Note on Intelligence

I'm of the opinion that the significance of intelligence is often underestimated. Intelligence as measured in tests is a very important factor in determining the maximum intellectual level you can expect from a person. I was a member of Mensa from 2002 to 2014. Mensa is a society for people who are more intelligent than 98 percent of the population. In my Mensa days I often experienced being misunderstood and treated unfairly by other members. By contrast, this hardly ever happened in high IQ societies with stricter admission criteria, e.g. such requiring to be more intelligent than 99.6 or 99.9 percent of the population. For reasonable discussion of topics that interest me, such as metaphysics, an IQ of 140 or higher (on a scale with an arithmetic mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15) seems to be required. That means that I can only communicate on an adequate level with 1 of 200 persons from the unselected population. This may sound arrogant but it is the truth, backed by decades of personal experience.