn't founded until the nineteen forties, but its co founder,
Roland Barrel, was an Australian expatriate whose interests included the
(21:27):
pseudo science of phrenology, a variant of which is used
as part of the logic that in cells used today
to incite violence against women, and was rehashed in the
controversial book The Bell Curve to discredit the intelligence of
black people. This since disproved study was focused around because
these people are obsessed with skulls, the shape of a
(21:50):
person's skull indicating things about them like intelligence and potential,
or the lack thereof. Roland Barrel would later complain that
he was disappointed that people who qualified FERMENTA would sometimes
come from humble homes because he thought that the premise
of the group was quote an aristocracy of the intellect unquote.
(22:10):
In The Miseducation of Larry P. The reporters expand on
the still valid law that black children cannot be given
an i Q test in the state of California, a
decision that was based around a case in which a
young black student was deemed quote educably mentally retarded unquote
after scoring poorly on an IQ test. This action, which
was taken without notifying the parents, resulted in five black
(22:33):
families whose children had been given similar diagnoses filing a
class action lawsuit against their school district, and ultimately they
effectively argued that the i Q tests of the time
were demonstrably biased against your children, and Judge Robert Peckham
ruled in the family's favor, saying this, we must recognize
at the outset that the history of the i Q
(22:53):
test and of special education classes built on i Q
testing is not the history of neutral scientific discoveries translated
into educational reform. It is a history of racial prejudice,
of social Darwinism, and of the use of the scientific
quote mystique to legitimate such prejudices. So the result of
(23:15):
this ruling has a fairly complicated historical legacy. Peckham did
not enforce the discontinuation of i Q testing in California
for discriminatory separation of students. It was merely the discontinuation
of giving i Q test to black children. Specifically, black
students are still not allowed to take the tests in
(23:35):
California schools, and as tests continued to be updated to
cater to more than just white students of the nineteen seventies.
This has kind of created a second prejudice that continues
to separate students from each other by race. The prejudice
roots of i Q based evaluation was given another talking
point in that book, The Bell Curve, which is written
(23:57):
by Charles Murray and Richard Hearnsan. The Bell Curve is
uncritical of i Q tests themselves, claiming that the test
has never in its history discriminated across any social, economic,
or racial divides, and presupposes that intelligence, contrary to everything
the inventor of the i Q test, Alfred Bennett, ever said,
(24:20):
is fixed, and attempts to explore why certain racial and
class groups did better or worse on the test. Quote,
it seems highly likely to us that both genes and
environment have something to do with racial differences. Unquote. The
Bell Curve is a very controversial book that I personally
(24:41):
have absolutely no respect for, and it rears its had
every several years since its publication, and whispers of this
book still permeate Mensa to this day. A few references
are made to it in the time that I spend
in Phoenix, whether it be in praise of a discussion
of intelligence, or as quote disgusting racist bullshit unquote during
a casual meal at a Scottish Hooters restaurant. There has
(25:02):
been a talk at a MENSA annual gathering on the
topic of the Bell Curve sometime in the past five
years from a member that firehouse members described as an
unabashed white supremacist, which causes yet another wave of drama
at the annual event. Now MENSA itself was founded shortly
after World War Two ended in ninety in Oxford, England,
(25:24):
by English barrister and biochemist Lancelot linel Ware and the
aforementioned Australian Elita's blowhard, Roland Barrel. These two guys just
met on a train by chance. They'd both recently become
interested in i Q tests, and they were enthusiastic about
founding a society for fellow smarts, and like many people
who meet on public transportation, menton history indicates that Lancelot
(25:48):
linel Ware quickly grew annoyed with Roland Barrel's bullshit after
the organization was formed, and only rejoined and participated in
MENSA when his co founder died. Unlike its European counterpart,
American men has a far more left leaning origin story.
It was started in Brooklyn in nineteen sixty by Peter
and Enez Sturgeon, a forty something year old married couple
(26:09):
closely aligned with the Socialist Workers Party. MENSA International since
its founding has ballooned to include over one hundred thousand members,
most of which live in America and the UK, and
as mostly who we'll be talking about. So it's impossible
to separate any high i Q society from the history
of the test itself. But that doesn't mean that i
(26:30):
Q testing is entirely bad or sociologically completely useless. Radio
Labs g explores a few different examples of i Q
testing proving beneficial, including its function in curbing the lead
industry during the Reagan era, when a doctor effectively argued
that putting lead in public water would lower the general
i Q of the population and affect the workforce. And interestingly,
(26:52):
this argument relies on Benet's assertion that i Q is
not fixed and can be influenced by external fact. So hey,
that's something, but this does not get MENSA off the hook. Unfortunately,
MENSA does not have a history of using the test
in this way. To get into MENSA, you get a
maximum of two chances to formally test in for your
(27:13):
entire life. One option is the traditional standardized test option
that I took, and the other is called the culture
fair option that is considered a better option for those
that don't speak English as a first language or quote
have language processing problems such as dyslexia unquote. That information
comes from MENSA UK. If both of these options don't
(27:34):
yield qualifying scores in the top two percent of the population,
you don't get to take the test again in one year,
or ten years, or fifty years. In high i Q societies,
Spearman's hate enabling assumption that intelligence is fixed and unchangeable
is the logic used. And conveniently, there is no conceivable
(27:55):
way under this model that intelligence could be wasted. M hm.
So with this in mind, we're going back to summer.
I'm taking the test for real this time, no more sidetrack.
