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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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:
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)
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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