Prometheus Society
High IQ society | |
Membership | "fewer than three dozen" (as of 2022)[2] |
---|---|
Website | prometheussociety |
The Prometheus Society is a
History
Background
An earlier organization, Mensa International, was founded by Roland Berrill and Lancelot Ware, who noted 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 then available, IQ tests) would also have much in common.[5][6]
They decided to focus on people whose IQ test scores would place them at or above the 98th percentile.
Beyond the 98th percentile
In the late 1930s Leta Stetter Hollingworth's research examined people with unusually high Stanford-Binet IQ scores. Starting in the early 1960s, when the now-defunct MM was started,[7] there were attempts to form high-IQ societies for people scoring at similar levels on then-current tests. The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry and the Triple Nine Society were founded in the 1970s and still exist today. Their membership requirements were intended to accept one person in one thousand from the general population. Restricting entry still further was difficult; no tests have ever reliably discriminated among test-takers with more selectivity. The paucity of data on persons with unusually high IQ scores, by definition, made ensuring the reliability of such scores very difficult.[8][9] High IQ scores are less reliable than IQ scores nearer to the population median.[10]
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, as to whether they could be normalized to Hollingworth's levels, or new tests could be designed and normalized. In the late 1970s, it was the latter approach that was followed. Kevin Langdon and
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
Membership
Despite the strong desire of many of its members to maintain a low public profile, the Prometheus Society has attracted some notice. The society is listed as social network #E240 in Networking: The first report and directory.
In his book Wounded Warriors (2008), on people marginalized by society, journalist Mike Sager wrote this:
Thanks to the magic of the World Wide Web, over the past fifteen years, more than a dozen affinity groups for people with superhigh IQs have been formed. More exclusive than Mensa — which accepts those with a minimum IQ of 132, one of every fifty people — clubs like the Triple Nine Society, the Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society (with IQ requirements of 148, 164, and 176, respectively) provide electronic fellowship to an eccentric, far-flung population known as HiQ Society. Though the clubs, like all subcultures, have become petri dishes for ego squabbles and political infighting, they nonetheless supply the comfort of fraternity in a world that doesn't think fast enough, doesn't get the reference, doesn't grasp the point.[16]
Notable members
References
- ^ The Prometheus Society, Past Officers | Presidents Archived 2012-10-05 at the Wayback Machine, 22 September 2012
- ^ The Prometheus Society, Welcome to the Prometheus Society, 8 September 2022
- ^ Jacobs, The Know-it-all, p.243, Wall Street Journal article, see also Prometheus Society website
- ^ see Mensa website Archived 2009-10-15 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ "Obituary - Dr Lancelot L Ware, OBE, Fons et Origio of Mensa" (Press release). British Mensa, Limited. August 16, 2000. Archived from the original on July 14, 2006. Retrieved 2006-07-26.
- ^ "Get Smart with High-IQ Society". Washington Post (Press release). November 16, 1997. Retrieved 2006-07-27.
- ^ Miyaguchi History of High IQ Societies
- ISBN 978-0-08-043796-5.
norm tables that provide you with such extreme values are constructed on the basis of random extrapolation and smoothing but not on the basis of empirical data of representative samples.
- ISBN 9780521739115.
[Curve-fitting] is just one of the reasons to be suspicious of reported IQ scores much higher than 160
- ISBN 978-1-931280-17-4.
The concerns associated with SEMs [standard errors of measurement] are actually substantially worse for scores at the extremes of the distribution, especially when scores approach the maximum possible on a test . . . when students answer most of the items correctly. In these cases, errors of measurement for scale scores will increase substantially at the extremes of the distribution. Commonly the SEM is from two to four times larger for very high scores than for scores near the mean (Lord, 1980).
- ^ Miyaguchi, Darryl (1997). "Generic I.Q. Chart". Retrieved 2006-07-23.
- ^ Miyaguchi, Darryl (2006). "Uncommonly Difficult IQ Tests". Retrieved 2006-07-25.
- ^ Aviv, Rachel (2006-08-02). "The Intelligencer". Village Voice. Retrieved 2006-08-02.
- ^ Miyaguchi, Darryl (January 19, 2000). "A Short (and Bloody) History of the High I.Q. Societies". Retrieved 2006-07-30.
- ISBN 978-0-385-18121-1.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-306-81735-9.
- ^ Cloete, D; et al. (2006). "Die intrapersoonlike leerder se ervaring van koöperatiewe leer en groepwerk". South African Journal of Education. 26 (3): 469–82.
- ^ Video of Boom episode, which includes the reference Archived 2012-07-13 at archive.today.
- ^ Spent, p.285, Google Books link: GBooks-MC
- ^ puzzle reprinted in The New York Times ferocious crosswords, entry at 45 down