Why Choose Densa

What Our Members Say

"Densa provided me with my tribe. I have asked them repeatedly which tribe, and they have been very warm about it." — Milena, Member #7, Poland

"I am not alone in this world. I checked twice." — Paquita, Member #9, Spain

"Not as smart, but a whole lot more fun!" — Barry, Member #4. This slogan has not been ratified by the Slogan Standardisation Subcommittee and remains under review (since 1981).

Mensa's website says: "You know that you belong with us." Ours says the same thing, and means everyone. Membership is open to the entire population of Earth. It always was. The only thing we test is whether you showed up — and look at you. Here you are.

More than 7.9 billion people qualify for membership. Most refuse to realize it.¹

Mensa admits the top 2% of the population. We admit the population. Our market research indicates this is a strictly larger market.

Plate IIThe Society's entrance, which has a door and no wall, and a rope of no consequence.plates/plate-02-admissions.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate IIADMISSION, AS PRACTISEDPL. II · DI/1974/014

Joining Is Easy. Genuinely. That Is the Entire Problem We Have Solved.

Admission by Prior Evidence

Mensa accepts scores from approximately 200 standardized intelligence tests, noting — verbatim — that "you only have to pass ONE of these test ONCE."³ Densa likewise accepts prior evidence. Approved documents include:

Fees & Dues

The Admission Test is free. The Practice Test is also free, and identical, and is in fact the same test, which we feel is the honest way to run a practice test. Annual dues are $0, and the Board has voted against crossing the psychologically important $0 threshold.⁵ Life membership is available at the same rate and is actuarially priced: the younger you join, the more nothing you pay.

Retesting Policy

Mensa permits one retest per lifetime. Densa requires periodic retesting, in case you have improved. Improvement may affect your eligibility. Members found to be scoring too well receive our standard notice: "Your score lies outside the range Densa is prepared to discuss. Have you considered Mensa? We can never go back there. But you still could, and we would wave."⁶

One thing, quietly, before you take the test. There is no version of this where you fail. We designed it that way on purpose, and not as a joke — or not only. Fifty years of research suggests the tests were never measuring what everyone hoped they were measuring. So ours measures the only thing we actually need to know: that you came. The rest of the Society is built accordingly.

The Densa Admission Test

Ten questions. No time limit. There is no need to hurry. There never was.

Plate IIIThe examination hall during adjudication. The invigilator is on a break.plates/plate-03-examination.jpg · 2100×1409

Plate IIIEXAMINATION, UNSUPERVISEDPL. III · DI/1981/007

A note on Question 8, for those who wondered. The point you gave away, if you gave it away, has been credited to the next stranger who takes this test. They will never know it was you. That was the test. It is the only question we have ever marked.

We Are Densa. Are You One of Us? Statistically, Yes.

Densa is a round-table society where ethnicity, colour, creed, national origin, age, politics, educational and social background — and performance on intelligence tests — are all completely irrelevant.¹ We kept Mensa's list and added one item. It was the load-bearing item.

Plate IVThe founding journey, commemorated annually, indoors, in the wrong direction.plates/plate-04-replacement-service.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate IVTHE REPLACEMENT SERVICEPL. IV · DI/1970/002

What Does "DENSA" Mean?

Mensa is Latin for "table," chosen to symbolise a round-table society: the coming together of equals. Densa is also real Latin — the feminine of densus: "thick, dense, crowded." We looked it up twice. Mensa meets at a round table. Densa's table has a leaf that no longer folds, and one leg shorter than the other three, which are also short. Everyone fits around it anyway, which upon reflection is the entire point of a table.

Mensa Named Us First

We wish to be scrupulously fair about the historical record, because it is entirely in our favour. The word "Densa" first appears in August 1974, in the bulletin of Boston Mensa, coined by a Mensan as "the low IQ society."² It spread through Mensa's own newsletters for decades. An unofficial Densa contingent formed inside Mensa, its members wearing their name badges upside down — so that they could read them.³ To this day, Mid-America Mensa's official glossary defines "Densa" as a "derogatory term for a Mensa member behaving foolishly."⁴

In other words: Mensa named us, mocked us, defined us in their reference materials, and kept the joke running for fifty years. We simply filed the paperwork. We are, as far as we know, the only organisation in history founded by its rival's glossary.

