Car clubs, stupidity, and the paradox of cognitive stratification

[Blackscreen67]

Originally Posted by The Wind Breezes

For someone purporting to be in the top 1/10th of 1% (given a standard deviation of 15) the apparent lack of reading comprehension is surprising. I said that there is a tendency for smart people to prefer a challenge. Trends have lots of exceptions.

As for my conception of the ideal car club, I think that's made pretty clear in the OP.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you aren't quite familiar with standards that pilots are held to....

With that said, some of the most brilliant minds don't necessarily seek a challenge. Yet look to find ways to avoid a challenge through critical thinking and innovation.

The same crowd that likes to flex an IQ is the exact same crowd that resulted in failure of the BOP on the deepwater horizon.

[SakhirM4]

Originally Posted by The Wind Breezes

For someone purporting to be in the top 1/10th of 1% (given a standard deviation of 15) the apparent lack of reading comprehension is surprising. I said that there is a tendency for smart people to prefer a challenge. Trends have lots of exceptions.

As for my conception of the ideal car club, I think that's made pretty clear in the OP.

My reading comprehension is just fine. When you talked about hooliganism and street racing, I really though you were being tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, you weren't and that is sad. Street racing is stupid and kills innocent people. We do our racing on a track, where we can drive fast and not endanger the public. Hooliganism has many definitions, but none of the ones that come to my mind are good.

Enjoy what you like and I will continue to enjoy my car club events. Thanks.

And yes, I always have enjoyed a challenge - like the ones below.

[The Wind Breezes]

Originally Posted by Blackscreen67

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you aren't quite familiar with standards that pilots are held to....

With that said, some of the most brilliant minds don't necessarily seek a challenge. Yet look to find ways to avoid a challenge through critical thinking and innovation.

The same crowd that likes to flex an IQ is the exact same crowd that resulted in failure of the BOP on the deepwater horizon.

What does being a pilot have to do with anything? You don't need a high IQ to be a pilot you just need ENOUGH intelligence. The typical military aviator in a high performance aircraft is probably between 115 and 130 IQ at best. Sure, a distribution like that leaves room for an unusually high amount of people like Sakhir (taking his claims at face value) but they are still the exception. It also leaves room for people who are closer to average intelligence but do well enough on the assessments to get a seat. So the average high performance military pilot is bright, but would probably not even qualify for mensa. Other things equal, intelligence helps people do pretty much anything better, but being a good pilot is more contingent on diligence, conscientiousness, good motor skills and coordination, good vision, athleticism, and mental toughness. Flying a fast jet isn't rocket science.

I couldn't agree more with the oil rig thing.

Originally Posted by SakhirM4

My reading comprehension is just fine. When you talked about hooliganism and street racing, I really though you were being tongue-in-cheek. Obviously, you weren't and that is sad. Street racing is stupid and kills innocent people. We do our racing on a track, where we can drive fast and not endanger the public. Hooliganism has many definitions, but none of the ones that come to my mind are good.

Enjoy what you like and I will continue to enjoy my car club events. Thanks.

And yes, I always have enjoyed a challenge - like the ones below.

[ATTACH]phantom[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH]m-car[/ATTACH]

Street racing is as safe or dangerous as you make it. Whether it's fun or worthwhile is a personal decision. I would agree that more intelligent people are probably less likely to street race, but as always there are exceptions and those people probably have a higher capacity to avoid accidents. There have been studies linking high IQ to accident avoidance in a number of dangerous fields including driving.

As far as you appreciating a challenge, fair enough. We are getting really derailed.

[Joekerr]

Originally Posted by The Wind Breezes

Street racing is as safe or dangerous as you make it.

This statement right here, strongly suggests to me that you would not qualify to be a member of any high IQ car clubs/meets or forums, should such a thing come to be.

[The Wind Breezes]

Originally Posted by Joekerr

This statement right here, strongly suggests to me that you would not qualify to be a member of any high IQ car clubs/meets or forums, should such a thing come to be.

Didn't say I would be. It's not a topic of any significant debate around here that I'm kind of a dumbass. It's also a common mistake, particularly among those with high IQs, to assume you can tell someone's IQ from superficial interaction.

Blanket statements that street racing is sooo dangerous show a lack of understanding or critical thought.

Let's say someone does a pull from 80-140 against a M3 on a 5 lane highway with little traffic, wide open. Or two cars take off fast from a light on a deserted road with full visibility and no side street and let off while still doing double digits. Both examples of street racing, but is anyone in much danger?

