The Prometheus Society is a high IQ society. Their membership requirements are six hundred times more selective than Mensa International. A high IQ society is an organisation that limits membership to people who are within a certain high percentile of IQ test results, theoretically representing the most intelligent people in the world. ... Mensa International is the largest, oldest, and most well-known high IQ society in the world. ...

History

Background

The first IQ society in history to precondition admission on the basis of examinations, excluding the Chinese mandarinate, is Mensa International. It was founded because two men happened to meet on a train.^[1] Though the reasons Ware and Berrill decided to found a high IQ club are the subject of dispute, it is likely that they realized from their first conversation that although they came from different backgrounds, they were able to communicate and had much in common. They hypothesized that what they had in common was intelligence, and decided to see if a society of people selected for intelligence (using the only means available, IQ tests) would also have much in common. ^[2] A Mandarin was a bureaucrat in imperial China. ... Mensa International is the largest, oldest, and most well-known high IQ society in the world. ... Dr Lancelot Lionel Ware OBE (5 June 1915 – 15 August 2000), British barrister and co-founder of Mensa. ...

They decided to focus on people whose intelligence would place them at or above the 98th percentile. In descriptive statistics, the pth percentile is a scale value for a data series equal to the p/100 quantile. ...

Beyond the 98th percentile

In the late 1930s, Dr. Leta Hollingworth's ground-breaking research, which led to the publication of Children Above 180 IQ (1942), suggested that there is a group of people with extremely high intelligence who also have much in common and who are as different from people at the 98th percentile in IQ as people at that level are from the norm. (Later studies have confirmed this. ^[3]) That level, 180 ratio IQ, roughly corresponds with the one in thirty thousand level. Starting in the early 1960s, when the now-defunct MM was started, there were attempts to form societies accepting people at a level approaching this. The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry and the Triple Nine Society, both in existence today, were founded in the 1970s. They accepted people at the one in a thousand level, far short of Hollingworth's norms. There was a problem in going higher. Apart from certain scores achieved in early childhood, no available tests were normed at that high a level, and the paucity—by definition—of data at that level made such norming very difficult indeed. Leta Hollingworth was born the oldest of three daughters in Nebraska in 1886. ... The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE) is A global, scientific, and philosophical Society founded in 1974, dedicated to advanced enquiry, original research and original contributions. ... The Triple Nine Society (TNS) is a voluntary association of individuals who have scored at or above the 99. ...

Testing difficulties

There were two possible ways to overcome this obstacle. Either the raw data from standardized tests could be obtained and determination could be made if they could be normalized to Hollingworth’s levels, or new tests could be designed and normalized. In the late 1970’s it was the latter approach that was followed. Kevin Langdon and Ronald Hoeflin both developed untimed tests that claimed to have a ceiling well above the one in a million level (176 IQ or 4.75 standard deviations above the mean).^[4] These tests were given to a pool of about thirty thousand test-takers, recruited through Omni magazine, and the resulting data were used to develop norms, mainly using equipercentile equating.^[5] Using these tests and norms, Ronald Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society in 1982. ^[6] It was the second society to select members at the one in thirty thousand level, the first being Kevin Langdon’s Four Sigma Society, founded in 1976.^[7] Ronald K. Hoeflin is a philosopher, creator of the Mega[1][2][3] and Titan[4] puzzle tests, and founder of several high IQ societies; the Top One Percent Society, the One-in-a-Thousand Society, the Prometheus Society, the Epimetheus Society, the Mega Society, and the Omega Society. ... In probability and statistics, the standard deviation of a probability distribution, random variable, or population or multiset of values is defined as the square root of the variance. ... Omni was a magazine that contained articles on science fact and short works of science fiction. ...

Recent changes

The pool of members was always limited by the number of people who had taken the Langdon and Hoeflin tests, and it was further limited when, in the 1990s, answers for some test questions were put on the Internet. However, there existed a large pool of potential members as tens of millions of people had taken standardized exams such as the SAT, which were in effect IQ tests. The problem was to norm them. In 1999, Prometheus formed a committee of ten members, many of them experts in psychometrics, to attempt this Herculean task. This committee produced a long report examining all reputable intelligence tests, determining which tests are capable of selecting at this high four-sigma level (four standard deviations above the mean of a normal distribution), and determining what the appropriate scores should be.^[8] This report recommended that members be chosen based on scores in several widely known and researched standardized tests, including the SAT, the GRE, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and others. This greatly expanded the number of possible members. Today, the number of members hovers around a hundred. The SAT Reasoning Test, formerly called the Scholastic Aptitude Test and Scholastic Assessment Test, is a type of standardized test frequently used by colleges and universities in the United States to aid in the selection of incoming students. ... In probability and statistics, the standard deviation of a probability distribution, random variable, or population or multiset of values is defined as the square root of the variance. ... The normal distribution, also called Gaussian distribution (although Gauss was not the first to work with it), is an extremely important probability distribution in many fields. ... The Graduate Record Examination or GRE is a standardized test that is an admissions requirement for many graduate schools in the United States and Canada. ... Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or WAIS is a general test of intelligence (IQ), published in February 1955 as a revision of the Wechsler-Bellevue test (1939), standardised for use with adults over the age of 16. ...

Membership

The membership roster is a diverse and surprising potpourri. There are CEOs of high-tech firms, math professors, computer programmers, physics PhDs, army officers, dry cleaners, and people who work for NASA. ^[9] Quite a few are involved with computer modeling of complex phenomena. As this last suggests, many members have much in common, and the officers try to link together members whose business or other interests complement each other. The society produces a 72-page magazine, Gift of Fire, published ten times a year, which contains many scholarly or speculative articles, along with poetry, artworks, and short stories.^[10] Perhaps the best-known article to appear in Gift of Fire is Grady Towers' essay, "The Outsiders". ^[11]

See also

• Triple Nine Society

The Triple Nine Society (TNS) is a voluntary association of individuals who have scored at or above the 99. ...

References

1. ^ British Mensa, Limited (August 16, 2000). Obituary - Dr Lancelot L Ware, OBE, Fons et Origio of Mensa. Press release. Retrieved on 2006-07-26.
2. ^ Washington Post (November 16, 1997). Get Smart with High-IQ Society. Press release. Retrieved on 2006-07-27.
3. ^ http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/Top1in10000.pdf
4. ^ Miyaguchi, Darryl (1997). Generic I.Q. Chart. Retrieved on 2006-07-23.
5. ^ Miyaguchi, Darryl (2006). Uncommonly Difficult IQ Tests. Retrieved on 2006-07-25.
6. ^ Aviv, Rachel. ""The Intelligencer"", Village Voice, 2006-08-02. Retrieved on 2006-08-02.
7. ^ Miyaguchi, Darryl (January 19, 2000). A Short (and Bloody) History of the High I.Q. Societies. Retrieved on 2006-07-30.
8. ^ Membership Committee (1999). "1998/99 Membership Committee Report". Prometheus Society. Retrieved on 2006-07-26.
9. ^ Material on some members of Prometheus and related societies can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20010516033659/www.brokersys.com/~bahai/
10. ^ http://www.prometheussociety.org/gof/index.html
11. ^ Towers, Grady M. (1987). The Outsiders, Gift of Fire, issue 22.

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External links

• Prometheus Society homepage
• High-IQ Societies and the Tests They Accept for Admission Purposes
• Other High IQ Societies on the Web.