Conversation with Paul Cooijmans on Registration to the Glia Society: Administrator, Glia Society (7)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/03/01
Abstract
Paul Cooijmans is an Independent Psychometitor and Administrator of the Glia Society, and Administrator of the Giga Society. He discusses: registration to the Glia Society; rationale for free membership; the need to submit the registration form if giving a qualifying score; members returning to the Glia Society if they have left; members expelled of the Glia Society; the importance of having the information entered in the registration form available to members of the Glia Society; the optional registration form information; prevent the sharing of members’ information to non-members; and the main ethic guiding the structure of the Glia Society.
Keywords: Glia Society, I.Q., I.Q. tests, intelligence, Paul Cooijmans, registration.
Conversation with Paul Cooijmans on Registration to the Glia Society: Administrator, Glia Society (7)
*Please see the references, footnotes, and citations, after the interview, respectively.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “Registration: The Glia Society” (n.d.a) is the main page for consideration for registration to the Glia Society. Membership is free. Other high-I.Q. societies aren’t free. What is the typical rationale for charging membership fees among some high-I.Q. societies?
Paul Cooijmans[1],[2]*: In the past, the Glia Society had a fee for subscribing to the journal, which was sent by regular mail, and the fee just covered the cost of producing and mailing the booklet. Since the journal became digital-only, there has not been a fee any more. Other societies may have a fee for the same reason, or to cover costs of online infrastructure. In some cases, the fee serves also as a source of income for the person leading the society; this has never been the case with the Glia Society, or any of my societies.
Jacobsen: What is the rationale for free membership to the Glia Society?
Cooijmans: The cost of conducting the Glia Society is not so high that it warrants a fee. The cost of the society’s web location is technically born by my business I.Q. Tests for the High Range, which is appropriate since it is money from test fees.
Jacobsen: For new members, you emphasize the need to submit the registration form if giving a qualifying score or scores when, or around the time when, submitting it. How often is this instruction misunderstood or missed?
Cooijmans: As good as never any more, but in the past it happened that people submitted the registration form without providing a qualifying score, and then I had all that unusable form data, and had to contact people to tell them they needed to show proof of test scores, which they often failed to do. That is why I added that instruction to the form, and it works well.
A similar situation occurred with the test registration form on my tests web location; in the past, it could be reached via hyper references on the web location itself, and people were constantly submitting it without subsequently taking any tests, so that the database got polluted with useless data. So I removed the hyper references and only referred to the form from within the test files, and that works much better.
Jacobsen: How often are members returning to the Glia Society if they have left?
Cooijmans: That happens regularly, maybe a few times per year, but I am not keeping count of that specific event. In fact, it is because of returning members that I stopped reusing member numbers long ago. In the early years, I reused the member numbers of people who had left, because I am a frugal person and did not want those numbers to go down the drain. But I learnt that returning members sometimes like to have their old number back.
Jacobsen: Also, how often are members expelled of the Glia Society? What are the main reasons for the expulsion?
Cooijmans: Three times so far, in twenty-five years. Once for harassing other members, once for publishing a test item from an admission test with proposed solution and explanation, and once for fraudulently and without permission using the name “Giga Society”.
There are some latent expulsions too; people who leaked out members-only information but have not been identified yet, and people who committed fraud with tests for which I do not have hard proof yet.
Jacobsen: What is the importance of having the information entered in the registration form available to members of the Glia Society?
Cooijmans: Well, members can know who the other members are. Anonymous membership is expressly not allowed, so it is possible for any member to know who all of the others are. Thus it is also possible for any member to verify that those present on the society’s communication fora are indeed members, and report it to the Administrator if not so. And that is an everlasting battle; if you neglect this aspect, the fora get infested with non-members before you know it.
Jacobsen: What part of the optional registration form information do applicants tend to fill out the least?
Cooijmans: The web location uniform resource locator. Not too many people have personal web locations any more. I have the impression that the advent of social media, as well as the omnipresent contents management systems, have killed personal web locations, which had their heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s when people were still able to write hypertext markup language by hand. It is even so that when people today see a genuine handmade web location, they may be observed making remarks like, “That looks like it has not been updated since the 1990s”. One wonders if they ever look at the source of a page (Ctrl-u) and see the difference between clean hypertext markup language and spaghetti code. One wonders if they appreciate that a proper web page is rendered in a tiny fraction of a second, while a contents management system takes several seconds to load a page because its contents has to be pulled from a database and produced by server-sided programming. One wonders if they realize that all that server activity and sending rubbish code from server to browser use extra energy and cause extra exhaust of harmful gasses into the plagued atmosphere of our planet.
Jacobsen: To prevent the sharing of members’ information to non-members, you state, “By submitting this form you agree to respect this state of affairs; that is, you certify you will not leak out information shared between members to non-members.” (Ibid.) What happens to members who break this social contract?
Cooijmans: They will be expelled when it becomes known who they are. So far, no such moles have been identified though.
Jacobsen: What is the main ethic guiding the structure of the Glia Society, the rules for the interactions between members, and the administrative duties of the Glia Society?
Cooijmans: These matters serve to have and keep a group truly selected at the stated intelligence level, to protect the privacy of members, and to prevent any perversion of these goals by a hostile takeover, such as via “democratic” procedures. I have seen these things go wrong in other societies and try to do better. As said before, I see parallels between the hostile undermining of I.Q. societies and that of societal institutions and industries at large.
References
Cooijmans, P. (n.d.a). Registration: The Glia Society. Retrieved from https://gliasociety.org/reg.html.
Footnotes
[1] Administrator, Giga Society; Administrator, Glia Society.
[2] Individual Publication Date: March 1, 2022: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/cooijmans-7; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2022: https://in-sightpublishing.com/insight-issues/.
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.
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