Paul Cooijmans: Independent Psychometitor; Administrator, The Giga Society; Administrator, The Glia Society (Part Four)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2015/07/22

ABSTRACT

Interview with Paul Cooijmans. Independent psychometitor and administrator of The Glia Society and The Giga Society. He discusses: high-range intelligence testing, three core interests of high-range intelligence testing, a brief warning on megalomaniacs, and the positives and negatives of the ultra-high IQ world; restrictions/qualifications based on specific tests and test scores, issues related to intelligence assessment, and the two groups which join high IQ societies, and the foundation of GliaWebNews, Young and intelligent?, Order of Thoth, The Glia Society, Order of Imhotep, The Giga Society, and The Grail Society with an emphasis on The Glia Society and The Giga Society.

Keywords: administrator, high-range intelligence testing, GliaWebNews, megalomaniacs, Order of Imhotep, Order of Thoth, Paul Cooijmans, psychometitor, The Giga Society, The Glia Society, The Grail Society, Young and Intelligent?.

*Incomplete, common reference style listing without access dates.*

11. You describe the continuous fascination with high-range intelligence testing, especially in the “gifted” ranges of high-range intelligence tests.^[1] With respect to the three core interests in these high-range intelligence tests, you state:

The attraction of these tests, to the testee, lies in three aspects: One may derive pleasure from taking them, similar to solving difficult puzzles. Also one learns how one’s score compares to those of other high-range candidates, and thus gains insight into one’s performance level on different types of hard problems. And finally, there is a wide array of high-IQ societies that accept scores on the tests.^[2]

However, and intimately linked to these positive interests, there exist negative reasons for entrance into the world of high-range intelligence testing.^[3] You wrote about this one article, Beware of megalomaniacs.^[4] You have joked about intelligence tests for the high range as a “megalomaniac’s waterloo.”^[5]You describe, quite frankly, the nature of serious problem behaviors within the intelligence testing business.^[6] For Instance, you wrote:

The truth is there are people, well known in and sometimes outside high-I.Q. circles, who have based their reputation on certain high test scores they claim. They use those scores for publicity, mention them in interviews, have them listed in biographical reference works, put themselves on self-published lists of “highest I.Q. scores” with their own score on top as the god-king with the world’s highest I.Q., and so on. The scores help them to become and stay famous, sell books, and make money.^[7]

What other positives and negatives exist in this rare and rarefied world of the ultra-high IQ?

Apart from the megalomania and fraud with tests and scores, a negative development I observe in some I.Q. societies are the committees of quack therapists, occultists, and psychics of all sorts, some using hollow “doctor” titles, who have clearly joined to prey on unsuspecting members. This has to do with the notion, popular in those circles, that “giftedness” is a kind of problem or disorder, and that one needs “help” with it. On several occasions I have attended “Giftedness day” in the Netherlands, and most of the stands were occupied by vultures like this, eager to get their claws on anyone “diagnosed” with “giftedness” and “help” them with methods including astrology, tarot, clairvoyance, and so on. And what is worse, there is an abundance of easy meat for them in I.Q. circles.

But the biggest disappointment about the high-I.Q. world is the lack of females. The higher the pass level, the greater the male/female ratio. When selecting strictly and without compromise at the 99.9th centile, one gets about 15 times more men than women. For males interested in eugenic mate selection, I.Q. societies are thus not the ideal place to be. This phenomenon is not unique to high-range mental testing, but seen in other fields with high cognitive demands too, be it professions, hobbies, or sports; wherever high intelligence is needed, you tend to find more males than females. While answering this interview, I saw a newspaper article about a “high frequency trading” company. The journalist asked an officer of the firm why there were only men sitting behind all of those computer screens, and if women were not interested in the job. He replied, “Oh yes, we get many female applicants. But our standards are high and we test candidates thoroughly before hiring them. Women just do not seem to get through the selection procedure. They are very welcome though”. At moments like that, almost by accident, one is confronted with a truth one would perhaps rather not know.

