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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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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Notes -
Had a second date today. She's great. I mean, great. Just objectively an obscene number of things in common, but different enough to be interesting, and the chemistry was there. Never felt this way really, although one other time was in the ballpark (...and then I moved out of state).
Unfortunately, she learned today that she's "definitely" leaving the state for work related reasons, permanently, in a month. If I had any sense, I'd've walked away when she gave me this news, early on in the date, along with the suggestion that I do so. Instead, I'm going to just ignore this fact, I guess, despite my dating goal being "a very serious relationship at a minimum" - next date Saturday. Why ignore this fact? Well:
there's some reasons (omitted for anonymity) to believe it's more "probably" than "definitely"
genuinely enjoying the dates
market research
And it's not even a "well, let's at least get laid" kind of thing (or I'd just text my ex instead of being back on the apps...). I wouldn't be shocked if we do sleep together, but I might actually try not to, in the interest of not getting hurt more than necessary. Might, anyway.
At a minimum, I think I've just found the bar by which future secretarial interviews will be judged. At a maximum, hell, I work remotely and make rash decisions sometimes - maybe I leave the state, too. I "definitely" won't do that. Even if she stays, I think long term she leaves, but by that point it'd be not crazy to imagine following.
I do in fact realize the above is rashly strong, I really do. The saner takeaway here is that I should approach dating more seriously, more optimistically, and with higher standards - women like that do exist. But damn, if not for the atomization of society, the tendency of high achievers to move around so much; if we'd met in some small town before the internet, the outcome would, with reasonable probability, be the obvious and happy one.
I did some napkin math. With 3.5M people in my greater metro area (~1 hour driving radius), I estimate 22 potential matches (though she clears a bar more than a bit higher):
I can't decide if 22 is good news or not. I lean "good news" but finding 'em is a bit elusive.
I hate to tell you this, but a lot of those variables go together. The odds that a woman who is age 25-34, smart, attractive, and good personality is also single are... not high lol.
My advice is to focus less on looks
Yeah, the single filter should probably be stronger, given the correlation you point out. But, most other places, the math has the opposite problem, so maybe it cancels out.
Attractiveness is really not the thing I'm being picky on - I don't think this advice is relevant to me here. This particular woman is quite sufficiently attractive, but (to repeat myself) she could be significantly less attractive and I'd still feel this way. Even removing that filter entirely, the numbers don't shift much. If anything, IQ is the interesting point to argue over I think.
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99% IQ? I know we are supposed to be kind in this particular thread. But...are you sure you're in the top 1%? What is going on with this filter setting? It is nice to have a smart partner, but I think expecting top 1% is a bit of a high bar and not worth it. Are you starting a biotech company with her or just looking for a bit of sparkling conversation on a car ride?
That being said, on an unrelated note, I did appreciate your arguments against sexual intercourse with black out drunk women and I agree that is a bad thing. Unlike a lot of people in that thread.
Top 1% is good, but it's something you see all the time.
If you imagine a typical 100 people in whatever school you went to, take a random 100, and on average, one of them is in the top 1%. That's over 3 million people in the US!
I expect a website that filters for willingness to write longform text might easily get to the point where top 1% IQ is far more commonly represented than among the general population. I'd also expect people with the username "@lagrangian" to have higher IQ.
That said, I'm slightly less willing to trust the 145 IQ, though it's still very possible. Looking it up, 0.1% of people are at 145 or higher. But I don't know how lagrangian evaluated his own, as I wouldn't trust random internet IQ tests, especially on the tails.
It's also worth keeping in mind that each unit of IQ might not be the same (whatever that means), as it's just forced into a bell curve.
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Yes. I'd guess 140-145 IQ, based on various standardized tests/competitions/comparison to peers. I'd wager she's smarter. (Insert some standard disclaimers about IQ being stupid, especially out at the tails; I mean all of the above more about intelligence than IQ, let alone IQ as measured by any particular test.)
It's possible that it's a pure coincidence that the strongest connections I've felt to people, platonic or romantic, male or female, have all been to people this bright. But, I doubt it, and the causality isn't difficult to imagine. Shared life experiences and interests, and a sense that they can see more of me than "that smart guy." Somehow this all matters even when we're not talking about anything that requires being smart
Thank you, shit, that was not the proudest of themotte I've ever been. OTOH, it's nice to know I don't quite fit every stereotype here, and to have something to point to as foil to when I explain to someone "look I'm really not that conservative, it just sounds that way sometimes".
Wait, where was that?
E.g. here, although in fairness 1) "sexual intercourse with black out drunk women" isn't quite what was being advocated for by others, and 2) I freely admit (as I did then) that my (extremely sleep deprived) prose on the subject was not super well organized. Still, yeah, shocking to me to see how the votes settled.
Wow, that's bad. Some of that's probably attributable to the thread starting with "what's rape?", meaning that some people certainly thought "that's immoral, but it's not rape, properly speaking" but yeah, that's worse than I was expecting.
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Bit of a digressive tangent here.
I feel like there has kind of been IQ inflation along with grade inflation in this kind of space. I have some smart friends. One might be in that range but he needs to run a "human suit/suite" program to operate on regular human level and it is just so funny that I can't help but make references and ask how his calculations are going when he stalls out.
