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Abraham wrote:TAM,

Ah, you were quoting Groucho Marx, not my other hero, Mark Twain in regard to the club member quote...

Groucho was quoting Twain.

cbr600 wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:and that is purely a matter of genetics. So belonging to a club based on an inherited trait is kind of like belonging to a club of blondes, or the left-handed.

There are clubs for left-handers and for tall people. There are clubs for people with Irish, Italian or Chinese ancestors.

And let's not forget the NAACP.

Yes there are, and I don't see any value to them either.

gigag04 wrote:....A CHL applicant background check is nowhere near as thorough as a trooper applicant.

I was going to say.... but you beat me to it. If that were true, I'd be a trooper... ...and that's not a good thing.

I have a rather bitter rant about IQ...

My parents were both long-time professors at Caltech. My dad published at least a couple of books before he died, and my mother has published 14 books to date, and at age 86, she is currently working on number 15. I don't know what their IQs were/are, but I would take it as a given that they probably would have tested pretty highly to have that kind of career. But none of that mattered to a son who idolized his emotionally distant father, who didn't know how to live up to his mother's impossibly high standards, and who spent most of his childhood and adolescent years in an emotional wilderness trying to find value in his own life because his parents didn't know how to invest him with a sense of his own worth.

IQ doesn't mean a damned thing. It is just another point of pride, in a world full of pride.

I was tested as a lad, and I apparently scored quite highly. Wisely or not, my parents refused to divulge the results to me because they didn't want me to get big-headed about it. The thing is that, since then, I've done any number of stupid things in my life, high IQ or not. In the end, if I may paraphrase Martin Luther King, I would rather be judged by the content of my character than by the altitude of my IQ score. I have met any people in my life who were plenty book-smart and would have probably tested very highly, but who were naive and incapable in the ways of the world. And I have also seen plenty of people whose career arcs tend to display high IQ scores, but whose personal actions revealed them to be people of low character at the very moments when character counts most. William Jefferson Clinton comes to mind. Conversely, I have also met people possessed of simple wisdom and the instinctive ability to do what is right in all things. These are the people I most admire. For all practical purposes, these are the most intelligent people in the world.

I have been approached by friends who were members to join Mensa. I couldn't be bothered. My escape line is to borrow from Mark Twain and say that I wouldn't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member. But the truth is that I don't want to be part of any group that exists to glorify something its members had no part in doing for themselves. It isn't an accomplishment. One's baseline IQ is largely a matter of heredity. It can be improved on somewhat by the nurturing process, and it can be depressed somewhat by failing to continue its stimulus, but we all have a baseline IQ (regardless of what method you want to use to test it). It is higher for some than for others, and that is purely a matter of genetics. So belonging to a club based on an inherited trait is kind of like belonging to a club of blondes, or the left-handed. It is pretty meaningless. In terms of my own personal experience growing up, IQ didn't necessarily add to the quality of my life, and it continues to have not much impact on it today.

I choose to give glory to God, who is the author of whatever intellect I possess, and I refuse to take credit for or glorify anything about it, because I'm not in charge. HE is.

Thus endeth my little rant...

I'm smart enough not to join.