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Wellness Wednesday for July 31, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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Married men of the motte, I need a sanity check.

To put it bluntly, my partner is lower status and less intelligent than I am. 110 vs 125 IQ points. middle class vs upper middle class.

We've been together for a year and our relationship is otherwise great (unrelated mental hang ups i have posted about here before aside). I can see myself marrying and being content.

Unfortunately, I am a pretty HBD-pilled individual, and the concept of my future children potentially being less intelligent and of phenotypically lower status fills me with dread. (The woman in question has many many positive qualities I DO want my kids to have.)

Is it over? Is that alone enough to say I should break up because that shows how I don't really love her etc? Are doubts like this normal for a young guy who's maybe getting commitment anxiety?

I come from a family of fairly accomplished people. Upper middle class academics and some geniuses. Her family generationally is lower/middle middle class.

My children would inherit this.

Now I should add that her family is of perfectly average to above average intelligence. The biggest difference is that they have very little intellectual curiosity. Abysmal levels of general knowledge, archetypical shape rotators.

(They do have their own opinions and are independent thinkers but they are deeply "practical people")

I thought this wouldn't bother me, and it doesn't, in the relationship. But I dread my kids being like that.

Narcissism? Does my girlfriend secretly disgust me? Am I giving this too much thought? I really want some outside opinion on this, preferably by people with children. This is obviously something I can only talk about on this forum.

This post really bothers me. Please value things other than raw intelligence more. IQ is good to have, but there's also work ethic, kindness, being pleasant to be around, various artistic disciplines that aren't that g-loaded, etcetera.

Elon Musk isn't literally the smartest man in the room, it's a combination of IQ and his almost pathological work ethic. Someone with his work ethic and a 110 IQ could easily still accomplish amazing things, just not quite as amazing.

Edit: Although in the world we live in I can see how one might become skeptical of the virtue of kindness, since the people who would have maybe been avatars of kindness in different circumstances are indoctrinated and crazy.

You're just finding reasons to get cold feet.

I think entering parenthood with the mindset that your children (or worse, a single child) must be equal to or superior to you by every possible metric is setting yourself up for disappointment, similar to the modern idea that your spouse must also be your best friend and that if they don't share all your niche interests then you aren't really soulmates and should find someone else. Your best bet is to have multiple children and hope that collectively they embody all the characteristics you value in yourself and your partner, or if it matters enough to you wait a few years for genomic prediction technology for embryos to improve (even if they only screen for health, that is still correlated with IQ and also makes it an easier conversation to have).

I come from a family of fairly accomplished people. Upper middle class academics and some geniuses. Her family generationally is lower/middle middle class.

My children would inherit this.

Perhaps I have a different perspective on the heritability of social class, seeing as my grandparents were illiterate peasants, but I think it at least needs to be normalized to opportunity i.e. if they, and more importantly your partner, are conscientious and working to improve their station in life, wherever they may have started, then that is a sufficient demonstration of value.

archetypical shape rotators.

They do have their own opinions and are independent thinkers but they are deeply "practical people"

I think if there's anything potential descendants of us motteposters could use a dose of to become well-adjusted members of society, it's this.

You are both far above global average intelligence. Other factors such as your parenting style, how quickly you start having kids, where you raise them, and how many you have, will probably contribute more to your odds of having intelligent kids than your choice of wife will.

You know what would best contribute to the well-being of your hypothetical kids, barring some giant leap in embryo selection or tremendous wealth? Young parental age. Lower probability of various defects, and parents (and hopefully grandparents!) energetic and healthy enough to give them all the play and development they need.

Man, this thread is an advertisement for the utility of the concept of infohazard. All I can think is that you would have been much, much happier if you'd simply absorbed the completely false polite fictions around intelligence and heredity that so many people believe.

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be burdened by knowledge than live in ignorant bliss in most cases.

Are there situations where not knowing something bad will happen might be better? Sure. But not in most cases. If I had metastatic pancreatic cancer that would kill me in a year or two, I'd live my life very differently, and maximize it to the best of my abilities instead of being blindsided.

In this particular case, the social fiction is clearly to the detriment of his goals and values. He could probably knock up a gorgeous bimbo and have a great time doing it, except when his kids turn out to be dumb(er) than he is. They might be better looking, and that's certainly a perk, but I'd have to look very good to trade even a small number of IQ points for it.

His understanding of heridity makes him strictly better off, even if it causes him some pain such as the prospect of having to break up with a perfectly nice sounding person in the hopes of finding someone better (and there's no reason to assume he can't). C'est la vie.

