High-IQ societies in the Village Voice

In the Village Voice's Education Supplement, Rachel Aviv wrote a great short profile of Ronald Hoeflin, founder of four high IQ societies including the Top One Percent Society, One-in-a-Thousand Society, Prometheus Society, and Mega Society. From the article:

Hoeflin is fascinated by the idea of a "maximum human potential." Every afternoon, he goes to Wendy's in Hell's Kitchen and reads for several hours with a magnifying glass—he's legally blind—as preparation for his three-volume treatise, The Encyclopedia of Categories: A Theory of Categories and Unifying Paradigm for Philosophy With Over 1,000 Examples. He is kind, awkward, and modest, and tends to explain things with charts. When talking about his childhood, he goes to his bookshelf unprompted and offers the results of a personality test. "I should probably just show this to you," he says. "As you can see, I have this extreme sensitivity factor. So some things are really hard."

In college, Hoeflin joined Mensa, the largest IQ society, originally created after World War II as a forum for brilliant people to come up with political solutions. As more members joined, people became less preoccupied with world peace than with finding mates and doing puzzles. Hoeflin felt too shy for the group—on one occasion, he drove 50 miles for a meeting and then got nervous and turned around—and began associating with newer, more selective organizations.

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