EPISTLE TO THE GAMA QUADRANT The race is not to the swift.
The medium is the message.
The successful are not very literate. They have limited understanding but are widely understood.
The literate are not very successful. They are not widely understood but excel in understanding.
The message of the bell-curve is that in the struggle for existence, being understood is far more important than understanding.
The tendency of Mensans to vote for successful board members notwithstanding, a dues paying Mensan cannot be typical of individuals with superior levels of either intelligence or literacy. Success is at the center of the bell-curve. The upper two percent is not.
Here is contradiction.
Unlike most of the super-literate /super-intelligent, Mensans are necessarily, to some extent, successful. Yet nothing is more important than normalcy in the daily struggle to exist. Here is reason to suspect or even believe that successful Mensans are somewhat overdosed on positive thinking, possibly to the point of finding reality completely unacceptable.
Here is reason to question the practice of ignoring the views and opinions of Mensans with so-called “negative” points of view.
Here is reason to question the wholesale swallowing of the tenets and assumptions of education.
Here is reason to question the normal practice of expecting Mensan editors to edit the written submissions of the membership.
Here is reason to focus on the experiences of Mensans with negative points of view.
Here could be an explanation as to why, of 6,000,000 potential members of American Mensa --- after some 50 years of effort ---- 2,000 register for an AG.
During the next year $500 billion will be spent on education in The United States of America. One year from now the average citizen will be precisely as ignorant, stupid and illiterate as he is today. Television audiences will be as unaware of the more literate half of the population as they are today. Hiring committees will still select applicants with the language skills of ten-year-olds, as they do today. Voters will still be unaware that politicians represent the average citizen.
The reason for this world class cluelessness is the lack of literacy standards anywhere on the planet. Without literacy standards, no honest school or university can exist and mediocrity becomes excellence by default. The fact that psychology texts devote several hundred pages to intelligence and little or nothing to literacy suggests to me that persons can only become educators, psychologists and psychiatrists by compromising their personal integrity.
I have been satisfied for many years that IQ scores are merely a nonsense interpretation of the effects of literacy and a member of Mensa for a quarter of a century.
For a free color postcard of the bell-shaped curve send mailing address to George Noviss (http://www.gnoviss.com).


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