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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

My limited experience with Mensa is that it's a social/dating club for high IQ people. It's been too long for me to remember the details, but I recall reading about studies that suggest relationships where IQs are too far apart (more than 5-10pts) have a high failure rate. If you're more than a standard deviation from the mean, it probably makes sense to have a special dating circle if you're looking for a long term partner.

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That's interesting. Similar to how many people rely on university networks to segregate their dating pool roughly by IQ (although more informally). Is the gender ratio reasonable for straight couples? My imagined version of Mensa is a club that mostly attracts men.

IQ is not distributed equally among men and women. The median is the same, but there are more men at the extremes for IQ (both high and low). Mensa membership is 66% male. https://www.us.mensa.org/learn/about/demographics/

This is a weird one. There does seem to be evidence in support of the variation hypothesis, but merely mentioning its existence while not being a woman is enough to get you sacked.

The thing I don't get about that, or at least I obviously do get it but it lead to think, surely if you were hiring in volume you might be better off hiring women anyway since you can more precisely know what kind of candidates you want to hire?

Variation hypothesis actually makes sense from evolutionary point of view: you need as many women as you can get to produce offsprings, but only small number of men suffices to impregnate them all. So men are disposable, therefore they are where the mother nature does its risky experiments.

This may be true, but I suggest you keep this to yourself. We also see that college majors with the highest average IQ (like Physics, Engineering) have the least women: http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students...

For diversity and inclusion in AI papers, they bring up facts like "All of the top 10 most-cited AI researchers are men" and then posit this as bad, and in support of a 50%-50% gender representation in AI. Like in: The field still has a long way to go. Not: we judged these extremely rare geniuses on their gender, and when you do this, you get bad diversity-and-inclusion optics.

And how to solve that perceived problem? Judge other academics on their gender, place them in a victimized group, and then compose your reference list with that in mind? The top 10 starts doing exactly that, because the guilt they feel is real. So they say nothing when privileged researchers can use the LatinX-in-AI, Women-in-AI, Black-in-AI, Gay-in-AI, Jewish-in-AI backdoors to get in a prestigious AI conference publication.

From what I've heard from some young women who were involved with Mensa early, it has aspects of a grooming club as well =(

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