What are your odds of finding someone "better" who you can gel with?

No idea. I gel with her perfectly well thats not the problem.

I didn't imply you weren't currently gelling. I'm saying that even if you find this high class high IQ unicorn, you simply might not get along as well with that one. Abandoning a perfectly fine thing for a chance at a better one is probably a bad idea, unless you have someone specific lined up.

Her family generationally is lower/middle middle class.

My children would inherit this.

I feel like this is some kind of troll, but just on the off chance -- somebody of your (claimed) IQ should know that IQ (heritability in general, really) does not work like this at all. "Lower-middle classness" even less so.

Proof: I have a quite a bit higher IQ than either of my parents. So did Von Neumann, Einstein, and innumerable other smarties (one assumes).

This is a very bad thought pattern you've gotten yourself into, and that's a you thing. Seek help, touch grass, log off, whatever it takes.

If you can't manage this, my advice to your girlfriend would be very different.

Class and inteligence are both very heritable. Choosing my partner is by a wide margin the most control I have over how my children will turn out. I am trying not to live with regret, which is why I want the perspective of parents who have already made tge choice.

Well you have it in me -- I'm smarter than my wife, and my parents. I'm not Von Neumann, but scored very high on a pro IQ test in the 'keep smart kids from getting distracted and/or BTFOing their mediocre teachers" stream at school, and (smart) people at work seem to think I am worth asking about smart-guy stuff.

My kids are pretty smart, my wife & I mostly get along, and I'm sure they will have successful, (mostly) happy lives going forward. What more could one want?

(You are quite incorrect about class being heritable in the genetic sense, but I don't have time to fight your egregore on that -- maybe spend a few minutes thinking about how that would work?)

Von Neumann and Einstein are necessarily extreme examples! Say IQ is 50% heritable, then the argument still goes through via expected value, although the magnitude is lower. Regression to the mean is a bitch.

Isn't regression to the mean responsible for the phenomenon in which even if both parents are very smart the children are likely to be more average?

Life is a crapshoot -- it's not clear to me at all what the true expected delta in IQ would be from having a 130 IQ mother vs. 110. I'm very confident that in terms of life outcomes this effect would be utterly swamped by having a loving stable family -- which I'd venture may not be the case here, and not because of anything to do with the proposed mother.

(I think 50% heritability is not supported by The Science either? This is not a rabbit hole I want to go down though)

I'm very confident that in terms of life outcomes this effect would be utterly swamped by having a loving stable family

I'm very confident it isn't, tbh, plenty of successful people come from bad upper-class families. And wouldn't this be 'shared environment', which is measured to be approximately zero?

(I think 50% heritability is not supported by The Science either? This is not a rabbit hole I want to go down though)… Life is a crapshoot

Indeed, because 50% is too low for the heritability of cognitive ability. For example, this NatureTM study with ~400 citations proffers a heritability figure of 66%.

Note that this does not mean 66% nature and 34% nurture. The 66% is a subset of “nature” and the 34% is a superset of “nurture.” The 66% contains only additive genetic effects, a linear combination of inputs from DNA. The 34% contains what’s generally considered “nurture,” as a certain wholesome copypasta helpfully encapsulated: "Reading [your children] stories at bedtime, making [them] go to sports practice, making sure [they] had a healthy diet, educating [them], playing with [them].”

In addition to “nurture,” the 34% also contains stuff like other non-additive genetic effects, maternal (and maybe paternal) age effects, developmental error (whether it be positive or negative) while in utero, the crapshoot of life you mentioned, and other factors. With heritability as the lead singer by far, "nurture" might very well be the third singer in a three-man acapella group, as suggested in Figure 1 of the above study.

it's not clear to me at all what the true expected delta in IQ would be from having a 130 IQ mother vs. 110.

It’s clear to me, assuming both parents revert to an IQ of 100. We can even relax the 66% to 64% for a “beta” of 0.8 to make the arithmetic a bit easier optically.

If you believe you have an IQ of 125 as in the case of OP, that means a parental midpoint of 127.5 with a 130-IQ wife, a parental midpoint of 117.5 with a 110-IQ wife. 100 + 0.8 * (127.5 - 100) = 122. 100 + 0.8 * (117.5 - 100) = 114. So an 8-point delta.

Is an 8 IQ-point delta significant when evaluating the effect of a potential future mother of your kids, holding all else equal? A 114 expected value is well-within sub-110 IQ territory for any given offspring, an at-least-one standard deviation gap between your 125-IQ self and a possible hypothetical child.