I show up hungover at a college in Pasadena on
the morning of my MENSA admissions test, and I am
(28:16):
ready to fail. The test, which is taken by sections
and all of those confusing sounding rate categories, takes about
two hours to take and it's administered by a proctor
who splits his time between engineering and repairing large orchestral organs,
which is pretty cool. I do tease this engineer, organ
(28:36):
intellectual guy a fair amount in what I thought was
going to be a one off column about taking a
standardized test that to me closely resembled the S A T. S.
And we even maintain a friendly email correspondence for a
little while after the test is over. But he strikes
me at first as the typical smart, dorky mensine. I've
(28:58):
been going on about to my friend the night before.
He's kind of a nerd, and he's a proud nerd.
In hell, if I can knock him for knowing how
to fix an orchestral organ at the Disney Concert Hall,
that's fuck me. I mean. The only other people taking
the test this day a local CrossFit law student and
his much friendlier girlfriend. Unfortunately I didn't find out what
(29:19):
she did, but because he was talking too much to
let her get a word in edgewise. But all three
of us listen to the proctor patiently between sections that
are on math, logic, vocabulary, and verbal intelligence, and while
we're supposed to be focusing on the test, the proctor
occasionally mentions what he feels are the benefits of the
mensine lifestyle. He tells us about game nights we can
(29:40):
attend if we get in, how fun local meet up
dinners are should we be smart enough to attend them.
And this is like shortly after her editory came out
and he just like spoiled the entire movie. And if
you've seen them that movie, that's a really has really
mean to spoil that movie. But anyways, we're reminded that
we only have this one chance to take this test
(30:01):
in our one human life. And if we fail this test,
we can take the culture Fair test, and if we
fail that test, we are doomed to resume our lives
not going to game nights and dinners with this specific
test proctor, so the stakes are high. It's very important
to him, and he lets us know. And it is
a little funny. Sorry. In my column at the time
(30:24):
after I took the test, I wrote, quote, maybe you
don't feel non mentioned deserve you, or maybe the opposite.
That's a manic episode. You set yourself up to fail.
It's a waste of money that could end hopefully in
community unquote quoting myself. Awesome. So if the history of
the i Q test in the controversial application of fixed intelligence,
(30:44):
is any indication. I don't think the fact that I
got into MENSA makes me even remotely smarter than other people.
It does make me remotely had sixty dollars, woke up
on time and had taken a lot of standardized tests
in the early two thousand's. I firm we believe if
that you, who have taken the time to listen to
this could get into MENSA, my stupidest acts could get
(31:06):
into MENSA, and he's and he is dumb, my con
artist uncle could get into MENSA, and I just as
firmly believe that all three of us being in that
group wouldn't make us better than anyone. It would only
make us a pair of new balance is poorer, because
I think all it takes to get into a group
like this is a little bit of predisposed aptitude for
(31:26):
a standardized test, and a little bit of ego. And conversely,
if you historically don't test well, which many intelligent people don't,
you probably won't do well in this test. It's almost
as if it's a flawed metric. So I take the
test and the email comes two weeks later, while I'm
in the dressing room of a Forever twenty one trying
on something that looks bad, and it says this, congratulations,
(31:50):
your MENSA admissions testing has been scored, and based on
the percentile rank, you qualify for admission into MENSA. I
would tell you how my scores translate to a formal
i Q test, but as I said, the Intelligence Index
scores that you're given are only used for MENSA admissions.
I got nothing for you. And when I get this email,
I'm like laughing my mostly exposed ass off, and I
(32:13):
do feel a small tinge of pride that I remind
myself to feel ashamed about later. And I write my
next column, which was called good news they let dumb
sluts into MENSA Now. And I wrote that as a
follow up to my first piece, which is about taking
the test. And in this piece, I'm joking about infiltrating
the local Los Angeles branch. But I think it's pretty
clear that I don't actually have an intention to, because
(32:34):
at this point I've already spent half of my freelance
paycheck just to take the test and enroll in the
group to get a membership card that I use to
take stupid Instagram pictures with to this day. So continuing
in MENSA for me makes no financial sense, not even
for those cool, smart people game nights that I'd heard
so much about. And the hundreds or some people that
(32:56):
usually read my column seem to enjoy it. A handful
of mensa reach out to say it made them laugh
and to say welcome. And two people tell me about
a closed Facebook group that might be of interest to me,
and yes it is that one. The first is my
test proctor, the organ fixing engineer, and he says, quote,
the articles were very funny, I'll be it occasionally mean spirited.
(33:19):
He also thanks me for changing his name in my column.
This is sort of unrelated, but this was written in
response to an email i'd written him asking if I
could see what an orchestral organ repair looked like in person,
to which he said no. So if anyone is wondering
who the dork and this email thread is, it is me.
(33:42):
And then another mensum member contacts me about Firehouse with
a far sterner warning and he says, quote, I am
writing you because menso is not just silly fun board games,
hug dots, don't ask, and happy nerds. There's also a
nasty alt right undercurrent that you can find in MENSA
Facebook groups. They consist mainly of Trump supporters, and if
you join, you will be amazed at what supposedly intelligent
(34:03):
people believe. Okay, so I searched for the group on
Facebook and request to join, and in keeping with the
inclusive spirit of MENSA, I also need to send them
my membership number to qualify for entry into the group.
His message continues, quote, these groups are no moderation, which
is the code of angry white people, for I want
to say racist things without a moderator calling me a racist.