He did, finally, by trial and error, snag an autistic Asian wife who works at MIT and believes 100% that mermaids are real things, they have a beautiful baby girl now. Which begs the question. Wouldn't a truly genius level intelligence be able to seamlessly navigate any waters? John von Neumann being a good example.
My understanding of IQ is holistic, I'm not a believer in being good at emotions and bad at math or a great wordsmith and terrible shape rotator, or working on space lasers and believing in Merpeople. If you're smart, you're smart, if you can truly model the future quickly in your mind you should be able to handle any information thrown at you, regardless of type.
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About a month after I met my husband, I got a great job offer that would have required me to move out of state. I turned it down because it had been a long time since I had met anybody I liked as much as him. A lot can happen in a month!
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I don't have anything to add, but love the post and the math. Makes me think of a Fermi paradox equation for incels!
Ha, thanks, yeah.
Uh, not-so-thanks? I wonder what fraction of this board is any way incels. I've had at least reasonable luck with these things over the years, and maybe I'm projecting, but wouldn't expect otherwise of most people here. We've got a lot of articulate and gainfully employed people - I picture mostly NEETs when I hear "incel."
Incel isn't really the word I was thinking of, I'd edit to "romantic relationship matching" if you hadn't already replied to the post.
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Quick story of long-distance relationship success - I started dating my wife about three months before she was scheduled to move to another city. Within a month of us getting together, I had her just move in with me since she was at my apartment nearly every day anyway and could save on a couple month's rent by leaving early. She moved, then we flew back and forth for two years before I finally got a job in her new city. We still live in the new city a decade later and have happily ever after.
I'm going to be corny and say that while your math might be wrong on the specifics of the 22, if you're actually infatuated with her, it's entirely possible that you'll never meet another one like her, or that it'll take years to do so. Unless you have a history of demonstrating unusually poor judgment in relationships, I say fuck it, do everything you can to be with her. I did and it made my life immeasurably better.
I've liked your advice before, we'll see. Thanks for the anecdote. I'm surprised to find that your comment here, and the similar sentiment in a few others, has at least moved me from "obviously not happening" to "very unlikely to happen." It's not really my MO to take risk or be able to picture life being great, but maybe that's stupid in this context. Patiently always buy index funds may be a better strategy in the financial case than the romantic one...
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22 is fucking terrible. Way too many filters.
Also I doubt this woman meets all these filters. I mean what are the odds right? You have rose tinted glasses on.
I really don't think so. It's easy living in a bubble of smart people to forget what p80 intelligence looks like. The least smart person I've ever dated was a first grade teacher, and presumably she was at least above average, leaving not a ton of room, if any, from her to p80. I really wanted to believe it wouldn't matter, but it just did. My real preference is probably steeper than p99, and Ms. Definitely clearly is past there. I'm fairly sure she's smarter than me, and I know I'm comfortably past p99. It doesn't hurt that often, and in this case, IQ correlated with gainful employment.
I'm really not trying to be, with my factor of 3 on that. Note that I didn't put "top 1/3" attractiveness - the intention is to filter out some at the top, filter out more at the bottom, and aim for some objective notion of at least modestly above average. She easily is, and fits a number of my specific preferences that are neutral to most people. She could be a fair amount less attractive and it wouldn't have changed my reaction.
Note also that by "attracted" (factor of 3), I meant "attracted to me" not "I'm attracted to her". I'm alright looking, but appearance certainly isn't my top selling point.
All that said, I think there may be some redundancy between these two factors, and between them and everything else. I.e. women who are smart, age appropriate, personality match etc are more likely than random women to be attractive/attracted to me.
I put a light factor here (2) intentionally. I don't need her to be a Mottizan, just not to hate me for having weird opinions on things from time to time. This also filters out e.g. strongly religious people.
Rose tinted glasses in general, entirely possible. As to the specific factors, I think they're all there, but it's possible she misses on "attracted to me" (I don't think so, but hard to say, and these things take time especially for women sometimes), "politics" (we've gotten into it some, but not that much - the lack of it coming up is in itself actually almost enough to check this box) and "personality" (I don't think so at all, but don't know her that well just yet). There's zero doubt that she's within an hour drive, human, female, age appropriate, highly intelligent, attractive, and single.
Based only on this, aren't the average elementary education majors IQ's 108 based on the old SAT data? The gap between 108 and 120 is still pretty healthy.
Am I messing up the IQ quantile conversion, or was there an error up-thread? Using a normal with mean 100, and SD 15 I get:
So a relaxation to a requirement of 120 would only be a 10x wider filter rather than 20x.
Yeah I dun goofed, I came up with those off the top of my head.
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I do wonder about these filters.
For IQ it depends on how much you value producing high IQ children. I assume it's pretty hard to estimate the distribution for outcomes, but if you were to go down to 110 like @2D3D suggests, it might be unreasonably hard to relate to both your wife and your children... I suppose if you're willing to go down the embryo selection road, but then you would also have to find a partner who would also be into that.