Our Founding

Mensa was founded in 1946 by two strangers who met on a train, one of whom asked the other whether he was reading Hansard, and received the reply: "Obviously."⁵ Densa was founded on the replacement bus service. Two strangers discovered they had both boarded it by mistake, in the wrong direction, and after some discussion elected not to correct the error, on the grounds that the company was good and the destination was, on reflection, negotiable. The journey is commemorated annually by our members, who to honour it go somewhere unintended and remain pleasant about it.

It is recorded of Mensa's co-founder Roland Berrill that he was a believer in palmistry and phrenology, that he hoped for "an aristocracy of the intellect," and that he was disappointed by the members he got.⁶ Densa's founders held no beliefs and were never disappointed. There was nothing to be disappointed about. There still isn't.

Who Joins Densa?

Our members include police officers and plumbers, truck drivers and taxidermists, doctors and delivery drivers, farmers and firefighters⁷ — and, unlike some societies we could name, we did not compile this list to prove a point. We compiled it because those are the members. We also could not think of a job starting with X, and have appointed a committee.

A Brief Institutional History

Mensa's co-founder Lancelot Ware said, late in life: "I do get disappointed that so many members spend so much time solving puzzles."¹¹ We think about that sentence a great deal. Our members also spend time on puzzles — but ours are distributed pre-solved, so that the time can be spent on each other. Nobody has ever asked for their money back, partly because it is free, but mostly, we believe, for the other reason.

What Is IQ? An Entirely Straight Answer.

This is the one page on which we will not joke. Every claim below is true and cited. We find the facts funnier than anything we could write, and considerably more important.

Plate VThe Society's instrument under calibration against a cloud.plates/plate-05-calibration.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate VCALIBRATION OF THE INSTRUMENTPL. V · DI/1987/031

The Scores Have Been Drifting the Whole Time

For most of the twentieth century, raw IQ scores rose by roughly three points per decade everywhere they were measured — the Flynn effect.¹ The consequence is strange to say out loud: by the tests' own arithmetic, an average person today outscores the average founding-era member of any 1940s high-IQ society by about a full standard deviation. By Mensa's own instrument, you are already smarter than the people who founded Mensa. Membership would therefore seem redundant. Welcome to Densa.

James Flynn, whom the effect is named after, drew a harder conclusion: the gains suggest IQ tests measure "a minor sort of abstract problem-solving ability with little practical significance," not intelligence itself.² And since the 1990s, in Norway, Denmark, and the UK, the scores have begun falling.³ We note without further comment that humanity appears to be getting Denser, and that we were early.

The Study That Should Have Settled This

In 1921, Lewis Terman of Stanford selected 1,528 Californian children with an average IQ of 151 and tracked them for the rest of their lives, expecting to document the flowering of genius. None of them achieved it — no Nobel, no transformative discovery; mostly they became ordinary, reasonably successful professionals. Meanwhile, two boys Terman rejected for scoring too low — William Shockley and Luis Alvarez — each went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.⁴ The instrument did not merely fail to find genius. It specifically screened it out, twice.

Terman's own collaborator, Catharine Cox, put the finding plainly: high but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest persistence, achieves more than the highest intelligence with somewhat less persistence. The tests were measuring the wrong axis. Richard Feynman's measured IQ, for the record, was 125 — below every high-IQ society's cutoff. The societies' loss was physics' gain, and also, in a sense, ours.

What the Wise Have Said

"People who boast about their IQ are losers."— Stephen Hawking, asked his IQ by the New York Times

"Joining Mensa means you are a genius, and enables you to meet other members."— Steve Martin, in a sentence we have read forty times and consider structurally perfect

The comedian David Mitchell observed the deeper mechanism: a person already regarded as intelligent gains nothing by certification and risks embarrassment by failing — so a society whose selling point is certified intelligence adversely selects for the people who need the certificate.⁵ Of the roughly 160 million living humans who would qualify for Mensa, about 150,000 have joined. That is a decline rate of 99.9%.⁶ Densa extends honorary founding membership to the other 159.85 million, who worked this out on their own.

The Serious Part, Stated Seriously

None of this means intelligence isn't real, or doesn't matter. It means a one-hour pattern test administered once, sometimes in childhood, is a narrow instrument being asked to carry a self-image — and that when test scores become a group identity, the identity needs the scores to mean more than they do. The historical record of what happens next is not good, and we do not find that part funny at all.⁷

Intelligence is the only human trait whose owners form a club for it. Nobody starts a society for the top 2% of kindness. Densa has looked into why. Findings pending.

