Too Smart for Mensa!

But just right for you! Meet Brian, André, Dylan, Stephan and Angélica!!

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Issue #108 of CAFÉ ANNE!

Just a few news items this week. First, back in December, in “Should 60 Wall Street Stay Weird?” I wrote about the proposed redesign of the city’s strangest public atrium, and the response from the rag-tag community inhabiting the space. Now, it seems, demolition has begun. And as reader Amy G. in NYC wrote to alert me, some heart-broken New Yorkers staged a funeral procession through the Financial District to mourn the loss.

More recently, in “How I Learned to Love Dunkin’ Donuts,” I chronicled my quest to embrace the global coffee chain, including a look at its humble beginnings as a Boston coffee shop. I was delighted when Meggo in New Haven sent me this wonderful video depicting a Dunkin’ back when it offered sit-down service and china cups. I had to share it with you!

Finally, huge fake-Rolex-on-Canal-Street shoutouts to new paid subscribers Margaret K., Tohmase and Lewis T. That’s enough $$$ for a whole new watch wardrobe!

I am very excited for this week’s issue, of course. I went a little crazy interviewing members of high IQ societies whose brains are too big for Mensa. Please enjoy.

Regards!

Anne

FEATURE

Too Smart for Mensa!

Inside the World’s High IQ Societies

I recently learned, while wandering the internet, that there are many high IQ societies with stricter requirements than Mensa. The global Prometheus Society, for example, requires an IQ of 160, while the Mega Society sets the bar at 175.

This is easy to understand, even if you're stupid. The IQ cutoff for Mensa, after all, is a mere 132 points. That means one-out-of-50 humans would qualify. You can't throw a pie in a diner without hitting a potential member. If you want to create a society for just the really smart people, you've got to aim higher.

But here's what I didn't understand. What do super smart people get from joining a club for super smart people? Sure, there's the bragging rights, but if you're smart enough to get into a high IQ society, you're probably smart enough to understand that flaunting your IQ is simply not acceptable behavior these days. People will just think you're insecure, or clueless.

Nor could it be the need to validate one's intelligence. For that, you can just take a test. You don't need to join a club.

Clearly, it was time for CAFÉ ANNE investigation.

I started by Googling high IQ societies. There are roughly a dozen that are active. Typically volunteer-run, they range in size from the 1,900-member Triple Nine Society to the Omega Society, which requires an IQ of 210 and has about ten members. (Mensa, by comparison, has 150,000 members worldwide.)

Along the way, I noticed something odd. Several, including the Mega, Omega and Epimetheus Societies, were all founded by the same person, a one Mr. Ronald K. Hoeflin, Ph.D.

According to his Wikipedia page, he is an American philosopher who, as a young child, memorized pi to 200 places. Alas, the only contact information I could find for Mr. Hoeflin—or the societies he founded—was a P.O. Box in Jacksonville, Florida.

I tried emailing the other societies and got no response from most. Then I got lucky. The founder of one, who asked to remain anonymous, offered to post a query on my behalf to the private forums of several societies. He even contacted some of his high IQ friends to see if they'd speak with me.

Thank you Mr. Anonymous Genius!

In the end, I had a lot of fun interviewing five uber-smarties affiliated with five different societies. They were all self-effacing and good-humored. And their stories surprised me. You know how they say pimpin' ain’t easy? Being super smart, it turns out, isn't easy either.

The Triple Nine Society

Minimum IQ: 146

Membership: 1,900, in 39 countries.

Society statement: "Think of Mensa on steroids when you consider joining Triple Nine. Admission to the TNS, at 0.1%, is 20 times as selective!"

Sample Member: Stephan Arndt

Mr. Arndt, 43, lives in Germany and is a project manager for a tech company. He got terrible grades in high school, he says, and efforts to earn college degrees in law, physics and finance were similarly disastrous.

In 2009, a psychologist specializing in career planning suggested an IQ test. "I was quite unsure if I should take it or not," said Mr. Arndt. "I wasn't really sure if I was gifted at all."

He was shocked by his high score and went through period of self-questioning. If he was so smart, why couldn't he get it together career-wise? He joined Mensa and then TNS, "To maybe get some instruction for life from like-minded people who have run into the same problems," he says.

Mr. Arndt says his mind is always racing, making connections and then getting bogged down in the complexity of situations that might appear simple to others. "It's a burden, in my opinion, to have a high IQ," he says. "I'm not going say that I'm suffering from it, but it has its challenges!"

He attended a Mensa meetup and wasn't impressed. The members, who were wearing Mensa tee-shirts and playing Trivial Pursuit, got oddly competitive when they learned he also belonged to the more exclusive TNS. "They tried to fabricate sentences that were maybe a little bit longer than necessary," he says.

But at TNS gatherings, he enjoyed chatting with folks who could follow his mental leaps. "I think a very common characteristic for people with a high IQ is that they have a very jumpy head—they jump fast between topics. And you cannot really do that with more normally intelligent people," he says.

