Official Business

Kevin Langdon

The Mega Society has been without an agreed-upon constitution ever since the merger between the old Mega Society and the MONTH (Mega/One-in-10⁶/Noetic/Titan/Hoeflin Research Group) society in 1992. We now have the opportunity to change that.

In addition to the Bylaws of the premerger Mega Society, you may choose the brief set of rules proposed by Ron Hoeflin in Noesis #142 (October 1998) or a document drafted by Chris Cole and me printed in Noesis #146 (November 1999). These items are ##6, 7, and 8 in this issue, respectively. Everyone has had the opportunity to comment on all these proposals; few have shown much interest.

If none of these constitution drafts gets a majority of the votes we’ll have to go back to the drawing board. If only one gets a majority,  that will be the constitution we’ll adopt, while if more than one obtains a majority, the one with the greatest number of votes will be the one adopted. If the old Mega Society Bylaws are adopted, we’ll have to take another look at my proposed amendments thereto, published most recently in Noesis #146. Please read the alternative constitution drafts carefully and vote.

Along with the constitution, there are a couple of other matters to be voted on. We’ll be voting yes or no on the following editorial guidline (proposed by me in Noesis #122, August 1996):

No accusation of crime or misconduct shall be published without proof of the truth of the accusation being furnished by the accuser nor without the accused person or persons being afforded the opportunity to reply in the same issue of Noesis in which the accusation is printed.

And we will also be voting on the suspension of admissions to Mega via post-1994 scores on the Mega and Titan tests. These tests have been compromised by publication of answers to many of the questions on the Internet. See the Prometheus Society 1998-99 Membership Committee Report <http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/MCReport/mcreport.html>. Ron Hoeflin’s comments on this proposal appeared in Noesis #147, April 2000.

Mark your choices on the enclosed (for members) postage-prepaid ballot card and return it to Administrator Jeff Ward, 13155 Wimberly Square #284, San Diego, CA 92128.

As many of you know, there is now a second 99.9999th-percentile group, the Pi Society, with (currently) 8 members (including several members of Mega). The question of merging the societies has come up and it has been broached to the members of Pi. All but one of the members have been selected via Dr. Hoeflin’s tests, though some of them took one of these tests later than the cutoff date proposed above, so a few members of Pi would have to be grandfathered in if the proposal passes. Please let us know your thoughts about this.