An 8 IQ-point delta is the equivalent of about one and a third inches in height. One and a third inches can make a material difference in height, especially when it comes to tail effects, if you’re hoping for a son who does well in business, athletics, and/or in dating on expectation. 5'10.67" vs. 6'.

On the flipside—and I don’t know about the particular situation of @Sheepclothes—however, in an age where smart young men are often dying of thirst, maybe it’s not the best for them individually or on a societal level to advise them toward being mineral water critics (to appropriate a line from Succession).

This arithmetic exercise also highlights the importance of a spouse’s familial background—or at least ancestral background—when it comes to mean reversion. The smarter (dumber) his or her family or ancestral background, the higher (lower) mean to which your offspring will revert.

Tests and some fudging to protect privacy

Since you asked, to give the other side, I think you should split up, so long as you're young-ish and would be dedicated to finding a new wife afterwards. You're going to spend two decades of your life raising the children, each individual moment working, consciously or not, to help your children be successful in life. And the highest impact thing you can do to ensure the kids have successful, interesting good lives is to ensure they have good genes. The idea marriage is about entirely personal romantic feelings detached from other material considerations is a modern one, an idea of irrational, overpowering romantic love isn't new but it coexisted more with real interests in the ancestry and health of the children. I wouldn't worry about the lower-class part - a lot of of smart people come from middle-class families - but the intelligence part is more important.

Also, HBD generally refers to the association of race and IQ, which is very contested. The heritability of individual intelligence is less contested, it is the mainstream scientific consensus, and it's just extremely obvious.

Is that alone enough to say I should break up because that shows how I don't really love her etc

You probably do love her? Romantic love isn't an overpowering metaphysical principle that overrides other facts or beliefs. You can genuinely love someone and at the same time rationally (or mistakenly) think being with them is a mistake.

To some of the points from other commenters:

It seems to me like you are far too focused on the idea of children getting good genes. Having children isn't a eugenics program, it's something you do (or don't) because it's meaningful in itself.

I understand why this feels true, but does it actually mean anything? Having children is - literally, words mean things - a eugenics program, in that your instincts for sexual attraction, both physical and social, are very clearly selecting for some sense of good genes to pass onto your children. Being successful and intelligent are attractive! And surely their intelligence and general mental qualities are more important than how tall they are or what their waist/hip ratio is! Most of the people replying to you, like most people in general (due to assortative mating), will likely marry someone of their social/economic class, as that's just what we instinctively do. (Assortative mating for class is stronger than for IQ, which on an individual level is imo a mistake). The experience of your children in life in the future surely does matter. Imagine if your five year old fell off of a bike without a helmet and lost 10 IQ points. I feel like that'd be tragic! Part of the "meaningfulness" of being a parent is protecting the kid from things like that! And yet... (I'd enthusiastically bite the bullet on every unintuitive consequence of this thought experiment)

Let's turn it around and say you're the prole dum-dum and she's the elite status genius. How would you feel if she harboured these doubts about you? Called it off because although you click on every level, she just doesn't want her kids to be stuck going to a state school because they inherited your midwit genes?

Interactions between people aren't symmetric when the interactions have other effects! It's good when a company fires a bad worker, even when the person firing them wouldn't want to be fired themselves. It's a good thing that the smartest archaic human 500k years ago tried to pick a smart partner and didn't settle for a dumber one because it'd be mean to do that! It's how we got here.

More generally, I think the standard Rationalist discourse on intelligence is badly flawed. To put it bluntly, I do not observe a correlation between intelligence and "correctness" in any objective, holistic sense

This is just, like, false? Whether it's high school math, basic facts about how the world, government, economy, etc function, or the ability to accomplish one's goals, intelligence is enormously important. To the point that if your wife was 85 IQ (or even 100), you wouldn't have gotten together in the first place because the contrast would be too apparent.

I strongly suspect the last commenter's wife is not an average person, they're an intelligent practical-minded person, and a genuinely randomly-selected person would produce different intuitions. It's berkson's paradox https://brilliant-staff-media.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tiffany-wang/1Mvt8RPtlU.png for "academic" vs practical intelligence.

You make some good points, but are you a parent though? Im fully aware of the exact statistical difference this partnership will have on my offspring. I only care how succesful and capable my future children are, insofar that future me will care.

I understand why this feels true, but does it actually mean anything? Having children is - literally, words mean things - a eugenics program, in that your instincts for sexual attraction, both physical and social, are very clearly selecting for some sense of good genes to pass onto your children.