Attractive—where does 1 in 3 here conditional on 25-34 and high IQ place them on absolute attractiveness? I would assume given youth, iq, and contentiousness the person would be well above average in attractiveness to start with. Even if only from the correlated likely socioeconomic advantages they enjoyed growing up. I mean, how many ugly people do you see walking around the campus of say Stanford?
For politics a 1 in 2 filter would be compatible, but not necessarily exactly aligned? Given how niche the politics of someone who posts regularly on the Mott probably are, I suppose it would be hard to filter any more generously without admitting intolerable incompatibility.
That's valid. It's plausible I could weaken this filter. Some of the point of it was to remove women who are too attractive to be into me. I tend to find them paradoxically unattractive anyway: give me a t-shirt over gratuitously well put together outfits and makeup any day. The personality filter also does some of the work on that front.
I don't think I could remove it, though. Especially by my age bracket, a fair number of people are getting out of shape, and that's not ideal.
As to the specific question re: absolute attractiveness, I guess the target is 6-8, although I've always found the numbers weird. Like, is this linear? Are we measuring against only the same age, or if not, how broad a range? Do we include my specific preferences? At any rate, Ms. Definitely is great on this front, very much my cup of tea.
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110 is too low? Goddamn this forum really is full of bigbrains.
I kind of assumed, based on a vague recollection of OP's claimed achievements, username (as implied major), and desire for a 135+ IQ partner that their (maybe self assessed?) IQ was at least 140. In that if it were "only" 135 it would be unreasonable to set a lower bound at 135.
At 140, the gap to 110 is 30 points, which is the same gap as 100 to 70. Or average to borderline intellectually disabled. I do think it's possible for 140 paired with 110 to work, which is why I put it as conditional on the relationship you expect with your children. Like there is a whole set of life experiences you likely will never be able to share with your children. That's sort of based off of a crude model of averaging parents IQ and assessing a 10 point regression to the mean, (140 + 110) / 2 - 10 = 115. I'd be pretty interested if someone has a less ad-hoc way of calculating this.
It can at least work in fiction though, season 6 episode 9 of House "Ignorance Is Bliss" has an IQ 178 married to an IQ 87.
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I honestly would say 110 is a tolerable minimum. Super smart partners are nice to have, but what relationships are maintained on are graciousness and patience, on top of the other normal social capabilities like geniality. I specify IQ in relation to graciousness and patience because low IQ people really have little concept of delayed gratification and so will want to address any perceived slight immediately instead of stopping to let the incident stew a bit and decide whether confrontation, much less escalation, is necessary.
I am surprised that geographic distance is not a listed function here. Its easy to daydream about your ideal Croatian waifu waiting for you to sweep her off her feet, but that has little connection to reality when you're still slaving at a bulge bracket in Midtown or whatever.
See the thing is, I get real tired of hearing stupid people talk, and there's an awful (or delightful) lot of that in dating. It's great being able to talk about things in my life and know she has context on them. I hear this point about overvaluing a woman's intelligence/career frequently (e.g. here), but strenuously disagree. At some point I'd try proving myself wrong on that again, but I am not there.
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Not that I know much about IQ but it’s hard to believe that character is circumscribed to this degree by intelligence. ‘Patience is a virtue that can be cultivated’ seems to hold true below the 110IQ cutoff point, even if there are retarded people who can genuinely never grasp it the best predictor of whether someone is patient (above or below that threshold) is simply whether they value patience (whether through religion, personality, experience, and so as not to disagree too much with you - reasoning).
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He said 1 hour drive in his metro.
My bad, I saw 3.5m and mentally added 3 0s to reach 3.5b and went 'hmm every woman in the world. ok I respect that but damn'
If this guy filtered down to 22 from 3B, I would personally find him and slap him
Yeah, I think that'd be evidence I pulled a Peter from the lab leak debate. OTOH, 22 from my metro area makes me think my filters are somewhere between reasonable and slightly picky, especially in context of being myself somewhat of an atypical individual (but a fairly "modal Mottizan" - I can't seem to find that post...)
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If it turns out that that she rates you as highly as you rate her, why not go with her?
30 year fixed rate mortgage is a helluva drug. I've also finally started making local friends in the last couple years, since buying the house, which was half the point of buying the thing: to make myself stay put.
And, she's leaving in a month. If it were even three to six, I could have enough data to not feel like a crazy person. Stranger things have happened, but I just don't see doing it.
That said, it wouldn't be the first time in recent history I failed to predict my own behavior re: moving and major life decisions, although the other time I decided to stay rather than take the much better job out of state. I suppose I'm going to not think about this possibility too hard, keep going on dates, and see if it feels even modestly less crazy closer to D[efinitely leaving]-day.
It's also not obvious if she rates me as highly as I her. Highly I think, but there's some gender asymmetry here where, especially once she moves to $EVEN_LARGER_CITY, men like me are somewhat common (albeit still not super common); women like her aren't common, anywhere (...I think, pretty strongly, but ??). The assumption that she's leaving town makes it hard to read certain things, since all I can trivially infer from her going out with me is that she like me enough to burn some time with before the move.
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99% iq looks like a major bottleneck. Are you that certain you can't be happy with 90%?
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