Prudentia High IQ Society

General observations For more than 16 years, I have been working in the environment of various highly gifted associations. In the beginning I was only a member of Mensa; in the meantime I have participated in numerous, mostly informal and international associations of this kind and left Mensa out of frustration about the lack of understanding of Mensa members for the problems that this essay will deal with. Even before this time I had been dealing with highly gifted people. I was a regular author of professional articles for German computer magazines and was thereby in contact with several highly intelligent people - admittedly mainly those whose interests were essentially limited to "computer science". Also in the so called demoscene (contrary to certain associations, which are initially imposed on the unsuspecting layman, this is an international community which deals primarily with computer art) I had to deal with numerous highly gifted people. These were those who not onl...

Sir Karl Raimund Popper was undisputedly one of the most important philosophers born in Austria in the 20th century. Many clever thoughts have been preserved from him, which are worth quoting in conversations where appropriate. I myself adorn my "Facebook Wall" with Popper's aphorisms. My parents have consciously renounced to give me a religious education. Instead, my father already taught me in young years the philosophy of Karl Popper, in particular his considerations on the theory of knowledge and science. I appreciate Popper very much. Nevertheless, in this essay I will take a critical look at his life and work. What led me to write this essay: The impetus for this essay came from a discussion on Facebook. My conversation partner was an older man, an American, who acquired a lot of knowledge in the course of his life. He said that I was intelligent and "somwhat erudite", but lacking "intellectual discipline". I interpret it this way: Not everything...

Welcome to something new! This is not Prudentia Newsletter #3. No, this is Prudentia Journal #1. I have had the idea that it might be good to occasionally release more than just a newsletter in the name of Prudentia. To be more precise, I have contemplated releasing an issue of Prudentia Journal after two issues of Prudentia Newsletter. In other words, there will – probably – be a new issue of Prudentia Journal once in every three months. As the name suggests, this is a kind of journal, or a magazine. As you might know I also edit Genycs Magazine these days, which issues in a bimonthly manner (at least it has issued in this manner so far). While Genycs Magazine will focus on topics related to computers, programming and computer science, Prudentia Journal will be open for all other sorts of topics. In this issue, you will find an essay about Karl Popper and his philosophy, as well as a statement on why I consider support of the gifted necessary, both of them having been written by me. O...

IQ is a measure for the performance of the human brain. Usually IQ tests primarily consist of tasks that require problem-solving skills. As some say, IQ can also be considered the ability to make predictions. In general, it is a skill, or a set of skills, that is more dependent on human physiology than on education. A person with no or little education might still have a well-working brain and score high on an IQ test. However, I personally encourage pursuing educational goals once a high IQ is diagnosed; with knowledge, a high IQ is an even greater gift than without, for IQ enables you to process knowledge and come up with new conclusions yourself. Another definition of intelligence is also that it is "reasoning ability". That is, the ability to come up with correct conclusions provided that the premises are correct. Reasoning ability plays a huge role in the thinking and acting of human beings. It enables human beings to think and act rationally. Claus Volko, cdvolko (at) g...

Almost a month has passed since the first newsletter. Meanwhile we have a total of eleven members and there are a couple more people who have expressed interest in our society, yet have not joined it until now. I am particularly happy that we already have three members in my home country Austria and I especially wish to gain more members here so that real-life, face-to-face meetings will hopefully be a reality soon. I have recently added the option to list one's interests in the members list at the website www.prudentia.club . The reason for this is that we want to enable our members to work together on research projects and debate about sophisticated topics at a high level. So it makes sense to gather information on who is interested in what. It is already clear to see that there are some areas of interests which several of our members share, such as philosophy and psychology. Hopefully this will eventually lead to fruitful collaboration. While Prudentia is not limited to universi...