Conversation with Paul Cooijmans on the Frequently Asked Questions About the Glia Society: Administrator, Glia Society (6)

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

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

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/22

Abstract

Paul Cooijmans is an Independent Psychometitor and Administrator of the Glia Society, and Administrator of the Giga Society. He discusses: Frequently asked questions; not attempting to force one’s way into a high-IQ society; other patterns of illegitimate action to try to enter into high-I.Q. societies; Glia Society’s admission policy; tests accepted for admission; the minimum requirements for a test to be “valid in the high range”; the number of high-I.Q. societies focused more on quantity; “a lack or absence of psychometric expertise”; the prime examples of the void in psychometric expertise; the prime examples of profound ineptitude; false impressions from rejection or exclusion of take-home tests by some high-I.Q. societies; take-home tests; and the rarer types of articles submitted to Thoth.

Keywords: frequently asked questions, Glia Society, I.Q., I.Q. tests, intelligence, Paul Cooijmans, take-home tests.

Conversation with Paul Cooijmans on the Frequently Asked Questions About the Glia Society: Administrator, Glia Society (6)

*Please see the footnotes, bibliography, and citation style listing after the interview.*

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “Frequently asked questions The Glia Society” (n.d.a) contains three questions and three answers. The first question asks, “I am not able to qualify for high IQ societies but still feel I can make valuable contributions to society. How do I get IQ societies to accept me?” (Ibid.) You deconstruct and concisely answer the question while correcting assumptions in it. To expand on the first question (the one at the top of the web page), is a higher I.Q. indicative of a higher potential to contribute to society? So, if an individual can “do that perfectly outside of the I.Q. societies, via universities, science, business, politics, and so on,” (Ibid.) can one have a higher potential to do that more if they have a higher I.Q.? In other words, they can contribute more, theoretically, if they have proven Glia Society level or higher intelligence and take part in business, politics, science, universities, and so forth.

Paul Cooijmans[1],[2]*: Yes, I am certain that persons of higher I.Q. levels have greater potential to contribute to society, and are in practice indeed contributing more. I am then talking about the full range of intelligence, not necessarily about the situation within the high range, as it is still being studied whether intelligence can be meaningfully measured at all there. I mention this because I know many stare themselves blind on nuances within the high range (“Can I contribute to [this or that field] if my I.Q. is only 143? Or should I try a few more tests to see if I can score over 150?”) but really it is differences within the range 60-140, maybe 55-145, that determine people’s functioning. I dare not say with certainty that even higher I.Q.’s add something extra, although they may.

Having said that, I should add that “intellectual” types of work are hugely overpaid nowadays compared to manual labour, and that is a problem. This gap has grown over time, and is related to the takeover of all vital institutions by certain species of intellectuals, who despise physical work.

Jacobsen: You mentioned, in the first answer, not attempting to force one’s way into a high-IQ society. There was a famous case of Paul Maxim trying to get into the Mega Society, for instance. As others have stated to me, though anecdotal, this is a pattern in the high-I.Q. societies, or, more properly, in the attempts to get into particular high-I.Q. societies by people in and out of the high-I.Q. communities. What is the ethic behind these efforts, as such?

Cooijmans: I think people want to derive social status from belonging to groups with very high admission standards. For illustration, it has happened that someone tried to join the Giga Society with screen shots of online games that reported I.Q.’s over 200 (without even containing the name of the candidate) saying something like, “You really have to admit me now because I have already told all my friends that I am a Giga Society member, please please please do not make me look like a fool before my friends.” That betrays the kind of motivation of such people, although most of them are not that explicit about it.

Jacobsen: What are other patterns of illegitimate action to try to enter into high-I.Q. societies? What are some of the famous cases known to you? You have a long history in this world, not many can stake that claim of longevity and activity.

Cooijmans: A pattern that I have observed is, for instance, very repeatedly sending the same type of “proof” of qualification, of course some test result not on the list of accepted tests. What has also occurred more than once is demanding entrance based on a mainstream psychological test score way beyond the usual ceiling of the test; most typically this is some form of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales, and apparently, some psychologists are in such cases willing to provide reports with absurdly extrapolated scores, like way over I.Q. 200. I am quite certain that some people are fully aware of the contents of the test and its intended solutions, and practise extensively before taking the test, and there may also be cases where the report itself is fraudulent.

I think it is not ethical to name names of these individuals as they are mostly teenagers when starting this behaviour and stop later on when growing up. Sometimes there is also a psychiatric background.