(34:23):
In any case, if you are looking to blow people's
minds with a behind the scenes look at MENSA and
that might be a good place to start. And Okay,
I know that sounds like a lot, but once Firehouse
grants me access, the preconceived mention I had been making
fun of this whole time completely implodes. There are some
scattered liberal ideas posted in Firehouse, but the vast majority
(34:45):
are far right leaning news sources, pixelated political memes, dirty
inside jokes, and something called the boob thread. I tell
a few of my friends about the group, but I
hold off on writing about it, thinking back to what
that mention had mentioned just before warning me of the
group's off He said, quote, if and when you make
fun of MENSA, please don't forget that a lot of
(35:06):
these people were bullied because they were smart, and they
finally found a club where they belong and where everybody
is a little awkward or at least understands them. And
that's completely fair. But does that apply to a far
right closed Facebook group. I'm a little lost on this,
So I go back to the group and I read
its description and it says, quote, this group, like MENSA,
(35:28):
is very diverse and can range from fluffy kittens two
items that will make you wish you could bleach your brain.
If someone upsets you or post things not to your liking,
reported to Facebook and or block this person. The administrators
will not take any actions to edit or delete post unquote.
So here I am a sweet young lady in an
unmoderated online forum. This lack of moderation is the same
(35:52):
logic that what I do think it is interesting in
the abstract has given way to websites like four chan,
eight chan, and other dark corners of Reddit that function
as venues for hate speech, which makes some members of
the group extremely vulnerable. But what really threw me about
the Firehouse group was the logo in the top right
corner of the page. Firehouse, I saw was a group
(36:15):
that was owned by the official American Mens of page
and was ostensibly endorsed and encouraged by it. So a
Facebook group of undercover bigots is unfortunately nothing new, but
their encouragement by what is supposed to be the smartest
organization in the country was not something that I had
seen before. What academic institution in their right mind would
(36:37):
proudly endorse a group that clearly states that no one
is safe and that hate speech would not be deleted
unless the historically faulty Facebook reporting system deemed it so.
And this back in July is something that I think
I could write about. But even so, I was nervous
because when you're comedian online you encounter some pretty brutal
(36:59):
comments that I didn't know if I wanted to put
myself in the comment section line of fire because I
think that there is an exact number of times you
can be called an ugly cunt before you impulsively get
a terrible haircut and Switcher meads and I had already
passed this point a long time ago, but I'm still interested.
And I talked to a few of my friends to
see if this idea an official organizational endorsement of a
(37:21):
far leaning, unmoderated group, was something they'd ever come across,
and whether it was a story worth pursuing, even in
spite of whatever backlash might happen. But while I was
thinking about this man that Firehouse group, that they do
not wait for you to be ready and make a
rational decision, and I never have time to reach a conclusion.
They find me first, and they are not happy. Alright.
(37:48):
That was episode one of my year in mensa. Thank
you so much to all of my wonderful friends who
contributed voice work to this. They are Miles Gray, Maggie
may Fish, if you, Waddy Way, Caitlin Durante, Danny Fernandez,
and Isaac Taylor. And thank you to Sadie Dupre wrote
the incredible theme song. And to all those medicines out there,
(38:12):
see you. In episode two, Gang
Is that smarts. Hi. My name is Jamie Loftus, and
this is the first episode of My Year in Mensa,
(00:22):
a four part podcast series about that time I joined
Mensa as a joke and then nearly got kicked out
of it after getting targeted by a secret Facebook group.
There's obviously more to it than that, but I've got
to get you interested now. I want to be clear
that I am not doing this podcast series too strictly
dunk on the mensines. I will be dunking on them occasionally,
(00:45):
but I'm more doing this to analyze how these sorts
of groups came to be in the first place and
sort of what they have evolved into. Because it definitely
did start as a dumb joke on my part, but people,
unfortunately contain multitudes awful and so what I'm gonna do
is take you through the story via my experiences and
(01:06):
then go back in time to trace the history of
these organizations and ultimately figure out what the fucking point
of any of it was in the first place. And
if you are listening from Mensa right now, Hi, maybe
we've met before, maybe we haven't. Um. I hope you
enjoyed this, and congratulations and doing well on that test once.
(01:30):
So before we unpack this ship show as a whole.
Hot is MENSA. I'm glad you asked. I have a
prepared answer. MENSA is a high i Q organization founded
in the UK and that requires that members take a
test for admission or submit test scores within i Q
beginning at one thirty two, then pay about seventy five
(01:51):
and member dus a year and hopefully participate in local activities.
So you know, it's it's a smart people club and
people absolutely love to make fun of it. I used
to love making fun of it, and now it just
makes me tired to think about. But in short, MENSA
is the most popular high i Q club on the planet.
So we're gonna be skipping around in time, gonna go
(02:11):
a little memento on this one. So we're gonna make
a really fun turn the page noise. Listen to this
noise I found online. Oh so bear that in mind.
All right, podcast is starting to the disclaimer at the top.
Let's hit a little a light music bed just to
ease us in. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a degree
(02:35):
in radio production and and here I am using it
for the first time, and so to be clear, All
of the names in this story, even ones that it
agreed to or previously one on the record, have been changed.
