I'm not sure that correlation with life expectancy, salary and number of children is good evidence to validate the efficacy of a measure. A lot of people think living a long life is prolonging your suffering, that providing children is detrimental to the life of the planet, and that salary-chasing is both dishonourable and prevents you from achieving the higher goal of contributing to society. IQ might correlate with those traits, but that doesn't mean those traits are indicative of intelligence or success.
IQ tests are typically designed by financially successful, Western academics. These sort of tests almost always include a self-selecting bias; that is, biases in the nature of the questions (stemming from the researcher's view of what "intelligence" means and how it should be measured) which lead to selection of people who are alike the designer of the measure, rather than those who are truly intelligent. In this case... self-selecting bias results in a semi-representative proxy, meaning it will probably select more intelligent people than a random sample but will still get a lot wrong.
Anyway, I think MENSA is pretty clearly an ego-boosting organisation rather than something that serves any purpose, and since I hate people who brag about their intelligence as if it's something they can control I don't have much time for it.
What do you think of Mensa (high IQ society)?
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I'm not sure that correlation with life expectancy, salary and number of children is good evidence to validate the efficacy of a measure. A lot of people think living a long life is prolonging your suffering, that providing children is detrimental to the life of the planet, and that salary-chasing is both dishonourable and prevents you from achieving the higher goal of contributing to society. IQ might correlate with those traits, but that doesn't mean those traits are indicative of intelligence or success.
IQ tests are typically designed by financially successful, Western academics. These sort of tests almost always include a self-selecting bias; that is, biases in the nature of the questions (stemming from the researcher's view of what "intelligence" means and how it should be measured) which lead to selection of people who are alike the designer of the measure, rather than those who are truly intelligent. In this case... self-selecting bias results in a semi-representative proxy, meaning it will probably select more intelligent people than a random sample but will still get a lot wrong.
Anyway, I think MENSA is pretty clearly an ego-boosting organisation rather than something that serves any purpose, and since I hate people who brag about their intelligence as if it's something they can control I don't have much time for it.