The Constitution of Densa

As rejected by the membership in 1983 and therefore in force. The authoritative text is the PDF, Constitution_FINAL_final_v2_USE-THIS-ONE_lost.pdf, which has been misplaced with the full confidence of the Board.¹

Plate VIThe Society's archive under consultation; the authoritative text is elsewhere.plates/plate-06-archive.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate VITHE ARCHIVE, CONSULTEDPL. VI · DI/1983/003

A word on Article VI, which visitors sometimes assume is the joke article. It is the serious one. We have found that most disputes between people who basically wish each other well can survive neither fresh air nor the shared search for somewhere to sit down. The other articles are how we make you read Article VI.

The Only Curriculum We Offer, Because It Is the Only One With Evidence.

Mensa's foundation holds a registered trademark on "Unleashing Intelligence®".¹ The Institute's registered position is that intelligence is fine where it is, and that the trainable faculties are the other ones. The Institute issues no scores, no rankings, and no certificates of emotional intelligence, on the grounds that ranking people by empathy would be the single least empathetic act available to us.

Plate VIIThe Institute's only examination, which cannot be sat alone.plates/plate-07-two-person-test.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate VIITHE TWO-PERSON TESTPL. VII · DI/2004/012

The Curriculum

The Two-Person Test

The Institute administers exactly one examination, and it cannot be taken alone. You must bring another person. The test consists of an hour spent in their company, structure unspecified. It is scored by a single criterion, assessed at an unannounced later date: whether they would take it with you again. There is no study guide. There has never needed to be. Everyone has always known exactly what is on this test.

The Ideological Turing Test

The Society's only hard-scored examination.² The candidate selects a position they sincerely disagree with, and argues for it — in writing or in person — well enough that people who genuinely hold that position cannot pick the candidate out as an impostor. That is the whole test. It is harder than anything Mensa administers, it cannot be passed by pattern-matching, and every hour of preparation makes the world slightly easier to live in, which no other examination we are aware of can claim.

Candidates frequently report that in preparing to imitate the other side, they came to understand it; some report that they changed their mind, and a larger number report the stranger outcome: they kept their view, but lost the accompanying certainty that everyone across the aisle must be a fool or a villain. The Institute regards all three outcomes as passing grades. There is no failing grade. There is only Not Yet.

Statements of No Position

Under Article II, Densa may hold no opinions. The Statements of No Position series is how we comply. Each Statement solemnly explains why the Society cannot take a side on some contested question — and in explaining its non-position, is obliged to state each side so fairly that its holders would sign it. The current Statement is reproduced below; the archive is maintained by the Committee on Fence Integrity.

The Institute is aware that this page is less funny than the others. This was measured, debated, and ultimately approved by a vote of the Curriculum Committee, whose position is that some things are only worth saying with a straight face — and that if you got this far, you were never here for the jokes alone.

The Densa Foundation

Registered charitable mark: "Intelligence: Leashed, For Its Own Safety."®¹ The Foundation exists because our Constitution forbids the Society from doing anything, and someone had to.

Plate VIIIThe Youth Programme in session; the adult is measured against the wall.plates/plate-08-measurement.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate VIIIMEASUREMENT OF THE ADULTPL. VIII · DI/1995/044

Scholarships

Mensa's foundation awards scholarships on the basis of a 550-word essay.² The Densa Foundation likewise requires 550 words — any 550 words, in any order. We are testing commitment, not arrangement. Judges' feedback on recent winning entries includes "the word 'marmalade' 550 times, which the panel found displayed unusual focus" and "a moving account of caring for a parent, which we note would also have won under the other system, and did."

The Blunt Pewter Award for Achievement in Effort

Mensa's foundation confers the Copper Black Award for Creative Achievement.³ Ours honours the larger and statistically far more significant category: things attempted. The trophy is pewter, blunt, and identical for every recipient, because the Committee found no principled way to rank effort and declined to invent one.

The Densa Youth Programme

Mensa admits members from the age of two, and its youngest members have been enrolled at two years and four months.⁴ Its youth pages observe — and this is real, and we think about it often — that "it can be tough to be the smartest kid in the room."⁵ Our programme begins from the adjacent observation: it can be tough to be any kid in any room. We checked. It can.

