Yeah, no one "flashes a Mensa card" unless they are a jerk. We joined many years ago when we lived in Iowa for the social aspect. The parties are a lot of fun and the people are all fascinating. Not all people you want to spend time with, but fascinating. We let our memberships lapse when we moved back to Colorado.

Nearly universally, Mensans recognized that IQ is only measure of how well you do on an IQ test (which, as you may know, was never intended as a test for the upper end, only to find students who needed intervention) or the other allowed tests.

There were materially successful people and not, socially adept and not. People we learned to avoid and people who became friends. Cringe and connection.

I suppose it is like any other social club where you have something in common with the additional kicker that people were not holding back in conversation. You had the chance to rapidly be humbled in that case if you went on at length about some favorite topic only to find out the person you were talking to was an expert in it.

Plus there were cool speakers and field trips. "Dumb things smart people do" was one of our favorites.

Well, the original idea behind Mensa was that if you got a bunch of really smart people together, they just might solve all the world's problems. Didn't quite work out that way, so I'd agree that it has no real reason to keep existing anymore.

Or IQ is a useless measure

Isn't mensa sort of a con itself?

I think their entry requirements are doing exactly what they're supposed to.

The problem is that intelligence, even if we could measure it correctly, doesn't and shouldn't imply what a person knows, nor their experiences and the wisdom that they carry.

Someone can be learned with a low IQ. Someone can be wise and similarly low IQ. In the same way, someone with a high IQ can be unwise.

The problem with having only one individual metric for a group which believes themselves to compose the smartest people, is that they're arrogant. I know plenty of people who are so extremely intelligent that I am certain that they could be a part of Mensa; yet, they are not. When they looked into it, they decided it would be unwise to become a member, given the requirements and the attitudes of, and about, the group.

Hell, there's a decent chance I could get in. I've never tried and I don't care to, for all the same reasons, so I would never know if I could "make it" or not.

Their arrogance and hubris is their undoing.

Do you remember how that con was supposed to work?

Go find yourself an IQ 300 mensa nerd. They need you

Probably a language thing too. In German, for example, comma splices are grammatically correct.