Hell yeah, this is the pedantry I crave late at night. :D

My objection here is that for something to be a program, it needs to be intentional to that effect. Simply being driven by subconscious biological urges and social tendencies isn't enough. Calling something that happens as the byproduct of other forces a program strikes me like calling humans furnaces because they turn fuel (calories) into heat. It's kinda true in a sense, but not what one normally means when they say that word.

The experience of your children in life in the future surely does matter. Imagine if your five year old fell off of a bike without a helmet and lost 10 IQ points. I feel like that'd be tragic!

I think this is a stronger argument, although I think that unrealized gains are nowhere near as bad (all else being equal) as actual concrete losses. And I also think that people here way overrate the importance of intelligence. Realistically, if OP's kids turn out to have 110 IQ instead of 125 that's not actually a big deal. OP gets along great with his 110 IQ girlfriend, doesn't he? Why would it be a problem if his kids are as smart as their mom? It's not like it'll prevent them from being successful and happy in their life or anything like that.

My objection here is that for something to be a program, it needs to be intentional to that effect

I think the question I'm asking is why, if you're already 'unintentionally' (but even then it depends on what you mean by intent - you may not have the full goal in mind, but you're actively using your agency to pursue the goal of a high-status, capable partner in ways that aren't just unthinking reflexes, and that's why OP doesn't have a truly average IQ girlfriend even if it'd have been easier to get than his current one) pursuing that goal, what's the issue with intentionally doing it, given it's a valuable goal?

I think that unrealized gains are nowhere near as bad (all else being equal) as actual concrete losses

But in this example the five year old's 130 IQ points are unrealized, right? Five year olds, whether or not they're in the top 97% for their age (ignoring some regression to the mean), are still pretty dumb. I don't think you can appeal to a physical property to separate the realized intelligence that's in the child's genes and future neurons but not actually current brain quite yet, vs unrealized intelligence that's not in the genes yet. Other than the way that other humans think about it - but then that's what's up in the air in the discussion.

I also think that people here way overrate the importance of intelligence. Realistically, if OP's kids turn out to have 110 IQ instead of 125 that's not actually a big deal.

Idk, I think intelligence is valuable. I mean, the complex experiences and challenges we have as humans are just, experientially, better than the ones that rabbits have. And intelligence is what lets us do that. The ability to work on meaningful, self-driven, complex projects in the modern world is something that I wouldn't have if I were 100IQ! No complex software development, no amateur politics or philosophy, no $work, etc. I wouldn't be able to get much out of the posts here. I'd even have to play different video games. I've spent a few weeks really sick recently, and was a lot dumber than usual, and it sucked! I agree the kids won't be any less happy, or any less individually act-based 'moral', or love their family less, if they're 100IQ ... but mice can do that, there's a lot more to life that you can miss out on.

I think you have to get to, like, 70 IQ before you start despairing that your kids are going to fare no better than mice.

Well, yeah, but I'm responding to the argument that the kids will still be "successful and happy in their life" - mice can eat a lot of food from a cornfield and have a lot of pups, most of why we value being human are the specific experiences we have and the way we can take action in the world, and that's something you get a ton more of if you're smarter. It is just better, as an experience, to be a software developer or writer than it is to be a janitor. Even the music you can make, or appreciate, improves as you're smarter.

It seems to me like you are far too focused on the idea of children getting good genes. Having children isn't a eugenics program, it's something you do (or don't) because it's meaningful in itself. It sounds like your girlfriend is fine (it's not like she's a moron whose company you can't stand, or you wouldn't have made it this far), and your relationship is fine. The only problem seems to be that you're getting in your head about something that isn't even important.

Having children isn't a eugenics program, it's something you do (or don't) because it's meaningful in itself

The two aren't mutually exclusive. I want my children to be better than I am, with every possible advantage in life. Because I love them.

I find it bemusing that there are putative parents out there who don't strongly value their kids being taller, stronger, smarter, more driven and beautiful than them. And given that the state of the art in gene therapy is woefully behind what it could have been in a sensible universe where ludditism doesn't run rampant, the best way is to find someone with the kind of genes that contribute to making them that way.

I work harder than I need to, live my life very differently than I could if all I cared about was maximizing hedonism or my short term satisfaction, because I want to give my kids opportunities I didn't have, the same way my parents sacrificed so much for me and would do so again in a heartbeat if they were handed a time machine.