Accordingly, Densa does not test children. Children are busy. A child who wishes to know whether they belong in Densa may be told the answer at once, free of charge, at any hour, and it will still be yes when they are ninety. What we offer instead is the thing the testing was always a clumsy proxy for: adults who are interested in what the child is interested in, for slightly longer than is convenient.

Annual Press Release

Each year, in keeping with tabloid tradition, a newborn is declared "Denser than Einstein."⁶ Our paediatric consultants confirm the finding refers to bone density, and that in an infant this is both accurate and excellent news. The parents receive a certificate. The infant receives, as all infants do, unconditional admission.

Somewhere right now there is a parent asking, as one really did ask Mensa's charitable arm: "So, you have tested my child and they are gifted — but what are you going to do about it?"⁷ It is the best question in this entire field. Our answer is the Programme above, minus the test: show up, be interested, stay slightly too long. It works on gifted children. It works on all the others. It is beginning to look as if that distinction was never doing much work.

Special Interest Groups

Mensa maintains a mind-boggling profusion of some 200 SIGs, from African violets to zoology, including groups for witchcraft, clowning, beekeeping, and skeet shooting, plus one called M-ISANTHROPES and one called UNDERACHIEVERS.¹ We wish to be clear: we are not competing with that. It cannot be done. What follows is merely our contribution.

Plate IXTwo special interest groups: one constitutionally vacant, one at its puzzles, pre-solved.plates/plate-09-warm-room.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate IXTHE ROOM, KEPT WARMPL. IX · DI/1979/019

Program HINDSIGHT

Mensa operates Program SIGHT — "Services for Information, Guidance & Hospitality to Travellers" — through which Mensans host travelling Mensans in 80+ countries.³ Densa operates Program HINDSIGHT, through which Densans will host you, warmly and enthusiastically, in the city you have just left. Members report that the welcome is genuinely moving, and that its timing teaches a lesson about travel, and possibly about everything: wherever you have just been, someone would have been glad to see you. The Program's motto — you should have said something — is printed on the guest towels you were not there to use.

A visitor once asked why our SIG list is short where Mensa's runs to two hundred. The answer is on the Sudoku SIG's row, if you read it twice: the interests were never really the point of an interest group. They are the excuse to be in the room. We just kept the room.

Directory of Affiliated Societies

Densa maintains warm relations with a number of organisations pursuing adjacent inquiries. Affiliation implies no endorsement, the Society being incapable of endorsement (Const., Art. II). Each entry has been verified by our Peer Review Committee, whose methods are described below, in the sense that they are described below.

Plate XAffiliated societies in congress: the year to scale, and an application pending since 1888.plates/plate-10-congress.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate XTHE WIDER COMMUNITY OF RIGOURPL. X · DI/1888/001

From the Peer Review Committee

The Committee evaluates syllogisms submitted by the public. Recent findings:

Visitors sometimes ask why this directory contains no real organisations. Because the reasoning failures are real and the people are invented — and we have found that this is the only order in which anyone can laugh at their own logic. The Flat Calendar Society does not exist. The annual schism over a threshold, followed by the reunion once the date has passed: the reader may have attended one of those. We know we have.

Gatherings & Events

Mensa's calendar is an acronym zoo: the AG, the RG, EMAG, GLAM, AMG, and the IBD meeting.¹ Ours is simpler, and every event is covered by the Dullness Warranty: if an event exceeds Precisely Average Excitement, the difference is refunded.

Plate XIThe Annual Gathering in progress; the podium is behind the assembly.plates/plate-11-gathering.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate XITHE GATHERING, IN PROGRESSPL. XI · DI/1983/026

The Calendar

The Gathering, In Period

The DAG is held on 4 April, and it is held in 1974. Members attend as they would have attended then. This is not a theme night, a costume party or an ironic exercise: the Society has simply never revised the dress order, and can see no occasion on which it would.

Standing Dress Order No. 1

Period attire is expected of everybody and enforced by nobody. Members are asked to choose one of the three recognised bands and commit to it without hedging.

Grey is permitted but discouraged, a room full of grey suits reading as an entirely different decade. Members who cannot or would rather not dress in period are asked to come anyway, in whatever they own. The Society would sooner have you in a fleece than not have you.