Blasting down a open toll road with zero traffic at 3AM on a sunday doing 3 times the limit: probably not that dangerous if the car's in good mechanical shape and has proper tires. Hauling ass down a divided, segregated curvy road with no traffic at 3AM on a sunday: maybe dangerous to the driver, but of minimal risk to anyone else.

Street racing is as safe or dangerous as you make it.

[Mandi90TT]

Not sure if trolling, or really a gigantic douche.

[wdb]

This thread is weird. I work in tech and I know a whole slew of Mensa level people. "Up their own ass" is pretty much the last thing they are. Maybe all the smart assholes go into finance? :shrug:

[The Wind Breezes]

We are getting rather beside the point. The OP has two simple questions, which nobody has even attempted to answer.

Originally Posted by wdb

Maybe all the smart assholes go into finance?

Finance, executive positions, and don't forget lawyers!

[Joekerr]

Originally Posted by The Wind Breezes

Didn't say I would be. It's not a topic of any significant debate around here that I'm kind of a dumbass. It's also a common mistake, particularly among those with high IQs, to assume you can tell someone's IQ from superficial interaction.

Whether I have a high IQ or not is of little consequence to me. I'm smart enough to do what I need to do, and while I do not think I am dumb, I somewhat doubt I have a high IQ, and I'm very skeptical of those online tests.

Thus, perhaps indicative of me having a low IQ, should we choose to accept your assertion above, I had chosen the word "suggest", rather than "assume". The two words differ in their meaning, albeit it somewhat subtly, however, since I did not assume I knew your IQ, I did not fall into the common trap that befalls those with a high IQ. This suggests to me that perhaps I'm either the seemingly rare anomaly and I have a high IQ AND did not make this common mistake (unlikely), or, and much more likely, I simply have a mediocre IQ.

Originally Posted by The Wind Breezes

Blanket statements that street racing is sooo dangerous show a lack of understanding or critical thought.

Let's say someone does a pull from 80-140 against a M3 on a 5 lane highway with little traffic, wide open. Or two cars take off fast from a light on a deserted road with full visibility and no side street and let off while still doing double digits. Both examples of street racing, but is anyone in much danger?

Blasting down a open toll road with zero traffic at 3AM on a sunday doing 3 times the limit: probably not that dangerous if the car's in good mechanical shape and has proper tires. Hauling ass down a divided, segregated curvy road with no traffic at 3AM on a sunday: maybe dangerous to the driver, but of minimal risk to anyone else.

Street racing is as safe or dangerous as you make it.

Well, with the above, you have to factor in pedestrians, which while one would not expect them on a highway, they may be on other roads. Also mechanical failures which may cause the car to veer off and onto a sidewalk (again, pedestrians) or into a home (innocent parties).

Factor in unplanned animals which may cause the same, or for you to hit the other car racing.

Curvy roads means you can't always see what's ahead - could be a car stopped for an emergency, oncoming traffic, etc.

No...street racing is stupid, and the safety aspects are never fully within your control. There will always be an unpredictable element to it. I say this from a person who used to race in the backroads of wine country for the same reasons you listed - flat, good visibility, deserted. And while fortunately I never wrecked, I see a whole host of other factors now which makes me think I was stupid back then...but that was university me. I'm a little more mature now.

[Mingwan]

I don’t think it would matter. There’s usually always at least one dumbass in the group at any given time. Having a cut off would be arbitrary to the point, and more or less superficial than anything. I’ve seen dumb people do dumb shit....I’ve also seen smart people do dumb shit. I think if you want to organize a car club that isn’t boring, and maintains the same type of hoonigan behavior you’d see in an underground street racing meet up with less likelihood of chaos, you’re more likely to find that in a group of individuals with more maturity and experience.

[JamesWWIII]

Originally Posted by The Wind Breezes

We are getting rather beside the point. The OP has two simple questions, which nobody has even attempted to answer.

Perhaps there are a couple of reasons why no one is taking this thread all that seriously. First, you appear to have already arrived at a conclusion to one of your questions:

Originally Posted by The Wind Breezes

What should the cutoff be for a high IQ car club? Is it a good, bad, or terrible idea? I'm leaning toward terrible.

Secondly, the entire OP seems to be up its own ass and an exercise in mental masturbation. But that doesn’t seem to have deterred you in previous posting...

[TheHouseWon]

The car clubs of the intellectually elite, by design, are fairly small groups. They don't street race as they are smart enough to know that they will eventually get caught or kill an innocent bystander. When the meet is discovered and turns into a cars and coffee with 100's of immature, low IQ savages, the original members move the meet.