I wouldn't marry someone pretty and dumb, I take pains to make myself better so I can demand the best. Am I perfect? Hardly. Still, I bring enough to the table that I expect to keep someone happy, happy enough to have kids with me, who, mediated by the unavoidable roll of biological die, can turn out in many different ways.

I intend to load the dice in my favor, and I 100% endorse what @curious_straight_ca says. You can find someone you love and who you can look forward to making your kids the best off they could be.

What it sounds like is that you're more educated and wordcelly than your wifepartner is, not that you're so much smarter that having children with her is some sort of huge Life Efficiency loss.

Let's turn it around and say you're the prole dum-dum and she's the elite status genius. How would you feel if she harboured these doubts about you? Called it off because although you click on every level, she just doesn't want her kids to be stuck going to a state school because they inherited your midwit genes?

I can't imagine the feeling is good. Or maybe you're just that kind of pragmatist. My (less snarky) take: If you are lucky enough to meet a woman you love, then further that luck when that same woman loves you, and then you show yourself to be among the truly blessed and manage to be healthily and happily married, and then, miracle of miracles, get her pregnant and she carries the child to term and has a boy or girl with no complications, then you've really had an amazing good fortune that many in history have not. If you then have further children, then you're lucky beyond measure. To be sure, so are a lot of people, but then that's for lack of a better term survivorship bias.

My opinion here should be clear. HBD may be observable and to some degree predictable. Unlike many here I am not particularly interested in or swayed by that idea. Plus I'm probably more a romantic than not.

OP if you are high IQ as you claim, you will stop reading after this post. Unless you have a candidate ready to swap to immediately, as in you are currently having an affair with a high IQ high-class woman who wants to have your babies, you are embarking on a fool’s errand. Or are you very attractive and confident that there are many women willing to sleep with you? In that case maybe your thinking is sound.

For what it’s worth yes IQ is clearly heritable, but my dad was the “smart” one (bootstrapped out of poverty and worked as both an engineer and in finance) and my mom was below-average, in both cases the grandparents were peasant serfs with no more than a 5th grade education. And I am smarter than my father. So it’s not written in stone that your kids will be an exact average between 125 and 110, you might have a me and pop out a 130-135.

If you are lucky enough to meet a woman you love, then further that luck when that same woman loves you, and then you show yourself to be among the truly blessed and manage to be healthily and happily married, and then, miracle of miracles, get her pregnant and she carries the child to term and has a boy or girl with no complications, then you've really had an amazing good fortune that many in history have not.

This is probably the most spot on thing in the entire thread and I hope OP really takes it to heart. Not everyone is so lucky to get all these things, and it is foolish to throw away the good thing one has because "well maybe I could do even better". People who do that often live to regret making that choice, because it turns out they couldn't do even better.

Having some doubt after a while in a relationship is normal, and it does not surprise me that for a mottizen it expresses itself in this way. You should ask yourself whether you really think this, or whether you are rationalizing your own cold feet.

That said, being a strong proponent of some level of HBD as well, I can understand this fear. But there is nothing wrong with shape rotators or pragmatism. Arguably, the biggest biological winners of modernity where workers and farmers, while many intellectual families struggled to even keep their numbers steady despite living in splendour. I don't think history vindicated an attitude of intellectual genetic purity. Your children will still resemble you substantially, and maybe a little bit less depressive self-consciuousness might be a good thing. You say she has many desirable qualities; You should imo aim for such a good mix, instead of pure IQ-maxing (though I agree that IQ should be considered disproportionally due to its importance).

I'd argue that conscientiousness is at least as important as intelligence, so from a pure genetic perspective I'd be as mindful of that as much as intelligence.

If she is as much more conscientious as you are intelligent your kids will likely come out ahead of where you are.

Lastly, I'm sure most people have some doubts at about a year into a relationship and start window-shopping, usually overestimating their own market value. How desirable are you really to a partner? Perhaps this is the best you can do. Odds are that you did your best to get this relationship and that you can't do much better. That doesn't have to be the case for you but it's the likely case. Don't piss away a good thing just due to some strange internet reasons. If you're really worried then you can compensate by rolling the dice more times through having more children.

I think you mean you conscientiousness? Though contentiousness might be an entertaining quality as well.

Yeah, thanks. I've been a bit out of it lately.

I mean if you are not married then I would say that you should not marry right away. I do think that the IQ of the maternal family plays a role quite certainly so do think about it before marrying. She might have some really smart brothers maybe but I do not know how much I can say on a wellness Wednesday thread.

Do you like your wife? Do you think the world would be a better place with more people like your wife in it?