The Object

Every member brings one object from 1974 that means something to them. One. It is carried, not exhibited; there is no table, and there is no competition.

At some point in the day somebody will ask you what it is. Here the Programme Subcommittee has issued the only instruction it has ever issued twice: do not describe the object. Describe the person it came from. A slide rule is not interesting. The uncle who could use it is.

Entirely acceptable, and all of them previously brought: a digital watch that requires a button to be pressed before it will tell you the time. A pocket calculator that cost more than the desk it sat on. A slide rule, rendered obsolete that very year and kept in the drawer regardless. A school report card, carried in by somebody who has plainly had it about their person for fifty years. An unopened bottle of Coke. A Connect Four, which appeared in 1974 and has been in the loft ever since. A tie that should not have been bought. Something profoundly kitsch that somebody, at some point, loved.¹⁶

The Programme

Refreshments, Streaking, and Judging

Refreshments are period-correct where the Catering Subcommittee can manage it. Bailey's Irish Cream, Skittles and Kinder Surprise all first appeared in 1974, a fact the Subcommittee regards as the strongest argument yet advanced in favour of the year.

Streaking is not permitted. The Society acknowledges that 1974 was the year of it — a man crossed the stage of the Academy Awards on 2 April wearing nothing at all, and the host got the better of him inside four seconds — and forbids the practice on the grounds that the venue requires it and the moment has comfortably passed. Members wishing to honour the tradition may do so fully clothed, at speed, and will be applauded exactly as warmly.

The moment survives on film. The Society has been debating whether to show it since 1974 and, in the course of that debate, has shown it.²⁰ Members are advised before pressing play that the year is 1974, that the gentleman is not dressed, and that the host is four seconds away from saying the best thing anybody said all evening.

Judging takes place. Every entrant is judged, and every entrant places first. The categories are Most Committed, Most Regrettable, Most Convincingly Middling, Best Object, Best Story Attached To A Markedly Worse Object, and Furthest Travelled In That.

A note on the date, which the Society did not choose

Members occasionally ask why 4 April. It was never chosen; it is simply when everyone turned up. But the Records Committee, asked to look into it in 1979, established the following about the week in question, and has declined to be drawn on any of it:¹⁸

The Society meets on the one day of that week on which nothing happened at all. This was not deliberate. It has, however, never been changed.

One further thing occurred in 1974, in November, and the Gathering closes with it every year. A radio telescope at Arecibo pointed itself at a cluster of stars twenty-five thousand light years away and transmitted, for three minutes, a message describing who we are and where we live. A reply, if one is ever sent, will take fifty thousand years to arrive.¹⁹ Everybody involved knew that. They knew that nobody in the room, and nobody they would ever meet, and nobody those people would ever meet, could possibly hear an answer — and they sent it anyway, on the chance that somebody was out there and would want to know we had been here. In the same year, this Society failed to decide where to hold a meeting. We mention the two together because we think they are the same impulse, handled with differing degrees of competence, and because it is the reason we keep asking you to come.

Standing Observance No. 404

At four minutes past four each afternoon, wherever the Society is gathered, proceedings stop for one minute. Members remain exactly where they are and locate themselves. No form is completed and no record is kept.

The Observance entered the calendar by clerical error — minuted as an agenda item at 16:04 and never rescinded — and the Society has declined every subsequent opportunity to correct the record.¹⁰ Visitors sometimes ask what one is supposed to do with the minute. The Society's guidance, issued once in 1974 and never revised, is: nothing. It is a full minute, timed, and it is considerably longer than you expect.¹¹

The guidance has been added to only once. In the same year the drafters attached Article VIII, which asks that the minute be given to somebody who is not in the room; the Society regards this as consistent with doing nothing, on the grounds that thinking of a person is not an activity. Members have since reported one result often enough that the Research Journal — which approves everything — declined it for want of a method: the person who comes to mind is almost never the person you expected.

The Sign

Members recognise one another by a hand sign. Its use has never been compulsory, and the Society has never checked.

The Full Sign. Both hands are raised to the level of the mouth, palms turned inward toward the face, thumbs folded into the palms and out of sight. The four fingers of each hand stand upright and slightly fanned. The mouth is opened to a small, round, deliberate O — the mouth of somebody who has just been told something mildly surprising, and not, the Society wishes to be clear, the mouth of somebody shouting. Read from the left, the assembled parts give four, nought, four.