Mr. Arndt spends a lot of time on the TNS online forums. Folks discuss the same topics you might find on any forum, he says—politics, current events, technology, the arts. Except they tend to cite evidence directly from scientific papers.

What do high-IQ society members have in common? Perhaps an experience of struggle, suggests Mr. Arndt. For the typical person who does well in school and enjoys a smooth career, intelligence isn't an issue one way or the other. "If you were successful in your job," he says, "Why would you even take an IQ test?"

The Prometheus Society

Tag-line: "The world-wide 99.997th-percentile high-IQ society."

Membership: ~100

Minimum IQ: 160 (found in roughly 1 in 30,000 people)

Official Publication: Gift of Fire ("Published 0 to 10 times per year.")

Sample Member: Brian Schwartz

Mr. Schwartz, who also is also a member of the Omega Society—which has an IQ cutoff of 210—says his folks gave him his first IQ test when he was a child.

"My parents had expectations for me—telling me about people like Freud, Marx and Einstein who picked up a pen and changed the world," he says. "But I never did that."

He did manage to enter Oxford at age 16, followed by Yale Law, followed by a stint clerking for a Federal Appeals Court judge. Then he spent six years traveling Africa and Asia, “which was glorious," he says. He went on to publish a book, "A World of Villages" about his adventures.

"And after that, my life has been a letdown," he says.

A NYC native raised on the Upper East Side, Mr. Schwartz spent years exploring the nightlife scene in Williamsburg and the South Bronx. "I connected more with people who weren't big intellectuals," he says.

But when he read an article about high IQ societies in New York Magazine, he was fascinated. "I guess I wanted to show to myself I was really superior somehow," he says. "It was a competitive thing.”

He got deeply involved, serving as the Prometheus Society treasurer and telephoning every member to chat them up. He hoped to get them involved in professional networking, but there wasn't much interest. Nor did he succeed in his efforts to grow the membership. "Thousands of people in the US would qualify, including many prominent leaders," he says. "But most of them don't join. There's almost a stigma about joining high IQ societies. It's not really an advantage to put it on your resume."

His parents moved to Tulsa, Ok. and he joined them in 2008 to care for them. While still a Prometheus officer, he's less involved these days. He spends his time writing restaurant reviews and volunteering for a local nonprofit.

Most of his Tulsa friends never went to college. "They are not into intellectual things, but those are still the people I feel most comfortable with," he says. "Maybe all the people I relate to are really smart, but they don’t know it!"

The Epimetheus Society

IQ requirement: 160

Membership: About 150

Note: This is one of the mysterious societies founded by Ronald K. Hoeflin. Its ultra-minimal website provides little detail beyond admission requirements and a photo depicting a field of snow-covered conifers.

Sample Member: Dylan Somerfield

Mr. Somerfield, 29, lives in Adelaide, Australia and recently left a job in finance to focus on employment consulting, helping others find their calling.

He joined the Epimetheus Society about two ago, he says, on the advice of the doctor who diagnosed him with Aspergers.

"I think she perceived that I was a kind of starved, intellectually, of people to speak to," he says. "Once she got me talking about some of the things I'm especially interested in, I wouldn't shut up. And I kept going to a really excessive technical level. So I think she was encouraging me to find special interest groups that would perhaps be similar."

Like Mr. Arndt, Mr. Somerfield has abandoned efforts to earn degrees in several fields including stabs at engineering, commerce, accounting and geopolitics. "I have a very sort of obsessive search trying to find the most meaningful thing that I can be doing, and I can't find that in a conventional degree thus far," he says.

I asked Mr. Somerfield, who has an IQ of 176, how his mind differs from that of a "normal" smart person. He suggested I consider the gap between a person with an IQ of 70—intellectually disabled—and the average person, with an IQ of 100. There's the same magnitude of difference between those two people as there is between him and someone just over the Mensa cut-off.

"People who are in the 130-140 range, they're often not fully comprehending that there are significantly higher brackets beyond that, where they may have blind spots." he says.

At the same time, he adds, folks in lower IQ brackets typically navigate many of the practical aspects of life with perhaps more ease than himself.

He has yet to meet fellow Epimetheus members in person—he's been too busy working. But he enjoys the group's online forums where he can geek out on topics ranging from poetry to engineering, in a way he can't in daily life.

"I'm constantly trying to work out how the dynamics of social groups and the dynamics of biology and the orbits of planets have parallels to each other—things like that." he said. "And these sorts of things make most people's eyes glaze over."

"I can imagine how lonely it must feel,” I said, “if you have all these ideas and concepts, and no one understands what you're talking about.”

"It definitely is,” he said. “And this is one of the very few times that I've ever voiced this with anybody.”

But more important, says Mr. Somerfield, chatting with folks of similar intelligence keeps him from getting lost in the weeds of his own mind.