We're just keeping it clean here. So MENSA has three purposes,
which are outlined in its constitution. According to the MENSA
(02:58):
website this year, they are one to identify and foster
human intelligence for the benefit of humanity. Two to encourage
research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence, and
three to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for
its members. So we're gonna jump around in time a
(03:19):
little bit. So we're gonna start towards the end on
July four, day one of the MENSA Annual Gathering. M
you do have to question the intelligence of anyone who
holds a week long conference in Arizona in July, But hey,
this event was planned by some of the brightest minds
(03:41):
in the world. I'm told Jamie right. I've been at
the MENSA Annual Gathering in Phoenix, officially titled MENSA Rising
for all of five minutes, and one of the few
faces I recognized from the mostly forgotten high i Q
Society has already spotted me. It's ten thirty in the
morning on the fourth of July and my sweat from
the walkover hasn't dried at and I'm sort of slumping
(04:01):
in the back of one of the Sheraton Grands millions
of beige conference rooms. There's a speaker at the front
for the Afrodds Acts Forbidden Food and Beverages talk, and
he's going on about millennials in their avocado toast, and
there's a room full of medicines who are just laughing
it up. And as I said, joining this group was
supposed to be a joke originally, but here I am
(04:24):
full year later, traveling seven hours by greyhound to try
and take it seriously. So who is the victim of
the joke? But this guy and I started conversation and
I whisper yeah and angle my body away because I'm
sweaty and it's Arizona. He's quick to remind me of
his name and standing as the second most blocked, reviled,
(04:44):
and harassed member of an American MENSA Facebook group, the
unmoderated chaotic online landscape that is cursed and fascinated me
for over a year. It's called Firehouse, and I incidentally
am the number one blocked member, even though I've only
posted there twice. In fourteen months. At an average MENSA
(05:05):
annual gathering, about two thousand members of American Mensa, which
hold more than fifty thousand members as of this recording,
attend the organization's city of choice, and I would estimate
that about four hundred of them in Phoenix know exactly
who I am and have a strong opinion about me
one way or the other. So the man I'm talking to,
who I'm going to refer to as two, is a
(05:25):
self described communist originally from Puerto Rico and is one
of the few people in the MENSA endorsed group that
regularly posts about radical left politics, only to be excoriated
by the majority conservative and far right leanings in that community.
Hasn't been bad so far, he says, saying that he
met some of the far right group members that he
regularly spars with the night before. He shares an anecdote
(05:48):
of an older white woman telling him in a black
man that Donald Trump is a better speaker than Barack Obama,
which okay, and he sounds equally annoyed and entertained when
he's telling me this, You feeling okay about being here?
And while I'm improvising a lie about how I think
this will actually be really good for me. There's a
deep sense of dread, just like adding another layer of
(06:09):
sweat to my body, because I am genuinely pretty nervous
to be here, and it's not entirely paranoia. There was
an internal poll of who is the most despised mencin
and Firehouse, and I won by an absolute landslide, although
because I'm blocked by most of the people in the group,
I couldn't witness the victory personally, and feeling nervous around
(06:30):
a group of two thousand random smart people does sound
a little far fetched, but there's already a low humming
of safety concerns surrounding this event. The annual gathering in
Indianapolis was a pr disaster, ending with one arrest, allegations
of harassment that it resulted in a man being banned
from a part of the event space, and two members
(06:52):
reporting that their drinks had been drugged after official bartenders
had gone off duty. And believe me, the smarts know
how to party, and the smarts fiercely protect their own.
So the backtrack. A little over a year ago, I
tested into the High i Q Mental Society as an
overpriced joke for a satirical column that I was writing,
(07:14):
and the whole admittedly underthought idea was to just kind
of make fun of what I thought then to be
an outdated organization of people who had paid these steep
dues to announce that they were smarter than of the planet.
So too jokey columns into this conceived project. The online
trolls of Firehouse discovered my writing and just attacked from
(07:36):
every angle and for any woman who has expressed an
opinion online before, I received what I think most would
consider the starter pack of like online harassment, so middling
insults about my appearance, guessing who's dick I had sucked
to get such and such job, demands that I be
removed from the group and was unfit to be there
(07:58):
at all, and what most of our house insists to
this day was a death threat presented as a joke
because the prevalent idea in this group, The argument then
and the argument now, is that who you are online
is not who you are in real life. So after
(08:19):
posting a few of these comments to my Twitter last
October without the names redacted, an action I have lived
to regret. In the preceding months, the satirical column was off,
and it sort of had to be because the high
browed dorks I thought I was making fun of it
didn't actually exist. When it comes down to it, mensa
is a group of thousands of people who did well
(08:42):
on a test one time, and the rest is completely unpredictable.
The people I've interacted with online and in real life
this past year are protective, They're more right leaning than
I could have imagined, and they are highly effective organizers
of the occasional online mob. Sometimes their families who are
trying to have something in common with each other, and
(09:04):
sometimes they're older, single people who are seeking community, and
sometimes there are people from remote areas looking to just
meet up with other smart people to relate with. There're
sometimes impossibly kind and other times alarmingly not so. A
lot of them are misfits, and some of them are
on the autism spectrum. And at least one lunged and
accused me of being a spy and a share it
(09:25):
and suite where a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump was
looming in the background at one in the morning on
the fourth of July, and at least one comforted me
for an hour after that happened. The Mendicines contain fucking
multitudes and they're more complex than I ever gave them
credit for, and for that I would suffer. So after
the organized blocking and harassment campaigns against me started last fall,
(09:47):
I stopped making fun of the Mentions who did not
exist and started reporting on the Mentions that did. Going
to their annual conference called the Annual Gathering in Phoenix
is what I hope will be my last stop and
a to finally understand them, as many members have requested
I do, instead of making fun of them, which is fair,
and to be clear, I was not here to cause
(10:10):
any sort of commotion or really rock the boat in
any way. Uh. Eric Andre already did that, and he
did it way funnier than I would have, so I
was truly just there. I'll play you a thing from
eric Andre's episode. Anyways, Hey guys, I'm here for they
can mention. Well, I have a I have a fo Q.
(10:31):
I'm in super Men, So okay, well let me just
go on this board and I read quick very wait
wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait how high
is the guy? Wait? Wait wait wait? I have questions? Question?