The Abbreviated Sign. One hand. Four fingers, raised. That is the whole of it. The Committee on Gestures was convened in 1974 to settle the remaining two characters and has not yet reported.¹² Members are asked to hold up four fingers and let the matter rest there.

There is one prohibition, and it is the only rule the Society has ever troubled to enforce. The sign may not be made at somebody in order to point out that they are not making it. A gesture of recognition used to mark out the unrecognised stops being one, and the Society would rather lose the sign than that.

The sign is not a password. It admits nobody to anything, it cannot be performed incorrectly, and there is no version of it that means you are in and somebody else is out. Anyone may make it. Anyone who makes it is a member, which has always been the whole of the entrance requirement.

The Densa Select® Seal

Each spring, Mensa convenes some 300 members for a four-day board-game-judging marathon at the Holiday Inn Cincinnati Airport, from which five games emerge bearing the Mensa Select® seal: "original, challenging, and well designed."⁷ Densa's judges convene for the same four days. Our seal honours five games annually found to be familiar, easy, and adequately designed. The judging concludes on day one; the room is paid through Thursday, and the remaining three days are, by common consent, the actual event.

Densa Select Laureates (all-time)

Site Selection for the DAG — Public Submissions Window

Mensa announces its Annual Gathering cities years in advance, selected with great ceremony, the honour being competed for.⁹ Densa has inverted this arrangement as well: in the Society's entire history, no city has ever bid to host the DAG, and the Site Selection Subcommittee has been deadlocked on the question of where since 1983, chiefly for want of the question being raised. The Subcommittee has therefore resolved to ask the membership directly — a method the minutes describe as "experimental," "irregular," and "probably how it should have worked the whole time."

One motion is now before the membership. After forty-four years the Subcommittee has advanced a single proposal, for 4 April 2027, at Las Vegas, on grounds entered in the minutes without amendment: Las Vegas is the only city on earth to which the smart money and the stupid money travel on the same aeroplane, check into the same hotel, and go home with the same expression. The Subcommittee was unable to identify a more accurate model of the Society and has stopped looking. It notes further that the city is already expecting large numbers of people who have made a decision they cannot fully account for, and that it is the only venue yet proposed in which the Society's practice of keeping no records would attract no comment.¹⁵

The motion is advanced, not adopted. The Subcommittee has never adopted anything and would not know how. The window below therefore remains open, and a submission naming any other city is weighed exactly as heavily, which is to say it is read.

Be advised of the ambition here, which is considerable by our standards: a DAG that is, in the fullest sense, attended. A real city. Real chairs. Real members, met at last, after years of assumed attendance. Activities of genuine warmth and Precisely Average Excitement, some of them memorable, some of them silly, several of them — the Subcommittee has stopped apologising for this — quietly useful. Whether it occurs, and where, depends substantially on the form below, which makes this, as far as our records extend, the first committee form in institutional history to do something.

Mensa's own event reports include an ice-instrument concert, a one-ski sledge race, and a charity pageant called Misster Mensa that raised fifty thousand dollars⁸ — and honestly, it all sounds delightful, because it is the same discovery we made from the other direction: nobody actually attends these things for the IQ. They attend for the part that happens after the agenda runs out. Our agenda simply runs out earlier. Tell us where, and we will bring the agenda, and keep it short.

Governance & Leadership

Mensa is governed by a 21-member board including ten numbered Regional Vice Chairmen, advised by an ExComm, a NomCom, a National Hearings Committee, and an appointed National Ombudsman, with chapter presidents titled "LocSec" (Local Secretary).¹ We have studied this structure closely and simplified it, in the sense that ours is a circle.

Plate XIIThe organisational chart in transit; the arrow was removed for pointing.plates/plate-12-pyramid-removed.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate XIIREMOVAL OF THE PYRAMIDPL. XII · DI/2004/001

The Organisational Chart

Officers of the Society

Elections

Held regularly, in accordance with Article V, which no election has yet satisfied. Candidates must gather 100 signatures from members in international good standing,⁵ a requirement our candidates routinely exceed by gathering zero and asserting good standing on behalf of all mankind. Results are certified by the Returning Officer, who has yet to return.

