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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.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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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.