Or they meet at the track... No issues there.

[Blackscreen67]

Originally Posted by TheHouseWon

The car clubs of the intellectually elite, by design, are fairly small groups. They don't street race as they are smart enough to know that they will eventually get caught or kill an innocent bystander. When the meet is discovered and turns into a cars and coffee with 100's of immature, low IQ savages, the original members move the meet.

Or they meet at the track... No issues there.

Reminds me of the beginning of TX2K...

[TheHouseWon]

IQ scores are overrated, what matters most is the ability to make friends and influence people

And self-preservation. No one is going to street race if they have too much to lose (house, business, family, etc. evaporates the moment you face a life sentence or 20 years for involuntary manslaughter).

The 'paradox' doesn't really exist. Smart people gather for social entertainment all the time, but rarely do they risk their lives or the lives of others for adrenaline rushes.

[Turkish Pickle]

all we need to do is have events that ban the idiots who always get in trouble, like have a mustang special meet or whatever. those dumbasses (not mustang owners specifically but you get my drift) are the reason why there are cop cars always present, because people can't respect each other to not injure them in a very stupid way. we go there to look at cars and talk to people and have a fun time; i doubt anyone who goes to those events can say "yea driving is not fun, i use my car to go from A to B" but i also know not everyone who goes to those events does burnouts in public roads.


tldr: instead of having IQ being a threshold, don't allow dumbasses to come to events. chitown/m for example is a local club that hosts events weekly and 5-10 cars show up usually and no one dies, we all have fun. couldn't care less who does what or how smart someone is, we all go there weekly to share something in common.

[DerEisbaer]

Originally Posted by Mingwan

I don’t think it would matter. There’s usually always at least one dumbass in the group at any given time. Having a cut off would be arbitrary to the point, and more or less superficial than anything. I’ve seen dumb people do dumb shit....I’ve also seen smart people do dumb shit. I think if you want to organize a car club that isn’t boring, and maintains the same type of hoonigan behavior you’d see in an underground street racing meet up with less likelihood of chaos, you’re more likely to find that in a group of individuals with more maturity and experience.

This.

I don't think it comes down to IQ, but rather experience, maturity, and common sense.

I have seen really intelligent guys starting outrageous shit despite being aware, that this would be as irresponsible as it gets.

[Yapakanichi]

Originally Posted by SakhirM4

We have quite a few young people that are active in our chapter. Their cars, however, may be a little older

This photo was a group of them at one of our recent events.

Attachment 1875219

#whippersnappers

[Hawkeye]

Originally Posted by DDD31

Why stop at car clubs, how bout high IQ car forums?

That already exists... sorry if that is news

I feel like the OP of this topic belongs in reddit's Iisverysmart sub...

[Maynard]

Your post, and subsequent 'theorizing' reveal that you have no more than the most rudimentary and over-general understanding of what 'intelligence' (especially 'G') is measuring or representing. I'd stick to the half-baked philosophy, where these deficits don't show so badly. Especially the idea that high-IQ members would be most likely to be able to commit hooliganism and then be good at evading capture. The rather poor correlation between IQ and real-world tasks is exactly why the SAT and other tests have 'such a poor G-loading', and why performance-oriented groups like the US Military do not put much emphasis upon it (the ASVAB is even less related to IQ/G than the SAT).

Only way to really test this out is to use your exceptional intellect to start a car club especially for super-high IQ guys who want to act out and not get caught. Of course, you then need to figure out who the guys are who just lurk long enough to figure out where you will be drawing the heat, so they can cut up on the other side of town. Those would be the guys you WANTED in your club .

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by Blackscreen67

What are you defining as IQ?

My ex wife's cousin was a Bill Gates scholarship recipient, undergrad at Cambridge and PHD at UT for bio-engineering with an emphasis in studies of delivery of pharmaceuticals and constructing alternative pathways of delivery.....

Yet the man literally had no clue how to change oil on a car.

Reminds me of a female friend I knew in college. She calls us in a panic (she was friends with my roommates too). Says she has no power and as a result no heat. It was dead of winter in upstate NY. We ask her to check the circuit breaker to see if it was tripped. She says...."What's a circuit breaker?"

So why this is relevant to your post is because her major is Electrical Engineering. She got all A's in her classes and could analyze the crap out of a circuit schematic/diagram. But we all had a major face palm moment when she didn't know what a circuit breaker was, where to find it, and how to even reset it. We all ended up piling into my roommate's car to go down to her apartment to reset her circuit breaker. And yes, it was a tripped breaker when we got there.