Volunteering

Mensa lists approximately 20 volunteer roles, including Test Officer and Assistant Constitutions Review Officer, and notes that member dues "only go so far."⁶ Densa's dues, being $0, go exactly that far. Our roles include Steering Committee Member (the committee has no vehicle), Keeper of the Warm Room (see Unpopular Opinions SIG), Welcome Auditor (counts welcomes; the number is never high enough; the role is permanent), and Deputy LocForg, who remembers where the LocForg is.

People assume the circle chart is the joke. It is the finding. Every organisation we have ever admired was, underneath its pyramid, secretly a circle of people covering for each other — and every organisation we have watched fail had a beautiful chart. We publish the underneath and skip the pyramid. Actions Still In Effect: unknown, as always.⁷

Name and Logo Standards

Mensa maintains an entire governance section devoted to its name and logo, with tiered marks and formal usage standards.¹ Densa complies in spirit, which is the only way we comply with anything.

Plate XIIIVerification of the mark, which is mounted correctly and is not to be corrected.plates/plate-13-verification.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate XIIIVERIFICATION OF THE MARKPL. XIII · DI/2011/060

Usage Rules (Binding)

The Approved Palette

Rule 7 is final and the Committee considers the matter closed. Members who continue to see otherwise are asked to keep it to themselves, and have not.

Intellectually Adjacent Publications¹

All Society publications are included with membership, which is free, a pricing structure our Circulation Department describes as "unbeatable, technically."

Plate XIVThe Society's press in operation; the sheets are inspected and found blank.plates/plate-14-press.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate XIVTHE PRESS, IN OPERATIONPL. XIV · DI/1991/103

The Densa Bulletin

Now with fewer words. Our flagship monthly. Regular columns include The Adequacy Test (readers submit situations; the column confirms they did fine), Beige Matter (neuroscience for the mildly curious), and Game Night Wish List, But For Naps. The crossword is published with Monday's grid and Thursday's clues; the letters page has been at peace for years.

The Densa World Journal

Round-ups of Society news from our 12, 90, or 100+ countries. The recurring "Postcard From…" column² most recently featured a postcard from a member who reports that Program HINDSIGHT hosted her magnificently in the city she had just left, and that she is thinking of going back, which the Program notes would defeat it.

The Densa Research Journal

Quarterly, peer-reviewed. Both peers approve everything; they have been asked to be harder on submissions and have promised to think about it, favourably. In the current issue: "Random Samples and Standard Deviations: A Study We Also Did Not Understand,"³ and a replication of last issue's findings, which replicated, in that we printed them again.

The Register of Plates

Numbered by accession. Never by date. Plates are numbered by the year they entered the Register, not the year they were taken; the Society has never once filed a photograph in the year it made one. Readers who date a plate by its number will be wrong by an interval the Register does not record and has not been asked to. Plate X carries 1888 because that is the year of the file it was added to — an application from an affiliated society, still pending, which the Register keeps at the front on the grounds that it got there first.

From the Blog (/our-blog-3/)⁴

Things Worth Thinking Twice About (column)

Our publications are shorter than Mensa's, plainer than Mensa's, and easier than Mensa's, and we would defend every one of those choices, but especially this one: everything in them can be retold at a kitchen table from memory. That was the acceptance criterion. It rejected most of what we wrote, including, four times, this paragraph.

Awards & Recognition

Mensa's recognition section includes national awards, Local Group Jewels, Local Group Owls, a Group Of The Year Award abbreviated GOTYA, and a Proctor of the Year.¹ Densa recognises achievement wherever it can be persuaded to sit still.

Plate XVConferral of honours upon a podium found, on measurement, to be level.plates/plate-15-podium.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate XVTHE PODIUM, LEVELPL. XV · DI/1988/002

VultureQuest® Standings

All teams are currently tied for first, pending recollection of the question. The Standings Committee reports the tie is "mathematically unbreakable and socially ideal."

External Honours

Densa maintains no reciprocal arrangements with other honouring bodies, with one exception. The Society formally recognises the Ig Nobel Prize, awarded each year for achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."⁴ The Committee on External Regard notes that this is the only major prize whose citation states its criteria in the correct order, and observes with institutional satisfaction that the awards are handed over by actual Nobel laureates — an arrangement under which, for one evening a year, the most credentialed people on Earth stand slightly to one side of an idea larger than credentials. The Society has petitioned for observer status at the ceremony every year since 1991. The paper aeroplanes⁵ we have chosen to receive as correspondence.

