Well, I have an interesting confession to make: I joined the Triple Nine Society in 2004, qualifying based on my old SAT score. My GRE score would also have qualified me, but I did not use it. Either score, according to TNS, is equivalent to an approximate IQ of 149. I was only a few points above their minimums, in both cases.
Some of the people in TNS are active in philosophy, but they tend to look down their noses at Objectivism, which disappoints me. They hold the same opinions of Objectivism, and believe the same modern-philosophy drivel, as most academics. I suppose that is to be expected. I find that the other members are most interesting when they are writing about more concrete disciplines such as physics, mathematics, or neuroscience. The least interesting ones are the ones who try to take over the society and get voted out for it (as happened recently). There are a few kooky ideas that get presented from time to time, but I suspect that there are fewer than Mensa (which I skipped over), and the point of having them is only to discuss them, not to force people to accept them. It is permissible to explain why they are wrong – this street goes both ways, of course.
Ayn Rand says not to join the wrong groups or movements in order to “do something.” I figure TNS is safe because it doesn’t do anything. The IEEE (of which I am also a member) is less safe, because it occasionally intervenes into politics, and I am not sure of the correctness of all its interventions.
I did not discover what my IQ really was until after I had graduated from college. I consider that a loss, as the discovery helped me to find some optimism at a difficult point in my life, when I was unemployed and seemingly unable to find a job anywhere. I was thinking that I was worthless. I was glad to find I was wrong, at least in some regard.
When I was young I had a difficult time in school. I was always socially ostracized, and the teachers encouraged this; their attitude was “he needs to learn to get along, he needs to learn to be more like normal kids.” My IQ was tested, but no one told me the results; it was taboo; I was not supposed to think I was smarter than anyone else. I was always treated differently and I couldn’t figure out why, and somehow it was wrong for me to get the right answer even though it was right for anyone else to get it. When I finally discovered how high my IQ really was, in 2002 (I didn’t join TNS until later), this finally made sense.
My parents were told that I should not be put in the Gifted program, that the people in Gifted were “arrogant.” What the teachers did not say, but believed, was: It is “arrogant” to think you are smarter than anyone else. If the facts back up such an assessment, that makes you even more “arrogant.” Such facts must be suppressed. A student should not be allowed to show off his high test scores to other students. It is not fair that some kids should be smarter than others. After all, high IQs are a myth anyway; they don’t exist. High IQ people should not be allowed to get ahead; they should be punished.
The trouble actually started when I changed schools. The teachers and administrators at the new school obviously had a whole different philosophy of what was acceptable student behavior. I had done just fine at the old school, but the old school had allowed me to get ahead a little. At the new school, they were teaching that with two minus three, you can’t subtract, and, after raising my hand and being called on, I said, “You can too, it’s minus one!” and that got me into trouble. Defiance of authority, I guess. The teacher marked a whole bunch of my perfectly correct answers wrong, publicly, to humiliate me.
I would change schools a few more times. I had to take the same math four years in a row. I mastered rational arithmetic in the fourth grade, and the next move was algebra, but I was made to wait until eighth grade like everyone else, in the meantime doing the same thing over and over. My seventh-grade math teacher gave a pre-test on the first day of school. I got a 57 out of 60 (raw score), the next highest score was in the 30s. That got me into MathCounts.
Luckily for me, after that, my parents finally decided to ignore the charges of “arrogance” and put me in a magnet school, where I actually won Mu Alpha Theta math contests (I would never have imagined that there was such a thing as a math contest, as if math were a sport! I won quite a few trophies), and I graduated from high school with two Advanced Placement math credits (and several others in other subjects). But I think I could have done a whole lot better if I had been allowed to learn at my own pace instead of being punished for my abilities.
Even at the magnet school, my grades were “bipolar” because I would get bored in class and stop paying attention and miss important things. (In some classes I would sit there reading the textbook, and I actually had a professor in college get offended by that behavior.) I didn’t fail completely; sometimes I could be massively productive, especially when I could rely on the textbook. Also, I faced constant social ostracism. There was a lot less ostracism at the magnet school, but it still existed, and I was hyper-sensitive to it. I suspect it is because I started to be treated badly at such a young age, just when I was supposed to be learning to socialize.
I was not able to afford anything but state college, and my bipolar grades disqualified me from most scholarships. I got my degree, but now I find myself bored at work, not qualified for the jobs I really wish I could do. I admit that sometimes I am too bored to study what I should be doing. Sometimes, though, I knock things off my to-do list so quickly I amaze people.
I am a programmer. I am an outcast among programmers. I have written my own Scheme implementation, but I am sometimes castigated for writing code that is too hard for people to understand. (No, I am not using call-with-current-continuation at work. I wish I could, though; I wish it were that kind of job. Not that there are very many of that kind.)
I still face ostracism. Sometimes people regard me with envy and disgust; they think that I have wasted my intelligence and that they could have done much better, but their mistake in this is that they imagine they could have my intelligence while still keeping their social lives. I am aware that lots of intelligent people have normal social lives. I suspect they went to schools that were more accepting of intelligence and even fostered and encouraged it. None of them seem to have gone to public schools in the South. I did not have their good fortune, and though my parents encouraged me to develop my mind, they did not know how to find others who could teach me, and they did not have money.
I do not think of myself as “arrogant.” I have a high IQ, but there is a big difference between intelligence and knowledge. I frequently find myself starved for information that is not in books, or information that is in books I’ve never heard of. It took me 10 years to figure out how to implement Scheme. I had to learn how on my own. I don’t know anybody else who knows much of anything about it, and I couldn’t find books that told me what I needed to know. (I did find one or two, eventually.)
I do put my IQ on resumes, but at the bottom of page two. I don’t mention TNS because I am not active in it and because I don’t want there to be any assumption that I agree with the various views of its members. Sometimes I hope people will see the IQ point and surmise the entire above story, but instead they tend to draw their own conclusions. Almost as bad as people who think IQ itself is a sign of arrogance, are the people who expect me to be able to work miracles. Sigh…
[Edit: miscalculated how many years it took me to learn how to implement Scheme… how typical of me…]
Those who have high IQs AND think that this is a major issue enter MENSA. That should make you think. These are people who are very intelligent (at least they have the potential to be so) yet have not yet found out that other things are more important. They have to be nutcases or at least not very proficient in philosophy. Well, most of them.