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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 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?
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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 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.
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