To avoid misunderstanding, I should add that men are not necessarily smarter than women on average. But when focusing on the high range, one sees more men than women. I have tried to attract more females to high-range testing, and even constructed a test consisting exclusively of tasks on which females are known to outscore males, but to no avail. The low representation of females remains a serious shortcoming of high-I.Q. societies.

The biggest plus about I.Q. societies, or at least about the good ones among them, is that they offer possibilities for publication and self-realization to creative individuals who are too unusual, deviant, original, or far ahead of their time to be accepted by the mainstream media or scientific world. Another good thing is that one can get in contact with intellectual equals. Since the rise of the Internet though, those purposes are also served outside the I.Q. societies.

12. Qualification for high IQ societies requires restrictions. Restrictions based on the specific test and test scores.^[8] You have described with typical clarity the issues related to assessment or measurement of intelligence.^[9] In addition, you provide the relevant definitions of assessment, measurement, and statistical terminology too.^{[10],[11],[12],[13],[14],[15],[16],[17],[18],[19],[20],[21],[22],[23],[24],[25],[26],[27],[28],[29],[30],[31],[32],[33],[34],[35],[36],[37],[38],[39],[40],[41]}You note, in an interview from 2002, two apparent groups take tests and join societies. You wrote:

About people joining societies and taking tests, there seem to be two groups, probably with some overlap: the “mainstream” and the “outsiders.” The latter are the ones who initiate things like IQ societies. The first start coming in once a group is growing well, and when the group gets to be a certain size – maybe like 300 to 400 – the “mainstream” tends to take over, maybe because of their better persuasive/manipulative skills which do well in democratic and group processes.

Once the “mainstream” is in power, which I think is the case in larger Mensa chapters, the ISPE and Triple Nine in some of its periods, the freedom goes and the censorship comes. The “mainstream” want things like a journal that is suitable for the whole family, professionalism, official status, tax exemption, etc. They keep adversary things out of the journal, without ever admitting to censorship, they use euphemisms like “editing for length and civility.” (This was a Triple Nine term.) Perhaps a certain organizational structure could avoid the “mainstream” from getting into power.^[42]

You founded high intelligence societies including GliaWebNews, Young and intelligent?, Order of Thoth, The Glia Society, Order of Imhotep, The Giga Society, and The Grail Society.^{[43],[44],[45],[46],[47],[48],[49],[50]} Two seem like core societies: The Giga Society and The Glia Society.^{[51],[52],[53],[54]}The Giga Society as on “honorary society for very high scorers on my tests.”^{[55],[56],[57],[58],[59],[60]}The Glia Society for provision of “a forum for intelligent individuals and assisting in research after high intelligence.”^[61],[62]Each devoted to individuated and interrelated personal interests with provision of journals, games, fora, tests, and general means of fulfillment for the high-range.^{[63],[64],[65],[66],[67]} How did you create, develop, and sustain these societies up to the present?

I started in the mid-1990s by formulating the outline of a type of society for which I felt a need, and that did not exist at the time: Nerve-centred in Europe, strict admission requirements, allowing members to express themselves in their own way and at their own level without censorship or editing (so, a verbatim journal that does not make the author look smarter or stupider than one is) and without formal democratic organs and procedures (to prevent the riff-raff from taking over). Thus, I hoped, the society would remain faithful to the real anarchistic-from-within outsiders, and not regress to a mainstream type of club with members of barely above-average I.Q’s in official positions and spoiling it for the few truly intelligent ones, whom they see as a burden and would expel if they could.

This became the Glia Society. The first several years were offline, with only a paper journal, and went excellently. In 2001, the transition to an online presence was made with success. A few years thereafter, with a few hundred members meanwhile, occasional problems began to occur with people sending offending messages to the electronic mail forum, which, because of its ease of use, facilitates such behaviour by unconscientious persons, makes them rise to the surface. In a traditional journal, filled with copy by members, one would never hear of such trolls, because the effort involved in writing a proper essay or letter is too high a hurdle for them. It became needed to have “netiquette” rules on the forum, and of course there were one or two idiots who purposely began to break the rules to provoke their expulsion from the forum, to see how far they could go. After having been removed temporarily (not expelled from the society though) such specimens sometimes play victim and act as if they are the ones who have been wronged.

