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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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on the other hand, put this way I would not want to roll the dice on child genetic makeup either, girls are cutest when they're almost retarded but I imagine it hits differently when you're the father.

I mean her parents and brother aren't retarded, right? Won't she just revert to the mean with her genetic contributions most like?

It’s a strange sentiment to me… I’ve never really thought it or felt it. Idiocy in a girl kind of gives me a sinking feeling, “oh no… ugh.” Intelligence is interesting and makes me want to stick around. I guess I’m the odd duck if people are stating it so confidently, though.

I don't know, a bit of naivety in a girl is cute... but being able to keep up intellectually, and even contribute to an intellectual conversation, is beautiful.

A fresh and youthful attitude is lovely and joyous. Is that what people mean by retarded, do you think? What, do you have to be jaded and brooding to be intelligent?

Well, whatever. I’m in agreement with you in any case.

The best partner is both, imo. Half my jokes are silly stupid nonsense (I can't even count the number of times my wife and I have accused each other of being a "Sneef Snorf") and the other half are clever and elaborate constructions designed to sound like something reasonable and/or intelligent until they think about it for several moments and untangle the hidden meaning: which turns out to be silly stupid nonsense. I once wrote a two page short story with seemingly arbitrary fantasy and fairy tale features all to build up to the conclusion which was a sentence consisting of weird typos my wife (then girlfriend) had sent me while drunk the previous night.

I suppose someone less intelligent could still have appreciated the goof, but probably not to the same extent. Or wouldn't have taken the teasing in as much fun, as part of the embarrassment at her misspelling is because she ordinarily spells things correctly while sober. And someone less intelligent probably wouldn't have been able to respond to my hack MSPaint "photoshops" of our cat's head onto movie characters with an even higher quality photoshop of her own. And someone who took themselves seriously just wouldn't have appreciated the goofs at all.

You need both.

I still don’t get it. That sounds like regular silliness to me, not idiocy. Intelligence doesn’t preclude goofiness; good comics tend to be pretty bright, because they need to put their finger on the audience’s pulse.

But people seem to be talking, sometimes, about feeling attracted to “tee hee math is hard” kind of nonsense. And I don’t get it.

My guess is that they're being attracted to the silliness part of it and attributing the lack of intelligence as a cause of the silliness. Which potentially has some merit: I think there is a negative correlation between intelligence and silliness on average. I could be wrong, some people do just want to be way smarter than their partner, as some combination of pride and the ability to win arguments and control things, but I think most of it is correlations and stereotypes connecting intelligence to other things. If I had to choose between an intelligent bitter feminist constantly comparing everything I do to a historical dictator, and a sweet highschool dropout country girl with rocks for brains and a heart of gold, I'd choose the latter. If for some reason I was convinced that intelligence inevitably produced the former and wasn't aware of the exceptions I would have been tempted to join more unintellectual activities to try to find unintelligent women. Or just despaired and given up because I don't think they would like me even if I did like them.

The point being, I think some men do think this way. And I think statistically they're partially correct but missing plenty of exceptions.

I think there is a negative correlation between intelligence and silliness on average.

I disagree, particularly if we’re talking about verbal intelligence. The silliest people I know are highly intelligent, and they love to riff on things in goofy and ridiculous ways, yet surprisingly insightfully. It’s actually not-very-bright people who are most resistant to silly wordplay — they don’t get it!

I remember the first day I went to a gifted education program, which had an IQ cutoff, and the thing that stood out to me was that I finally met people who made silly jokes and found my silly jokes funny.

I think if we sat for IQ tests I would score higher than my girlfriend, but she’s also probably the smartest person I’ve dated and she’s sharp and analytical. Regardless, she’s definitely the silliest. I have a text file where I write down many of the silly things she says because I find them so hilarious. I was going to share these for Friday fun anyway, so here’s some choice selections:

I want to be an RNA so I can just affect you and go with you everywhere. I want to be in your body 100% of the time. It's not enough for me to just be close to you. I need to be enveloped by your cells.

Can you imagine an 18th century taxonomist out in the swamp, trying to measure a crocodile's penis in order to properly classify it?

People need to retain their inalienable right to suck mannequin dick without worrying about it being a dead guy.

(apparently this was a real story)

All children's authors are on the right amount of cocaine. Just the right amount of cocaine to get the right amount of whimsy. Roald Dahl, JK Rowling, CS Lewis are all massive cokeheads. I mean Dr. Seuss just had it dialed in, just the perfect amount.

I found a very interesting documentary for us to watch. It's about fungus.

(It was in fact a good documentary about mycelium.)

crocodile penis

Divorce this woman right now! Even if you're not married! Anyone ought to know that crocodilians have cloaca.

I jest. She sounds like a keeper, you're a lucky man and I look on in envy.

(Did the 18th century taxonomists know this? When I consider this more deeply, she might have a point.)

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Silly and indicating pop/stereotypical conception of aspects of the world/history. If she understands that her understanding is in fact surface level, sure.

If however she considers herself your equal (given your high minded posting history, I am comfortable putting you at least a step above a person who thinks bodyparts were measured of alice subjects), than you have the worst of both worlds. A chip on her shoulder, but without the receipts to justify it.

