My experience at Mensa meetups - Share yours

When I started a new job a few years back, met one of my colleagues who I would classify as a high IQ person. I always enjoyed his company, we could talk and talk and talk.

This was different from the conversations I had with friends/family. I just couldn't convince them of something regardless of how many facts I presented. For example would be that one would say something really ridiculous, show them an article that contradicts that but they would dismiss it and open a blog post written by some crackpot conspiracy theorist. When questioning trustworthiness of his link he would ridicule and say something like 'how come your links are true and none of mine are?'. Show him other links from the web, but they would insist that blog post was the truth.

When speaking with this colleague it was different. He was usually right about things, occasionally he had some misinformation. I would open up a well researched/written article and forward it. He would come up and thank me for teaching him something new and correcting him. This was surprisingly new.

Seeing this I decided I wanted to be with more people like him. Tested for Mensa and got in. Started going to Mensa meetups. People at these meetups are having the same conversations as very low IQ people have. There is always 1 dude who thinks he is so far ahead in IQ that only he can see the truth, hes deep into conspiracy theories and claims ridiculous things like 'climate change is fake, we had snow this winter, no scientist can explain the snow' a few people there would contest this but then he would open his conspiracy blogs. Some people are supporting his thoughts. I wish I could share the specifics of these conversations but if any of them are on this sub I would give away my identity.

The open minded people that I was expecting to meet are not at these meetups.

So my question is why? How come even high IQ cannot be convinced to change their mind when you present them with an alternative view with proof. I always assume this would not be an issue with Mensans but have been utterly disappointed. Interested to know everyone else's experience at these meets.