The most common way to force oneself into a society is cheating when taking a high-range test. Those responsible for the unauthorized spreading of test answers, however evil, are not necessarily the ones trying to enter I.Q. societies, so in the context of this question I need not discuss the former. “Creative” ways of “entering” societies are to forge a membership certificate using a specimen that an actual member showed publicly on a social medium, or to add oneself to the listed members in the society’s entry in an online do-it-yourself encyclopedia. I even suspect that such entries are sometimes created purposely by people in order to put themselves in and pose as members.

Jacobsen: The second question asks, “Why is the Glia Society so liberal in its admission requirements, in that it accepts a lot of take-home tests rather then [sic] just official standard tests?” (Ibid.) As you state, the Glia Society’s admission policy is more stringent than other high-I.Q. societies. Let’s expand on this, why are “mainly regular tests” or “regular psychological tests” without much validity below I.Q. 70 and above I.Q. 130, presumably on a standard deviation of 15?

Cooijmans: Regarding below I.Q. 70, people in that range, and especially under I.Q. 60, tend not to be able to take tests in the usual format, and their I.Q.’s are mostly assessed in other ways, such as by observation and interview in direct personal contact. There are special tests for that. And yes, I know there are people who will now bark, “What?! Are you serious?! Why would people below a certain I.Q. not be able to take tests in the usual way?!” These are the ones that deny the real-world relevance of intelligence and I.Q., the ones who claim that someone of I.Q. 65 can just as well be a mathematics professor as someone of I.Q. 165.

The lack of high-range validity of most regular tests is due to the absence or lack of truly difficult problems in those tests. If you include such problems, you may get validity in the high range, but at the expense of violating certain paradigms of the current academic climate, wherein it is unthinkable to create tests and publish data that show significant sex differences in important behavioural variables like intelligence. And on really hard problems for mental ability, there is one sex that does better than the other. This taboo is hidden by leaving out such problems.

Another way in which sex differences in mental ability are hidden in science is by using childhood data when studying sex differences; in childhood, the later-to-develop adult differences do not show up because the hormones of puberty have not done their work yet. In fact, before puberty, girls mature faster than boys, so that childhood studies yield a biased result compared to the state of affairs among adults, favouring girls. The use of childhood studies to “debunk” sex differences in mental ability is a form of scientific fraud.

I suspect that a mainstream scientist who published data on high-range mental tests like I do would be banned for life from the academic world.

Jacobsen: How do tests accepted for admission (Cooijmans, n.d.b) to the Glia Society tap into its minimum required I.Q., and higher, better than the regular intelligence tests?

Cooijmans: By containing sufficiently hard problems.

Jacobsen: What are the minimum requirements for a test to be “valid in the high range” (Cooijmans, n.d.a)?

Cooijmans: When it comes to high-range validity in the psychometric sense, “valid in the high range” means that the test has positive loading on the general factor “g” in the range beyond the 99th centile, so within the top 1 % of the general population. But validity alone is not enough; robustness (resistance to score inflation) is just as important, as is mere hardness.

If “beyond the 99th centile, so within the top 1 % of the general population” is not precise enough, one may read this as “whatever one defines as the high range”, or, when it comes to society admission, “around the intended pass level”. Of course, a test never starts measuring exactly at a given level like the 99th centile; high-range tests typically have a threshold somewhere around the 90th centile but more than half of the scores exceed the 99th centile.

Jacobsen: If you had to estimate the number of high-I.Q. societies focused more on quantity, or growth of membership, than quality of membership, what percent or ratio of extant high-I.Q. societies fit into this identification?

Cooijmans: That is difficult for me to answer because obviously I avoid looking at such societies, if only to prevent vomiting over the keyboard of my electronic computer. I can only make a rough estimation: the majority of them.

Jacobsen: Why is there “a lack or absence of psychometric expertise” in many high-I.Q. societies, even “a deep incompetence” (Ibid.)?

Cooijmans: I imagine the following reasons exist for this: People who feel called to start I.Q. societies tend not to be experts in psychometrics. For instance, when Mensa, the largest I.Q. society, was conceived, its founders thought they were selecting at the level of 1 in 6000. Later they found out it was only 1 in 50. This was related in an issue of the Mensa journal, possibly in the 1990s, in an article about the early history of that society. In more recent years, it has been obvious that some I.Q. societies are founded on a whim by people who were not able to qualify for existing societies, and without having any knowledge of psychometrics.