"I'm really a solitary kind of person, and it's not always clear to me whether my ideas are genius or crazy," he says. “A person who spends a lot of time by themselves can be blind to their own biases, they can go down rabbit holes. Having people who are really intelligent, who I know will be able to understand everything that I say, has been a bit of a guardrail, intellectually. It's kept me from developing too many crackpot theories. And it's sort of made me feel normal."

The Vertex Society

Motto: "Felix qui potest rerum cognoscere causas"

Minimum IQ: 160

Sample Member: Angélica Partida-Hanon

Angélica Partida-Hanon grew up in Mexico. At age six, she was so socially awkward, the school psychologist tested her for a mental disability. Her score revealed the opposite. Later, after getting the top score nationally on her country's equivelent of the SAT at the age of twelve, she was invited to join the engineering school of a local university. She believes she was the youngest known university engineering student worldwide at the time.

Her family was broke, so she took freelance programming jobs to help support her folks. She graduated university at the age 16. Her next move—get the heck out of town! "I was having a tough time with my family." she says. “It was really a madhouse. My parents were very violent.”

She got a scholarship and moved to Madrid on her own at the age of 17, sometimes sleeping on the street when roommate situations fell through. Now 34, she's earned a PhD in biochemistry, molecular biology and biomedicine and is about to earn a second in data science. She works as a data scientist for a global investment bank and teaches at the European School of Economics and IE University.

Ms. Partida-Hanon told me all this in a Zoom call, and I'm pretty sure my eyes were bugging out of my head. "I just have to say your story is blowing my mind," I said. "I can't believe what I'm hearing."

But as high achieving as she is, she has trouble "reading between the lines," as she puts it. "If someone says everything is okay, but it's not at all, I have like a male brain,'" she says. "I'll say, 'Oh! Everything is alright. Okay, thank you.' And then they get really mad."

She's joined several high IQ societies with mixed results. "There's like the elites among the elites," she said. "If you are in Mensa, because you are in the top 98 percent, the folks in the top 99 percent are like, 'This is a peasant!' People play a lot of chess and board games. It's like, 'We can be normal. Look at me!'"

Clearly, at both work and at school, Ms. Partida-Hanon is surrounded by plenty of smart people. Why bother with the societies?

"It's their speed of thinking," she says of her Vertex peers. "Even if you are surrounded by smart people, sometimes you need to over-explain a lot, and it can be very exhausting."

"I guess I can't imagine what it's like to be like you," I said.

'It’s not a big deal in my opinion," she says. "I just want to be very simple. I just want to enjoy my house, have my dog, keep my job. I don't ask for anything more in life."

International Society for Philosophical Inquiry

Tagline: "World's Oldest 99.9% Organization"

Minimum IQ: 149

Membership Perks Included: ISPE Card and Membership Certificate "suitable for printing in color on paper you select (parchment is recommended).”

Sample member: André Gangvik

Right off the bat, Andre Gangvik, who lives in Oslo, told me that despite his 160 of IQ, he’s still trying to earn a bachelor's in biochemistry at the age of 41. "I have Tourettes and OCD," he said. "That's why I have issues in my life.”

"That's so interesting!" I said. "You're the third person I've interviewed with a similar experience."

"Oh cool!" he laughed.

Like Mr. Somerfeld and Mr. Arndt, he took his first cognitive test on the advice of the doctor who diagnosed him. But he didn't know his actual IQ until he took an extended test 2020. He remembers his reaction when he learned the result: "Oh s—!"

Mr. Gangvik, a devoted powerlifter, knew he was often thinking faster and taking a broader view than most of the folks around him, "But I haven't done so much with my life," he says.

Membership in high IQ societies (he's joined Mensa and Vertex as well as ISPE) serves as an alternative form of validation, he says.

A favorite hobby he shares with fellow members: designing IQ tests.

"You give each other homemade IQ tests?" I said.

"Yep, yep!"

"That's the cutest thing I've ever heard!" I said.

He laughed. "We're really nerdy on that type of thing.”

He said he used to feel "a little lost, a little isolated.” Discovering the high IQ societies helped him realize there are others who share his cognitive quirks. "I have the ability to connect with people on every level, I think. But I'm much more in my sweet spot when I connect with people on my own level."

I asked if he thought super smart people are generally happier.

Not at all, he says. While a high IQ is a gift, it often comes packaged with a secondary condition that brings its own difficulties. "What would I be without OCD?" he says. "I don't think I'd be the same on the IQ level. It's sort of a structure that gives a boost to my IQ."

Are they generally wiser?

This Mr. Gangvik answered in the affirmative. While hyper-intelligent people can do plenty of stupid things, they are perhaps more likely to reason and learn from their mistakes, he speculates.

But at least in his case, that's about as far as it goes. "I have not managed," he says, "to solve the world's problems with my IQ."

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