This is an extremely important claim since NXIVM purports to teach people life skills and deep truths about humanity and philosophy and success. Consequently, if it is true that the leader is smarter than almost everyone else, he may know something that a student doesn’t.
If, on the other hand, the claim is bogus, then the student could ask, “what does he know that I don’t know that I should pay him?”
The super-intelligence claim is a bedrock claim of NXIVM.
The test that NXIVM uses to establish Raniere as one of the smartest men comes from the Mega Society, founded 1982. It is a so-called “High IQ society”
Its website http://www.megasociety.org.
The Mega society was founded by Ronald K. Hoeflin and it claims it is open to people who have scored at the one-in-a-million level of general intelligence on a test the society created. The Mega Society claims it is able to discriminate at that one in a million level.
The popular Guinness Book of World Records once stated in its 1989 Australian edition that the Mega Society is the most elite ultra High IQ Society with percentiles of 99.9999 or 1 in a million required for admission, but offered no independent proof of this and based it evidently on the society’s own claim.
The Guinness Book of Records did not repeat the claim in subsequent editions and has failed to mention the Mega Society in any other edition since 1989.
[In fact, Guinness retired the category of Highest IQ in 1989, the year Raniere appeared in it.]
The Mega Test was published in 1985 by Hoeflin. Some notable people have taken the Mega Test, meeting the Mega Society entrance requirements which the society has used to validate its authority to judge the super-intelligent. These prominent people include Chris Langan, author and columnist Marilyn vos Savant, mathematician Solomon W. Golomb, former governor of New Hampshire and former White House Chief of Staff, John H. Sununu, and Keith Raniere.
The problem with the Mega test is that it is a test that claims what it is without anyone else agreeing. No other professionally designed and validated IQ test claims to distinguish test-takers at a one-in-a-million level of rarity of score. The standard score range of the Stanford-Binet IQ test is 40 to 160.
The standard scores on most other currently normed IQ tests fall in the same range. A score of 160 corresponds to a rarity of about 1 person in 30,000.
The Mega claims its members achieved one in a million status or better. The test author claims the tests have been normalized using standard statistical methods.
There is controversy about whether these tests have been properly validated. Some claim the Mega test is a “nonstandardized test”.
Here’s part of the reason why: To qualify for membership in the Mega Society via the Mega Test, aspirants must earn a score corresponding to an IQ of 171 or more on a test accepted for admission by the society, although no currently normed and professionally validated IQ test yields such a score….
Another serious problem with the Mega Society test is that it accepts members [based on] untimed, unsupervised IQ tests.
[In other words, the Mega IQ test Keith Raniere took to get into the Guinness Book of Records was a take home test. He took about a month to complete it and some say he help completing it.]
It seems obvious that if the test is unsupervised … there is no guarantee that the person who claims he took the test did not get help from others or a team of people. Raniere in an interview with the Times Union said that Mega test takers are on the honor system.
At the end of the day, an objective person might require more than this to conclude Raniere is among those … with the highest intelligence.
What we have now is that Raniere took an unsupervised, take home, IQ test some 25 plus years ago, designed by a largely unaccredited, so-called IQ society with only a handful of members and a questionable method of selecting admission.
Since I published the article in 2016, I learned that Guinness decided to drop the Highest IQ category and never brought it back. According to a report, the editors realized that IQ tests, in general, are unreliable, and take-home IQ tests are especially unreliable. The editors may have learned that Raniere coopted the Mega Society, actually taking control of it for a time. He proposed changing the name of the society, as part of his plan to get his own name in Guinness. He then did his own study where he “proved” that his score on the Mega IQ test established that he was one of the top three problem solvers in the world.
He took a take-home IQ test, then did a study on the score he got on the test to prove how smart he was. One of the problems with the study is that Raniere lacked documentary evidence of comparative scores of SAT tests, so he claimed he got them orally and put the numbers in that supported his conclusion: He was one of the top three problem solvers in the world.
After including Raniere in their Australian edition, Guinness chose not to include him [or for that matter anyone] in the US or UK editions and retired the category of Highest IQ in all future editions.
Still, Raniere was able to use this mention in Guinness for almost three decades as the hallmark of his business and personal operations – from Consumers’ Buyline to Nxivm and to impress a bevy of women who were attracted to the charm of being with the smartest man in the world.
One other tidbit: After Raniere completed his take-home IQ test and turned it in to Hoefler for the Mega Society, he called a few days later and asked Hoefler if he could change one answer. To show how sloppy this all was, Hoefler let him change the answer. The result was instead of a score of 45 he got his score of 46. Had he not found out about the correct answer and had Hoefler not agreed to change it after he turned it in, Raniere would have lost out to Marylin Dos Savant and Eric Hart and could not have claimed he was the smartest man in the world.
How did he figure out the answer after he turned in his test? Maybe he had a revelation or maybe it was that he found that the entire test had been published a few years before in Omni Magazine and some people had apparently compared notes and quite possibly shared answers to some of the questions – which had been out there for years.
Viva Executive Success!
On the IQ test, that is one reason I first got interested in KR. It is an obscure test that he did and it was unsupervised. He probably is good at general knowledge and IQ but over-egged the pudding in letting it be suggested he is the world’s smartest man. If he were that smart, he would not have allowed any potential law violations in his activities that are actually dead easy to achieve. He and I are of similar age and I remember doing a Mensa IQ test when about aged 21 just out of curiosity. At that time, they gave you a home test first (I got 159 which is pretty high) and then had to travel to a city centre in the UK (Yes, I went as far as going that) to an examination hall with invigilators watching about 30 of us at all times and I got 152 and membership (Not that I went to any of their meetings ever).
One reason I was interested was as children our doctor father, a psychiatrist, allowed a psychologist to test our IQs as they were practising testing and I was so shy and some questions were verbal I answered I did not know to some and “just” got 120 whereas my younger sister was over 130. Our parents would not tell us the score (presumably they did not want me to think I was worse than she was) although about 5 years later I sneaked in and looked it up. Anyway, roll forward to age 21 and it seemed to matter to me and at the peak of the academic /learning stage of my life , studying law, etc., I did quite well. After she died, I found my mother’s mensa home test with results of 136 and 141 (she had two attempts) which was pretty good for being in her 50s.
[Important note… I am not the world’s smartest woman… laughing as I type]