Then, when people are delegated the task of admissions officer or test psychologist in a society, those who offer to take on this job tend not to be bona fide experts in psychometrics and tend not to be interested in a strict admission policy. Some seem to have “liberal” inclinations and really just want to please and admit anyone regardless of their intelligence level. They secretly despise selecting by intelligence, and it may even be that, when becoming active in I.Q. societies, they did not fully realize they were getting involved in something that went against their moral principles. On the other hand, they may have joined purposely to sabotage the selection procedure and destroy the elitist nature of the society. Such infiltration and corruption of policies would mirror the undermining of democracy that we have seen in Western societies in general, where cultural Marxists have gradually occupied all institutions, resulting in exceedingly liberal immigration and other destructive policies.

Early examples of lack of expertise were observed by me in the first few years of my Mensa membership, when I had some correspondence with the test psychologists of the Netherlandic and International branches, and had to conclude, to my shock, that they were incompetent.

Another reason I believe to be behind the silly admissions policies of many societies is that a strict admission policy, unfortunately, produces fewer female members the higher one sets the pass level. This can be countered by accepting tests without validity in the high range, as on those tests, the possible scores in the high range are meaningless (random, having huge error margins), thus containing more females as well as more unqualified people.

Jacobsen: What are the prime examples of the void in psychometric expertise?

Cooijmans: A list of accepted tests containing tests that can not discriminate, have no validity, in the range where the society’s pass level resides. A list of accepted tests containing scores based on long outdated norms (Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices is notorious for that). A list of accepted tests that appears to be more or less copied from other societies (which betrays a lack of independent research). A list of accepted tests that is not updated and adapted based on feedback from the evaluation of incoming members; that is, the functioning of the admission tests is not monitored by assessing whether the members who qualify through those tests are indeed at the required level.

Also, testing potential members with tests that require supervision, but without supervising the test administration. So: simply sending the test by mail and letting the candidate supervise and time oneself (supervised tests tend to be timed, for practical reasons). This causes serious problems in case it concerns a test with heavy loading on vocabulary and knowledge while prohibiting reference aids; candidates can then cheat easily by looking things up. It also causes problems because the self-reported time taken may be off. Mensa International used to do this in countries where they did not have a testing infrastructure in place; early members of Mensa Singapore have told me they received the Raven test by mail from Mensa International and took it unsupervised and self-timed. The International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, too, has a long history of testing for willingness-to-commit-fraud rather than intelligence. Wait, I have to clean my keyboard now.

Jacobsen: Following from the previous question, what are the prime examples of profound ineptitude?

Cooijmans: Hm, I should have waited with cleaning my keyboard I see. Here we go again. An early example took place in the early 1990s after joining Mensa, when I published an article in their journal in which I explained that, when selecting the top 2 % on each of a number of tests as Mensa did, one is really selecting more than 2 % of the population because of the imperfect correlation between the tests, in other words, because the top 2 % scorers on the respective tests have only a partial overlap. To my dismay, the society’s test psychologist replied in the journal, denying me in words that betrayed that he was not able to comprehend the reasoning set forth in the previous sentence. Ineptitude does not get more profound than that (incidentally, I had to look up the word “ineptitude” in order to answer this question).

Other examples of ineptitude I have observed, in people dealing with high-range test and I.Q. societies:

Publishing score histograms consisting of a mixture of first attempts and (multiple) retests, without explicitly mentioning this mixed nature, just to give the impression of more data than there actually is.

Incorrectly computing full-scale reliability of a test from its constituent subtests, resulting in a much too low value; this happens by taking the simple average of subtest reliabilities. This is wrong because, ceteris paribus, reliability increases in proportion with the square root of test length and is therefore not a simple average. Spearman and Brown have provided a set of formulas for correctly computing the reliability coefficient of a test based on partial (subtest, odd/even) reliabilities.

A recent hilarious example concerns an individual who was founding one society after another and charging money for entrance, accepting his own tests as well as many others. He presented himself as an I.Q. test designer, and claimed that the validity of his tests was “insured” by computing the “Pearson R”. A higher density of error is hardly possible: The Pearson correlation coefficient is known as “Pearson r”, not “R”. While it is an informative statistic, computing it in no way affects the validity of a test. Finally, one wonders which insurance company would issue such a policy. Inevitably, such a person puts himself on the member lists of his self-founded societies, even if the nominal requirement is some 70 I.Q. points above his real level. The maxim “fake it until you make it” comes to mind in such cases.