And is that the best? Yes, but it wasn't what
I was trying to do here. So no, this is
not an outsider story of random millennial inserting themselves somewhere
(10:54):
they don't belong and making fun of it. And trust me,
I was alive and I've written those stories. I didn't
spend seven d dollars of my own money to come
to Phoenix in July to tease two thousand people that
hate me. I was actually invited. The member of Firehouse
who invited me insisted, as is the company line, that
I needed to meet them mentions in real life instead
(11:14):
of judging them from their direct online death threats. And
so for one second, let's return to that conference room
on the fourth of July. Two says he's going to
go to a different talk after growing board with the
speaker regaling us on the horny properties of chocolate. I stay,
and I pushed myself up against the wall, and as
(11:36):
I'm writing a few things down on a pad of
paper that has the mental logo just burning at the top,
one of the favorite insults directed at me and Firehouse
over the past year is just like pulsing through my
head and it goes like this, I am a mentioned
the comment says towards the end of a multi paragraph taunt,
(11:56):
so presumably not a total idiot. M all right, I'm
taking you back a full year to summer when I
first decided to take the MENSA test. And I'm sorry
if you're feeling time jump whiplash, but you know, keep
up smarty. You know, mensa means stupid lady in Spanish,
(12:19):
right like crazy lady. This is my friend MICHAELA. And
we're drunk on those hangover in a bottle shandies they
sell at CVS the night before I take the MENSA
admission test. And at this time I did not know
that mensa meant stupid lady in Spanish, nor that I
would be reminded of this once a week by someone
or other for the next year, because it didn't matter
to me what MENSA meant. Really, the point of what
(12:41):
I was doing was to not get in and dump
on the whole experience and in six hundred words or less,
for what I considered to be my birthright as a
millennial woman, which is of course an underpaid personal experiences
column on a Middle and culture website. The concept of
a pay to play high i Q society is ripe
to be fun of, and a lot of people have
done it before. So as we kept drinking and watching
(13:03):
King of the Hill, I built out my flawed vision
of who I thought Amensum member was. So I thought
all men, for sure, fiscally conservative, ideologically liberal, just solving
puzzles and discussing the comedic merits of the Big Bang theory.
And this is all wrong except for the last part
(13:24):
mentions love the Big Bang theory and they're not funny.
What I had not considered was that having sixty dollars
and the willingness to wake up on a Sunday to
take the test at all made me a perfect candidate
for this group. My entire generation has been hardwired to
excel at standardized tests at the expense of all else.
(13:44):
And to be honest, I had been taking practice tests
in secret because I'm very insecure, and because I wasn't
having a lot of sex at this time. Besides, at
this time, I thought that the concept of i Q
tests had been proven over and over to be elitist
pseudo science designed to elevate a group who were good
at multiple choice tests and deciding that makes them intellectually superior.
(14:08):
Was this assumption as far off as my first picture
of a mention was. Well, like so many parts of
this story, that's a complicated question. There's rumblings of talk
about the role of i Q tests throughout history and
the high i Q societies that have sprung into occasional
relevancy over the past hundred years or so. So it's
kind of hard to say. And the mensine I was
(14:28):
picturing would probably tell you to look at the evidence
and decide for yourself. The actual medicine might just tell
you what they think with little or no sourcing whatsoever,
which is why I feel comfortable telling you that I
think i Q testing is still more or less bullshit
does more harm than it does goods. But please, perceived medicine,
decide for yourself. So before we can talk about the test,
(14:53):
we have to talk about how and why the test exists.
I know, I'm sorry, but we need to do it,
interrupting this biased gonzo piece to lay out some facts.
So there's a great podcast released as an offshoot of
Radio Lab called g Show, which examines the perception of
the idea of general intelligence. And I'm gonna start by
(15:15):
citing an episode called the Miseducation of Larry p which
is an in depth look at how i Q tests
have been used to racially discriminate, beginning with its inception
in the early nineteen hundreds and into now they were
culturally specific to European Americans. This is black psychologist Brandon
Gamble talking to Radio Lab in the episode, and he
(15:37):
goes on to explain that contemporary i Q tests were
designed using only white children as the control group. Now,
to be clear, MENSA does not use the conventional i
Q test that the criminal justice system, the NFL, and
American schools used, but the tenants of the test are identical.
It asks the question are you smarter than the average person?
(15:57):
And what does that mean? Our MENSA heads you use
the rate or r a I T scale that measures
the following categories. You can you can ask me what
these categories mean or to me, they all kind of
sound like the same thing. Crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, total intelligence,
(16:18):
quantitative intelligence, total battery intelligence. That sounds like a car.
And they have you take the Wonderlock Cognitive ability test.
And as far as I know, there is no precise
way to translate your mental scores into a traditional i
Q number score. But the mental website specifies that if
a member is hoping to join based on a previously
(16:40):
taken test, the lowest Binet i Q score accepted is
one thirty two And right, Banet, I should tell you
who that is. The originator of the i Q tests
upon which all of these societies are built is French
psychologist Alfred Binet, who spent his life studying how children
learn over time. I'm getting with the inch music, but
(17:00):
I mean, what if I stuck to it? Maybe I will,
and devised an exam that would theoretically reflect how the
student was learning based on an average for their age.
So if a six year old got a score of
one hundred on a Binet test, that would mean that
a six year old was comprehending at the rate of
Benet's average six year old, and a higher or lower
score would indicate proficiency on either side. However, and this
(17:24):
is very important, Benet's i Q test was not designed
to be exceptionalist in nature, and by exceptionalists in nature,
I mean you know, it wasn't invented for bragging rights
or as a value judgment on a person at all,
which is something that virtually every high i Q society misses.