[davis449]

I've had more experience in this realm than I ever care to admit. I was never a ricer boy nor streetracer, but I really do enjoy cars and the tasteful modification of such. Most of all, I just love to drive. I joined up with a European car club here locally 13 years ago. It was started by a guy and a few of his close H.S. friends (they were all out of H.S. when I joined up) and, by the time I started attending meets, it had grown to a nice little 20-30 car meetup every week. Most everyone had decent cars, the majority of which were VW\Audi and BMW, and all was well and good. The guy who started it wanted it to grow and, with a lot of word of mouth and forum advertising effort, grow it did. Problem was, the growth brought out the undesirables. Guys with shitty cars, horrific mods, delusions of grandeur about those very cars\mods, bad attitudes, and even worse driving ability. Like any car club, there were organized cruises. I went on two and never went again. It was like a near-miss competition with a bunch of children.

But along the way I met some others (one of whom I am best friends with today and our cars have little to do with that) that were like minded. We cliqued up at meets always and eventually created an after meet meetup at another location where we could share things on a more "intelligent" level. Long story short, others found out, tried to get in with us, were rejected\shunned at our low-key meetups, got butt hurt, and complained to the founder of the club. Ego collisions commenced and we broke off.

For the sake of brevity, let's just say we set out to create a club in a similar vein of the OP's "what if" scenario. We decided that the original 8 (me included) who started the break off GTG would serve as the board of directors and have final approval of who got in. We collaborated on criteria, nomination process, rules, etc., and I wrote the charter. We didn't advertise to the public. We "carded" cars that we thought met the agreed upon criteria for appearance, etc. and that's all we did in terms of public recruitment. The idea being the owner of said car would show up and we might get a new member out of it after meeting them and getting to know them as a person. We were about 20-25 strong and our cruises, GTG's, and events (mostly traveling to car shows in TX) were much more organized and controlled. One very important criteria for being a member meant having more than just a modicum of driving ability. This resulted in exactly the driving activity many in here describe as "ideal as it can get". The exception was the drag racing, there was little to none of that in our club, mostly aggressive driving in the Hill Country.

Eventually, though, it all fell apart. That many egos of a specific type, members who thought their friends deserved to be "in" when they clearly didn't meet membership criteria, contention between our club and the one we split from, and finally a sharp divide amongst the founding members crashed the whole thing. When my side of the divide amongst the founders left for good (only three people), the rest quickly withered away into a loose group of idiots. I swore off clubs forever.

Once out for good, my close car buddies, in general, came together as friends. It was organic, easy, and fun for a few years. The only organized driving events were me and two other close friends. We would do random runs and tell no one else. But we all grow up, drift apart as we work toward other life goals, and move on. I now I have nothing to do with organized car club bullshit and have only the one friend who became one of my best friends in life. I am perfectly fine with that. I am happy being my own car club as a solo enthusiast.

I still enjoy talking to others about cars, just not in a formal GTG type of situation. I stay as far away from even C&C type events as possible. Hell, I won't join the BMW CCA. My dad's a member of the Rockies chapter of the Porsche club in CO and I get uncomfortable around those guys. The times I've been to track days with him, I've immediately recognized similar behavior to what I've experienced before and these people are, mostly, grown-ass adults. The only organized event I participate in is with a private race team my father came to have an association with through the PCA. They are all a bunch of reasonable men who enjoy competition on the track. I am a part of their crew every year when their league comes to COTA. There's already been on rift that resulted in a split in the team, but even that was handled professionally and those other guys who split off see me at the race and treat me with the same level of friendliness and respect as before.

Lesson(s) Learned:

My very good friend and I always wondered why there were just some loners out there we could not get to join whichever organization we were a part of. We sought them, we wanted them, we needed them. We wanted to know what it was that made them as elusive and "cool" as they are. Well, we became those very persons as our experiences gave us the very answers we sought. In whatever you do, try not to lose your own self.

[SakhirM4]

Originally Posted by davis449

I still enjoy talking to others about cars, just not in a formal GTG type of situation. I stay as far away from even C&C type events as possible. Hell, I won't join the BMW CCA. My dad's a member of the Rockies chapter of the Porsche club in CO and I get uncomfortable around those guys. The times I've been to track days with him, I've immediately recognized similar behavior to what I've experienced before and these people are, mostly, grown-ass adults.

That's really a shame. The Tejas Chapter, BMW CCA is nothing like what you describe in your experiences. The active members are a wonderful group of people that are like family.