As it does in the case of the one who maintains a counterfeit Giga Society web page, of course listing himself as a member as well as a number of others. At least some of those members are (were) listed there without their knowledge; apparently he has used names and biographical information found on the Internet to fill his fake society, which is perhaps more fraud than ineptitude. Such cases make me think of the current hype of having one’s face injected with silicone, botulinum toxin or whatever, or even have surgery to create a certain appearance. These people focus on appearance rather than essence when striving for success. Seen from the front, they may have nice voluminous lips; but from the side, they look like ducks because their lips are sticking out like a bill. Some even quack.

An extreme case of felonious ineptitude was reported to me by a candidate; a test constructor had invited him to take one of said constructor’s tests, with the guarantee that the result would remain confidential (which should be standard). However, right after the test had been scored, this test constructor, who purports to be a certified psychologist and a PhD, published the score, including the name of the candidate, on a social medium. This is so serious that I consider it my duty to warn the unsuspecting public of characters like this.

In general, the publishing of candidates’ scores including their names and without their permission is typical of inept test scorers. I have received more than one complaint about that. On one occasion, such a bungler even published a list containing only one name (mine) with a fictitious (too low) score behind it, apparently to discredit me.

Publishing item analysis data is another form of ineptitude; it helps future candidates because it reveals the exact hardness of each problem of a test.

And then, congratulating or praising the candidate with one’s score! Those idiots do not understand that an I.Q. score is an objective datum, not an achievement. You praise someone for a scientific discovery, invention, or work of art; not for an I.Q.!

Jacobsen: To some members of the general public with an interest in I.Q. and high-I.Q. societies, as you state in the second answer, they can get false impressions from rejection or exclusion of take-home tests by some high-I.Q. societies. A false impression of a “strict entrance policy” (Ibid.). Why is this the current culture or norm with high-I.Q. communities?

Cooijmans: I think this is already answered sufficiently in the question ‘Why is there “a lack or absence of psychometric expertise” in many high-I.Q. societies, even “a deep incompetence” (Ibid.)?’

Jacobsen: Why should take-home tests be considered part of respectable high-I.Q. societies?

Cooijmans: Because those are the tests meant to measure intelligence with validity in the high range. Most regular I.Q. tests fail at this. And for the minority of regular tests that do possess validity in the high range, a problem is that those who administer the tests in practice are sometimes not able or willing to do so correctly and to report the score correctly and honestly, despite their formal degrees in psychology or psychometrics. Looking at what some psychometrics “doctors” have done in the world of high-range tests, I have to say that such a degree is virtually a guarantee for incompetence and fraud. I am then talking about providing super-high scores to unqualified idiots, publishing names and scores without the candidates’ permission, and leaking out scoring keys of tests. The fingers of one hand barely suffice to count the high-I.Q. “doctors” who have done exactly that.

Another problem with regular psychological I.Q. tests, rarely mentioned but oh so real, is that one can usually buy them as a “kit”, including the intended solutions naturally, if one is at least something like a student of psychology. And I suspect that some of the “certified psychologists/psychometricians” who perverted the admission policies of I.Q. societies have entered those societies with scores obtained thus, and would never have qualified on proper high-range tests or without fraud altogether.

Jacobsen: The third question asks, “What kind of articles are you looking for when taking submissions for the Glia Societies journal Thoth?” (Ibid.) You answer with the values covered before on absolute freedom of speech and no taboo topics for the Glia Society. As a short side question, what are the rarer types of articles submitted to Thoth?

Cooijmans: Esoteric interpretations of works of literature, conspiracy theories about historical events, a few unusual novels, and seven submissions by an early member who was quite brilliant but withdrew from the high-I.Q. world after seeing proof that God existed.

References

Cooijmans, P. (n.d.a). Frequently asked questions The Glia Society. Retrieved from https://gliasociety.org/faq.html.

Cooijmans, P. (n.d.b). Qualification: The Glia Society. Retrieved from https://gliasociety.org/qualification.html.

Appendix I: Footnotes

[1] Administrator, Giga Society; Administrator, Glia Society.

[2] Individual Publication Date: February 22, 2022: http://www.in-sightjournal.com/cooijmans-6; Full Issue Publication Date: May 1, 2022: https://in-sightjournal.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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