It was not a test that was designed to say
(17:44):
this is how smart you are forever, and you should
consider yourself better or worse. It was supposed to be
a reflection of where you're learning is at in a
specific moment. And this distinction is something that MENSA and
all societies like it have completely ignored. High ACCU society's
view intelligence as a permanent and never fluctuating state of being,
(18:07):
rather than just a reflection of how you took a
test at one point in your life, the scores of
which could reflect a circumstance or a relationship to the
style and content of a single test. And Benet himself
was adamant on the fact that a score on his
test was not an enduring statement on what a person's
intelligence was. In ben I read a book called and
(18:30):
Get Ready for an incredible French accent les Ideas Mont,
and he said the following. Some recent philosophers seem to
have given their moral approval to these deplorable verdicts that
affirmed that the intelligence of an individual is a fixed quantity,
a quantity that cannot be augmented. We must protest and
(18:50):
react against this brutal pessimism. We must try to demonstrate
that it is founded on nothing. So that's Benet's take.
You can get an accuse score, but it's not a
statement on who you are forever. It's a statement on
where you're at right now. And his work in stating
that intelligence was not fixed was more or less completely
undone by a British psychologist named Charles Spearman, who noticed
(19:14):
that if someone performed well in one section of a
Benet test, they tended to do well in the other
sections as well, and Spearman ended up describing this observation
as general intelligence. Under Spearman's logic, the amount of general
intelligence every person has is a fixed, unchangeable amount. And
(19:35):
not coincidentally, Charles Spearman was a eugenicist, and this fixation
on eugenics, which if you've managed to not have to
interact with the idea, it is a proven false pseudoscience
concept that states that the shape of the skull indicates
your intelligence. Charles Spearman believed this strongly, as did Men's
(19:57):
A co founder Roland Beryl, as do a lot of
racist people on the Internet. Unfortunately, Spearman started to introduce
this idea of general intelligence and the idea that i
Q is fixed right after Bannet dies. So Spearman's work
in the nineteen tens led to Bonet's i Q test
to be used for purposes that were the complete opposite
(20:18):
of its intent. And because Spearman just happened to start
spouting this bullshit right after Bannet died, Banet was not
able to call him from wherever dead people go to
correct it. The eugenics movement that Spearman believed in would
use a low i Q score under the idea of
intelligence being fixed, as an excuse to separate, discriminate against,
(20:42):
and even euthanize those that the test considered inferior. And
there's many examples of this happening in America any episode
of the Radio lab G series called Unfit, which discusses
the role of euthanization based on arbitrary and frequently biased
i Q tests, as well as the America and bugfeed
Bell Supreme Court decision which stated that the compulsory sterilization
(21:05):
of the quote intellectually disabled for the protection and health
of the state unquote was not unconstitutional. That is to say,
in certain cases, the i Q test could kill you
Menso wasn't founded until the nineteen forties, but its co founder,
Roland Barrel, was an Australian expatriate whose interests included the
(21:27):
pseudo science of phrenology, a variant of which is used
as part of the logic that in cells used today
to incite violence against women, and was rehashed in the
controversial book The Bell Curve to discredit the intelligence of
black people. This since disproved study was focused around because
these people are obsessed with skulls, the shape of a
(21:50):
person's skull indicating things about them like intelligence and potential,
or the lack thereof. Roland Barrel would later complain that
he was disappointed that people who qualified FERMENTA would sometimes
come from humble homes because he thought that the premise
of the group was quote an aristocracy of the intellect unquote.
(22:10):
In The Miseducation of Larry P. The reporters expand on
the still valid law that black children cannot be given
an i Q test in the state of California, a
decision that was based around a case in which a
young black student was deemed quote educably mentally retarded unquote
after scoring poorly on an IQ test. This action, which
was taken without notifying the parents, resulted in five black
(22:33):
families whose children had been given similar diagnoses filing a
class action lawsuit against their school district, and ultimately they
effectively argued that the i Q tests of the time
were demonstrably biased against your children, and Judge Robert Peckham
ruled in the family's favor, saying this, we must recognize
at the outset that the history of the i Q
(22:53):
test and of special education classes built on i Q
testing is not the history of neutral scientific discoveries translated
into educational reform. It is a history of racial prejudice,
of social Darwinism, and of the use of the scientific
quote mystique to legitimate such prejudices. So the result of
(23:15):
this ruling has a fairly complicated historical legacy. Peckham did
not enforce the discontinuation of i Q testing in California
for discriminatory separation of students. It was merely the discontinuation
of giving i Q test to black children. Specifically, black
students are still not allowed to take the tests in
(23:35):
California schools, and as tests continued to be updated to
cater to more than just white students of the nineteen seventies.
This has kind of created a second prejudice that continues
to separate students from each other by race. The prejudice
roots of i Q based evaluation was given another talking
point in that book, The Bell Curve, which is written
(23:57):
by Charles Murray and Richard Hearnsan. The Bell Curve is
uncritical of i Q tests themselves, claiming that the test
has never in its history discriminated across any social, economic,
or racial divides, and presupposes that intelligence, contrary to everything
the inventor of the i Q test, Alfred Bennett, ever said,
(24:20):
is fixed, and attempts to explore why certain racial and
class groups did better or worse on the test. Quote,
it seems highly likely to us that both genes and
environment have something to do with racial differences. Unquote. The
Bell Curve is a very controversial book that I personally
(24:41):
have absolutely no respect for, and it rears its had
every several years since its publication, and whispers of this
book still permeate Mensa to this day. A few references
are made to it in the time that I spend
in Phoenix, whether it be in praise of a discussion
of intelligence, or as quote disgusting racist bullshit unquote during
a casual meal at a Scottish Hooters restaurant. There has
(25:02):
been a talk at a MENSA annual gathering on the
topic of the Bell Curve sometime in the past five
years from a member that firehouse members described as an
unabashed white supremacist, which causes yet another wave of drama
at the annual event. Now MENSA itself was founded shortly
after World War Two ended in ninety in Oxford, England,
(25:24):
by English barrister and biochemist Lancelot linel Ware and the
aforementioned Australian Elita's blowhard, Roland Barrel. These two guys just
met on a train by chance. They'd both recently become
interested in i Q tests, and they were enthusiastic about
founding a society for fellow smarts, and like many people
who meet on public transportation, menton history indicates that Lancelot
(25:48):
linel Ware quickly grew annoyed with Roland Barrel's bullshit after
the organization was formed, and only rejoined and participated in
MENSA when his co founder died. Unlike its European counterpart,
American men has a far more left leaning origin story.