Yes and yes. That is a much healthier way of framing things, immediately makes me feel a lot better about having children, thanks!

It still however leaves the fear that i will feel alienated from my own children and the belief I have failed in endowing them with the capacity to achieve great things.

But it could just be projection from my much more intelligent father never saying he was proud of me or something.

(We are not married)

Sorry, sorry, potential wife.

It still however leaves the fear that i will feel alienated from my own children and the belief I have failed in endowing them with the capacity to achieve great things.

My children are not yet capable of a coherent conversation. I still find them wonderful and amazing; the last few months have been pretty tough, and interacting with my eldest has consistently been the largest source of genuine joy and contentment in my life, to the point that several times I've stepped away from crises with work to simply pick up and hold them.

There are times when I might have been tempted to claim that I was smarter than my wife. I know a lot more about history, philosophy, politics, pretty much anything academic, and she certainly lacks my encyclopedic knowledge of banal gun trivia. And yet, she is miles better at most practical matters than I am, and it turns out that those practical matters are extremely important every day of the week, while my academic knowledge is mostly useful for arguing on the internet. My life improved massively by all objective measures when I married her, and if I lost her it would immediately get much worse by those same objective measures, completely ignoring the emotional and personal factors.

If my children take after me, I hope my wife will be able to teach them a great deal of her practicality; my life would have certainly benefited from more of it. If my children take after her, then it will be my job to try to compress what insights I have down to a level their capability and inclination can make use of. Intellect that cannot be communicated has scant value. I am likely always going to be "smarter" than them, simply because I'm much older and have much more data and experience; the question isn't whether they're my intellectual equal, the question is whether my intellect is sufficient to the task of making good humans from scratch.

My father was quite critical, and I think I've inherited a double-portion of his critical nature, but this is something I'm aware of and can try to compensate for. I'm critical because I see how things could be better, and I want them to be better, but nothing gets improved without the motivation to strive, and criticism is not a good motivator for most people. So, again, the test of intelligence is not whether I can find flaws, but whether I can motivate improvement. I'm proud (and terrified) that my eldest can climb a ladder. I'm proud that they can hold a pencil. I need to cultivate and communicate this pride to them, teach them that focused, purposeful effort is the essence of value, that that I am proud of their growth.

More generally, I think the standard Rationalist discourse on intelligence is badly flawed. To put it bluntly, I do not observe a correlation between intelligence and "correctness" in any objective, holistic sense. Self-deception and rationalization scale in direct proportion to intelligence. Von Neumann was not, in fact, the God-Emperor of mankind; he was in the end successfully yoked to a society of his supposed inferiors, and his more unique ideas were thankfully discarded by those same supposed inferiors. Intelligence is not isomorphic to Goodness, but rather is values-neutral. There are no shortage of examples of the harms caused by intelligence turned to evil ends, and no reason to believe that a dramatic increase in intelligence, either on the individual or societal level, would alter the human condition in any fundamental way.

And yet, she is miles better at most practical matters than I am, and it turns out that those practical matters are extremely important every day of the week, while my academic knowledge is mostly useful for arguing on the internet

I suspect your wife is intelligent, and specializes in something different from you. Most people are not that intelligent, and are mediocre at both practical and intellectual tasks! You didn't randomly select a wife from the American population.

More generally, I think the standard Rationalist discourse on intelligence is badly flawed. To put it bluntly, I do not observe a correlation between intelligence and "correctness" in any objective, holistic sense

Do you think that, if society had an IQ cap of 100, we would understand quantum field theory, or general relativity, or have most of the technology we use so much? This is a bizzare statement. The average person mostly can't do algebra, and genuinely doesn't understand why they keep getting inflation when they vote for more spending and less taxation. Yes, smart people use their intelligence to be wrong in novel ways, but it's a process that in many areas converges.

Von Neumann was not, in fact, the God-Emperor of mankind; he was in the end successfully yoked to a society of his supposed inferiors

This is conflating the fact that Von Neumann's technical aptitude was controlled by highly intelligent people with social and political aptitude with strong progressive / democratic values guiding public opinion with a sense that Von Neumann was being guided by the People and their average intelligence.

but rather is values-neutral

If the world were entirely composed of 100 IQ people, the world would be so much worse by any reasonable set of values. We wouldn't have an internet, we'd be missing most treatments for currently existing diseases, we'd lose great art and music (Scott Alexander's brother is a famous musician. Coincidence? lol). This isn't neutral!

That was very beautifully said. I will notify you when I marry her.