IQ Blues

[supergee]

Mensa membership correlates with mental and physical disorders.

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[weofodthignen]

This may be correct, and it's even possible the suggested explanation is correct. But it relies doubly on self-reporting: for the specific study (I didn't read very far so I missed it if the author stated whether they weighted in any way for self-diagnosis vs. official) and for having bothered to join Mensa, which is a group of dubious value. Quite apart from the issues with IQ tests, I'm deeply suspicious that the kind of people who jump through the hoops to join a high-IQ club are also more likely to ask their doctors about their sneezing and coughing or their crying jags, or be curious about whether they are in an unusual position on a spectrum. Whereas those busy with their job, suspicious of authority (which I believe does correlate with intelligence), or without the leisure or deep pockets to navigate the awful medical system in the US, are more likely to just work through or around it. (Then of course there's cultivating disabilities or peculiarities to get out of stuff, as notably during the Vietnam War.)

[threeringedmoon]

If there are approximately 321,000,000 people in the USA, the top two percent would be over 6,000,000. According to what Google told me, MENSA has over 50,000 members in the USA. If I am doing my math correctly, that means .8 percent of the people who are eligible to join have actually joined. It's ludicrous to extrapolate from this self-selected fraction to the whole.

[arlie]

What everyone else said. Read the headline, and enough of the first paragraph to realize that the headline was inapplicable to the content, or close enough to that. Scientific American is clearly not what it was when my father was a subscriber.

By the third paragraph, it seemed clear that the journal Intelligence either is not peer reviewed, or the reviewers are incompetent. If Scientific American's reporting is accurate, Ruth Karpinski and her colleagues have done the equivalent of finding evidence that red things elicit a particular response, and then theorizing why colours have that effect. I'd have rejected this as poor science by the end of my sophomore year in University. (We had a class that, among other things, focussed on recognizing bad science.)

[Update skimmed all the way to the bottom. Scientific American does point out the obvious holes in the research, though not in the speculation ("theorizing") about "overexcitabilities". But the headline is still click bait, IMNSHO.]