It was started in Brooklyn in nineteen sixty by Peter
and Enez Sturgeon, a forty something year old married couple
(26:09):
closely aligned with the Socialist Workers Party. MENSA International since
its founding has ballooned to include over one hundred thousand members,
most of which live in America and the UK, and
as mostly who we'll be talking about. So it's impossible
to separate any high i Q society from the history
of the test itself. But that doesn't mean that i
(26:30):
Q testing is entirely bad or sociologically completely useless. Radio
Labs g explores a few different examples of i Q
testing proving beneficial, including its function in curbing the lead
industry during the Reagan era, when a doctor effectively argued
that putting lead in public water would lower the general
i Q of the population and affect the workforce. And interestingly,
(26:52):
this argument relies on Benet's assertion that i Q is
not fixed and can be influenced by external fact. So hey,
that's something, but this does not get MENSA off the hook. Unfortunately,
MENSA does not have a history of using the test
in this way. To get into MENSA, you get a
maximum of two chances to formally test in for your
(27:13):
entire life. One option is the traditional standardized test option
that I took, and the other is called the culture
fair option that is considered a better option for those
that don't speak English as a first language or quote
have language processing problems such as dyslexia unquote. That information
comes from MENSA UK. If both of these options don't
(27:34):
yield qualifying scores in the top two percent of the population,
you don't get to take the test again in one year,
or ten years, or fifty years. In high i Q societies,
Spearman's hate enabling assumption that intelligence is fixed and unchangeable
is the logic used. And conveniently, there is no conceivable
(27:55):
way under this model that intelligence could be wasted. M hm.
So with this in mind, we're going back to summer.
I'm taking the test for real this time, no more sidetrack.
I show up hungover at a college in Pasadena on
the morning of my MENSA admissions test, and I am
(28:16):
ready to fail. The test, which is taken by sections
and all of those confusing sounding rate categories, takes about
two hours to take and it's administered by a proctor
who splits his time between engineering and repairing large orchestral organs,
which is pretty cool. I do tease this engineer, organ
(28:36):
intellectual guy a fair amount in what I thought was
going to be a one off column about taking a
standardized test that to me closely resembled the S A T. S.
And we even maintain a friendly email correspondence for a
little while after the test is over. But he strikes
me at first as the typical smart, dorky mensine. I've
(28:58):
been going on about to my friend the night before.
He's kind of a nerd, and he's a proud nerd.
In hell, if I can knock him for knowing how
to fix an orchestral organ at the Disney Concert Hall,
that's fuck me. I mean. The only other people taking
the test this day a local CrossFit law student and
his much friendlier girlfriend. Unfortunately I didn't find out what
(29:19):
she did, but because he was talking too much to
let her get a word in edgewise. But all three
of us listen to the proctor patiently between sections that
are on math, logic, vocabulary, and verbal intelligence, and while
we're supposed to be focusing on the test, the proctor
occasionally mentions what he feels are the benefits of the
mensine lifestyle. He tells us about game nights we can
(29:40):
attend if we get in, how fun local meet up
dinners are should we be smart enough to attend them.
And this is like shortly after her editory came out
and he just like spoiled the entire movie. And if
you've seen them that movie, that's a really has really
mean to spoil that movie. But anyways, we're reminded that
we only have this one chance to take this test
(30:01):
in our one human life. And if we fail this test,
we can take the culture Fair test, and if we
fail that test, we are doomed to resume our lives
not going to game nights and dinners with this specific
test proctor, so the stakes are high. It's very important
to him, and he lets us know. And it is
a little funny. Sorry. In my column at the time
(30:24):
after I took the test, I wrote, quote, maybe you
don't feel non mentioned deserve you, or maybe the opposite.
That's a manic episode. You set yourself up to fail.
It's a waste of money that could end hopefully in
community unquote quoting myself. Awesome. So if the history of
the i Q test in the controversial application of fixed intelligence,
(30:44):
is any indication. I don't think the fact that I
got into MENSA makes me even remotely smarter than other people.
It does make me remotely had sixty dollars, woke up
on time and had taken a lot of standardized tests
in the early two thousand's. I firm we believe if
that you, who have taken the time to listen to
this could get into MENSA, my stupidest acts could get
(31:06):
into MENSA, and he's and he is dumb, my con
artist uncle could get into MENSA, and I just as
firmly believe that all three of us being in that
group wouldn't make us better than anyone. It would only
make us a pair of new balance is poorer, because
I think all it takes to get into a group
like this is a little bit of predisposed aptitude for
(31:26):
a standardized test, and a little bit of ego. And conversely,
if you historically don't test well, which many intelligent people don't,
you probably won't do well in this test. It's almost
as if it's a flawed metric. So I take the
test and the email comes two weeks later, while I'm
in the dressing room of a Forever twenty one trying
on something that looks bad, and it says this, congratulations,
(31:50):
your MENSA admissions testing has been scored, and based on
the percentile rank, you qualify for admission into MENSA. I
would tell you how my scores translate to a formal
i Q test, but as I said, the Intelligence Index
scores that you're given are only used for MENSA admissions.
