I wish I could remember the story but there was a guy that joined Mensa so he could con people. It worked too which rather seems to suggest that the entry requirements are not all that stringent.
Don’t let you convince yourself of something just because you want to believe it’s true. IQ is not an objective measurement of intelligence, but it isn’t completely useless either.
Well, it helped me understand why people would very regularly not understand apparently simple stuff I explained. This happened on so many topics with so many people it was very frustrating.
I don’t think that makes them lesser than me or me better than them (the people not understanding)… It just means I had and still have to work on adapting my messaging to my audience ← and that is something that everybody regardless of IQ should do.
It was in an article about the real life incidents that influenced Terry Pratchett in the discworld series. So the con itself probably took place in the '80s or '90s, so quite a while ago. I can’t really remember if the article itself went into any details but I ended up looking into it myself because I thought it was funny that people in Mensa had been conned.
I think it was some sort of timeshare scheme. The guy managed to sell timeshares in a property he didn’t in fact own, not a very sophisticated con really. The utter geniuses didn’t demand evidence that he actually owned the property before handing over cash.
I took a trip down the rabbit hole and tried to find any evidence - there is none. Even though this was happening before the www really took off there should be evidence on the net. A story hilarious as that would never die and would also be used as a warning against timeshare scams.
I don’t think mensa members are immune to scams, but timeshare? Even the legit ones are scammy IMO.
I wish I could remember the story but there was a guy that joined Mensa so he could con people. It worked too which rather seems to suggest that the entry requirements are not all that stringent.
Or IQ is a useless measure
IQ is absolute nonsense that tells you literally nothing about intelligence or anything of the like.
Don’t let you convince yourself of something just because you want to believe it’s true. IQ is not an objective measurement of intelligence, but it isn’t completely useless either.
It’s worse than useless. It tells you literally nothing about anything, plus idiots think it’s meaningful.
Well, it helped me understand why people would very regularly not understand apparently simple stuff I explained. This happened on so many topics with so many people it was very frustrating.
I don’t think that makes them lesser than me or me better than them (the people not understanding)… It just means I had and still have to work on adapting my messaging to my audience ← and that is something that everybody regardless of IQ should do.
Do you remember how that con was supposed to work?
It was in an article about the real life incidents that influenced Terry Pratchett in the discworld series. So the con itself probably took place in the '80s or '90s, so quite a while ago. I can’t really remember if the article itself went into any details but I ended up looking into it myself because I thought it was funny that people in Mensa had been conned.
I think it was some sort of timeshare scheme. The guy managed to sell timeshares in a property he didn’t in fact own, not a very sophisticated con really. The utter geniuses didn’t demand evidence that he actually owned the property before handing over cash.
I took a trip down the rabbit hole and tried to find any evidence - there is none. Even though this was happening before the www really took off there should be evidence on the net. A story hilarious as that would never die and would also be used as a warning against timeshare scams.
I don’t think mensa members are immune to scams, but timeshare? Even the legit ones are scammy IMO.