In the late 2000s, the admission policy was improved with regard to homogeneous (one-sided) tests, requiring two qualifying scores on two different types of such tests for admission, while only one qualifying score remained needed on a heterogeneous test. This works to satisfaction. A bit later, an “assessment” procedure was added to facilitate the admission of candidates without qualifying scores on accepted tests. This became useful as a result of the vast number of tests today available on the Internet; it is not doable to establish suitability for admission purposes for every single test separately.

To make an observation about I.Q. societies in general, striking is the individualism: much disagreement, low sense of loyalty to the group, no sense of a common goal, little willingness to conform to rules, tending to treat non-members the same as members, speaking negatively of the group to non-members, joining and leaving multiple societies on a whim, and more. Such behaviours are typical of I.Q. society members, and less likely to be seen in political parties, religious cults, ideological interest groups, hobby groups, business enterprises and so on. This individualism is the achilles heel of I.Q. societies, and the answer to the question, “if they are so smart, then why do they not solve the world problems?” There is no group synergy in a group of high-I.Q. individualists. Rather, the outer appearance of the group tends to be determined by the least able members; intelligence is recessive in the group as a result of the members’ individualism. What the world sees of high-I.Q. societies is mainly the loud-mouthed braggers and fraudulent claimants of the highest I.Q.

[1] See Cooijmans, P. (2008, March 19). The fascination with high-range intelligence testing.

[2] See Self-Growth.com (2015). Paul Cooijmans: High-range intelligence test Expert.

[3] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Beware of megalomaniacs.

[4] Ibid.

[5] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). I.Q. Tests For The High Range.

[6] Ibid.

[7] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Beware of megalomaniac’s.

[8] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Qualification.

[9] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Assessment.

[10] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Balanced g factor loading.

[11] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Congruence coefficient.

[12] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Correction for attenuation.

[13] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Correlation.

[14] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Correlation with national I.Q.s

[15] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Covariance.

[16] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). The g factor.

[17] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Frequently encountered fallacies regarding test-related statistics.

[18] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Hardness.

[19] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). I.Q..

[20] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Median.

[21] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Normalization.

[22] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Number of candidates.

[23] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Preliminary norms.

[24] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Proportion outscored.

[25] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Protonorms.

[26] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Quality.

[27] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Quality of norms.

[28] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Quartile deviation.

[29] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Range.

[30] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Raw score.

[31] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Reliability.

[32] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Resolution.

[33] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Section statistics.

[34] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Standard deviation.

[35] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Standard error of measurement.

[36] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Standard score.

[37] See Cooijmans, P. (2012, January). Test data structure.

[38] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Total proportion selected on two tests with known correlation.

[39] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). T-scores.

[40] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Variance.

[41] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Weighted median.

[42] See Cooijmans, P. (2002). An interview with Paul Cooijmans.

[43] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). GliaWebNews.

[44] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Glia Web Young and Intelligent.

[45] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Young and Intelligent?.

[46] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Thoth.

[47] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). The Glia Society.

[48] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Imhotep.

[49] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). The Giga Society.

[50] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). The Grail Society.

[51] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). The Giga Society.

[52] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). The Glia Society.

[53] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). The History Of I.Q. Test For The High-Range.

[54] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). The Glia Society: Animated Presentation.

[55] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Paul Cooijmans.

[56] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Latest Insights Regarding The Giga Society.

[57] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Contact Information Of The Giga Society.

[58] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Do You Qualify For The Giga Society?.

[59] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Letters of Appreciation To The Giga Society.

[60] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Frequently Asked Questions To The Giga Society.

[61] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Paul Cooijmans.

[62] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Constitution.

[63] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Mind Games: Glia Society Mind Games.

[64] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Glia Society Crossword.

[65] See Cooijmans, P. (2003). Glia Society Memory Game.

[66] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). Glia Society Mastermind.

[67] See Cooijmans, P. (n.d.). I.Q. Tests For The High Range.

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