I got nothing for you. And when I get this email,
I'm like laughing my mostly exposed ass off, and I
(32:13):
do feel a small tinge of pride that I remind
myself to feel ashamed about later. And I write my
next column, which was called good news they let dumb
sluts into MENSA Now. And I wrote that as a
follow up to my first piece, which is about taking
the test. And in this piece, I'm joking about infiltrating
the local Los Angeles branch. But I think it's pretty
clear that I don't actually have an intention to, because
(32:34):
at this point I've already spent half of my freelance
paycheck just to take the test and enroll in the
group to get a membership card that I use to
take stupid Instagram pictures with to this day. So continuing
in MENSA for me makes no financial sense, not even
for those cool, smart people game nights that I'd heard
so much about. And the hundreds or some people that
(32:56):
usually read my column seem to enjoy it. A handful
of mensa reach out to say it made them laugh
and to say welcome. And two people tell me about
a closed Facebook group that might be of interest to me,
and yes it is that one. The first is my
test proctor, the organ fixing engineer, and he says, quote,
the articles were very funny, I'll be it occasionally mean spirited.
(33:19):
He also thanks me for changing his name in my column.
This is sort of unrelated, but this was written in
response to an email i'd written him asking if I
could see what an orchestral organ repair looked like in person,
to which he said no. So if anyone is wondering
who the dork and this email thread is, it is me.
(33:42):
And then another mensum member contacts me about Firehouse with
a far sterner warning and he says, quote, I am
writing you because menso is not just silly fun board games,
hug dots, don't ask, and happy nerds. There's also a
nasty alt right undercurrent that you can find in MENSA
Facebook groups. They consist mainly of Trump supporters, and if
you join, you will be amazed at what supposedly intelligent
(34:03):
people believe. Okay, so I searched for the group on
Facebook and request to join, and in keeping with the
inclusive spirit of MENSA, I also need to send them
my membership number to qualify for entry into the group.
His message continues, quote, these groups are no moderation, which
is the code of angry white people, for I want
to say racist things without a moderator calling me a racist.
(34:23):
In any case, if you are looking to blow people's
minds with a behind the scenes look at MENSA and
that might be a good place to start. And Okay,
I know that sounds like a lot, but once Firehouse
grants me access, the preconceived mention I had been making
fun of this whole time completely implodes. There are some
scattered liberal ideas posted in Firehouse, but the vast majority
(34:45):
are far right leaning news sources, pixelated political memes, dirty
inside jokes, and something called the boob thread. I tell
a few of my friends about the group, but I
hold off on writing about it, thinking back to what
that mention had mentioned just before warning me of the
group's off He said, quote, if and when you make
fun of MENSA, please don't forget that a lot of
(35:06):
these people were bullied because they were smart, and they
finally found a club where they belong and where everybody
is a little awkward or at least understands them. And
that's completely fair. But does that apply to a far
right closed Facebook group. I'm a little lost on this,
So I go back to the group and I read
its description and it says, quote, this group, like MENSA,
(35:28):
is very diverse and can range from fluffy kittens two
items that will make you wish you could bleach your brain.
If someone upsets you or post things not to your liking,
reported to Facebook and or block this person. The administrators
will not take any actions to edit or delete post unquote.
So here I am a sweet young lady in an
unmoderated online forum. This lack of moderation is the same
(35:52):
logic that what I do think it is interesting in
the abstract has given way to websites like four chan,
eight chan, and other dark corners of Reddit that function
as venues for hate speech, which makes some members of
the group extremely vulnerable. But what really threw me about
the Firehouse group was the logo in the top right
corner of the page. Firehouse, I saw was a group
(36:15):
that was owned by the official American Mens of page
and was ostensibly endorsed and encouraged by it. So a
Facebook group of undercover bigots is unfortunately nothing new, but
their encouragement by what is supposed to be the smartest
organization in the country was not something that I had
seen before. What academic institution in their right mind would
(36:37):
proudly endorse a group that clearly states that no one
is safe and that hate speech would not be deleted
unless the historically faulty Facebook reporting system deemed it so.
And this back in July is something that I think
I could write about. But even so, I was nervous
because when you're comedian online you encounter some pretty brutal
(36:59):
comments that I didn't know if I wanted to put
myself in the comment section line of fire because I
think that there is an exact number of times you
can be called an ugly cunt before you impulsively get
a terrible haircut and Switcher meads and I had already
passed this point a long time ago, but I'm still interested.
And I talked to a few of my friends to
see if this idea an official organizational endorsement of a
(37:21):
far leaning, unmoderated group, was something they'd ever come across,
and whether it was a story worth pursuing, even in
spite of whatever backlash might happen. But while I was
thinking about this man that Firehouse group, that they do
not wait for you to be ready and make a
rational decision, and I never have time to reach a conclusion.
They find me first, and they are not happy. Alright.
(37:48):
That was episode one of my year in mensa. Thank
you so much to all of my wonderful friends who
contributed voice work to this. They are Miles Gray, Maggie
may Fish, if you, Waddy Way, Caitlin Durante, Danny Fernandez,
and Isaac Taylor. And thank you to Sadie Dupre wrote
the incredible theme song. And to all those medicines out there,
(38:12):
see you. In episode two, Gang
Host
Jamie Loftus
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