Members who win an actual Nobel Prize are asked to keep it to themselves.

Mensa members shout "Retest!" as a joke when one of their own does something foolish.² We have the equivalent tradition in reverse: when a Densan does something quietly brilliant — and it happens constantly, because brilliance was never actually rationed to the top 2% — the room calls "Recount!", and the member is issued a fresh certificate confirming, as before, the top 100%. The certificate does not change. The room saying it out loud is the award.

The Neighbor Gratitude Award

The Society confers one real award. This is it.

In 1997, accepting a Lifetime Achievement Emmy, Fred Rogers stood before the assembled famous of American television and asked for ten seconds of silence to think of the people "who have loved us into being." Then he looked at his watch and kept the time himself.⁶ A room that had gathered to celebrate achievement spent ten seconds on gratitude instead, and by most accounts did not entirely recover. The Committee on External Regard has reviewed the footage annually since and rules, each year, that this remains the finest use of an awards ceremony on record. The Society's only real award is modelled on it. (The Society's broader confidence in gentleness as an operating strategy is informed by the occasion on which the same man recited a song lyric to a hostile Senate subcommittee and left with twenty million dollars.⁷)

The Neighbor Gratitude Award cannot be applied for, cannot be competed for, and cannot be won. It can only be given. Any member — and membership, as established elsewhere, is everyone — may confer it, once per year, upon one person who loved them into being, or who was simply their helper when one was needed.⁸ The Society's entire role is to print the certificate. There is no shortlist and no ranking, the Institute having ruled that ranking people by kindness would be the least kind act available to an institution. The supply is unlimited. It has to be.

A note on the spelling, which sharp-eyed members of the Orthography Subcommittee have raised: the Society writes "honour" and "colour" throughout this website, and "Neighbor" here. The spelling is his. It stays. And if, reading this, you cannot think of anyone who loved you into being — sit with the ten seconds anyway. The Society's experience is that a name arrives, usually before the fourth second, and that it is very often someone who never once wondered what your IQ was.

The Densa Store

Mensa's store slogan is, unimprovably: "You don't have to be a genius to dress like one."¹ Ours: You don't have to. That's the whole idea. All prices are approximate, and the checkout asks twice whether you are sure, out of care.

Plate XVIThe Society's store; the frame is displayed within a frame.plates/plate-16-goods.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate XVIGOODS OF THE SOCIETYPL. XVI · DI/1999/018

Goods of the Society — the current catalogue; twenty-one lines, of which the Records Committee counts nineteen

The Society's goods, as presently issued, with their prices as printed at the Store on the day of printing. Every order ships with Application Form 1, blank and stamped ACCEPTED, and with one spoon where a spoon is owed. Two lines are made in small batches and are listed for the waitlist, on which the Committee will write to you in order of arrival, which is the only order it keeps.

Prices are as printed and are approximate, as all Society prices are. Every order ships with Application Form 1, blank, stamped ACCEPTED. Orders begin when the counter at store.densa.org opens, which will be announced here, late.

From the Catalogue of 1974 — the archive; prices as printed at the time. The Store's differ, as records do

Every item in the Catalogue of 1974 was, for fifty years, a joke, except the last one, which we ask you to look at again. Somebody you know has spent their whole life being told, in a hundred quiet ways, which rooms they belong in. The envelope costs a dollar. It says a room decided to want them. We sell it in packs of ten.

This page has achieved Full National Status.¹

It can no longer be reached by ordinary means, and we are all very proud. The Committee on Locations has been notified and is on its way to the wrong place. The Society observes Error 404 annually, on the fourth day of the fourth month, for reasons that predate the web — and daily, at four minutes past four, for one minute, for reasons set out in Article VIII and nowhere else.

Plate XVIIThe crossroads at which the Committee on Locations was last seen departing.plates/plate-17-signpost.jpg · 2100×1400

Plate XVIITHE SIGNPOST, CONSULTEDPL. XVII · DI/1970/404

Return Home   Or Take the Test, Since You're Here

You looked for something that wasn't there and ended up somewhere anyway. This is also how the Society was founded. Welcome back.