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I’m not personally sold on the correlation myself. Plenty of dumb harpies out there. Meanwhile, the smart women I know (NOT identical to academics) are generally pretty nice, including to me, a man.

Now, what I do see a correlation on is deference. A smart woman is more likely to challenge you on things and assert her own opinion, and less likely to take what you say at face value, holding kindness constant. This is simply because they’re more capable of going toe to toe on the details on account of their intelligence. So if you say something stupid, a smart woman will call you out, possibly nicely, but certainly accurately. And she’ll bring receipts. So for a man who likes to impress his woman (all men), this can be a bit of a challenge. Does she still like me and look up to me? Chances are yes, but it’s something a little galling. It’s like a man doing better with a child or animal - a sort of personalized, gendered insult.

So maybe that’s where it comes from. For me, dumb is such a dealbreaker that I can’t really look past it. But attraction is one of those things where people can never really see eye to eye, and I guess that’s a good thing in itself.

For the sake of argument:

Dude with an IQ of 130. Girl with an IQ of 90. Her parents and sibling are roughly 130.

The heritability of IQ is between 0.5-0.8. Let's run with 0.6.

Mid parental IQ is 110.

Deviation from population mean: 110 - 100 = 10 With heritability of 0.6: Expected deviation = 10 * 0.6 = 6

Expected IQ = 100+6 = 106

My understanding is that this would have an SD of about 10-15 points.

If the girl too had an IQ of 130, the expected value would be 118, which is a big jump.

I'm not quite sure how to account for the fact that in the 90 IQ scenario, the girl is more likely to have environmental contributors that lower IQ rather than genetic issues. I'm not Cremieux. All else being equal, 12 IQ points is a big deal! I'd pay a lot to have my kids come out with an additional 12 points. I would fistfight a dog smaller than a labrador for a mere five.

I don’t know about the chick described in the OP, but in my Lived Experience women are smarter than you (the general you) think. That is, women’s IQs are higher than what their personalities would suggest—as holding IQ constant, on average women are more basic and boring than men.

Men have the burden of performance. Hence women being less (intentionally) funny than men, and women consistently, signficantly underperforming men in knowledgability tests, despite only a modest IQ gap if you’re Hanania-pilled. I doubt, in a hypothetical where their life is on the line, an above-Lizardman’s-Constant proportion of people would pick a randomly selected woman over a randomly selected man to win a trivia game to save their life.

The basicness is amplified for young attractive women, who are generally kind of “retarded” and clueless about the world, even if you know that their grades and test scores are/were high. Talking to a given hot chick outside of her preferred topics such as herself, TV/movies, make-up/fashion, celebrity gossip, or interpersonal drama runs the risk of her finding you WEIRD or—ironically enough, BORING—just as you might talk to a little kid about his or her favorite toys, movies/TV shows, school friends to keep him or her engaged. I suppose there is no reason to be interesting or knowledgable when you’ve been coddled all your life, and people will pay attention to, help, and accomodate you no matter what.

So the IQ gap between oneself and retarded hot chick [X] might be surprisingly small. And thus marrying a retarded hot chick doesn’t necessarily mean dooming your kids to be mid IQ-wise, or possibly retarded themselves.

Your calculations using the input assumptions look correct, but I question the applicability of the inputs to most situations smart young men would find themselves in, given assortative mating and homophilic social sorting (“Different Worlds” and Young Earth Creationists come to mind). A 40-point IQ gap is pretty vast for just an acquaintanceship to be made and maintained, much less a potential relationship.

A typical 130-IQ young man likely doesn’t have that many <= 90-IQ people in his social circle. Even without social sorting/assortative mating, <=90 IQ people are only 25% of a population with a mean of 100 and an SD of 15. If one’s social circle has a still-pretty-modest average IQ of 115 and an SD of 15, this already drops to under 5%. He likely doesn’t have too many prospects from online dating, social media, or IRL cold approaches (each of which would still have some social sorting and assortative mating). Plus, in your hypothetical, the girl’s offspring IQ would likely regress to a higher mean than 100 given her parent and sibling IQs.

I'd pay a lot to have my kids come out with an additional 12 points. I would fistfight a dog smaller than a labrador for a mere five.

If that dog is a near-labrador-sized member of the Breed of Peace: after the nannying experience, you might not still be around to see a given kid come out.

I don’t know about the chick described in the OP, but in my Lived Experience women are smarter than you (the general you) think. That is, women’s IQs are higher than what their personalities would suggest—as holding IQ constant, on average women are more basic and boring than men.

In the specific me, I'd say I'm pretty good about gauging how smart women are. I know plenty of them are incredibly basic despite, by other objective metrics, being highly successful. The number of female colleagues here who are whip-sharp docs while being enthusiastic fans of Love Island aren't low at all.

I've ended relationships because the women in question were either too dumb, too boring, or both. And I have met one (or two, perhaps three) who were both attractive and interesting, or at least able to hold a conversation.

In this particular case, I think I'm quite well founded in my belief that she's not smart. She has no real interests beyond partying and makeup, she told me she always struggled in school and whatever "educated housewife" degree she did was for the sake of it, and she'd wistfully say that her brother was both the smart one, and that he looked down on her because of it. And the questions she sometimes asked me, it was like meeting someone from an uncontacted tribe...

Your calculations using the input assumptions look correct, but I question the applicability of the inputs to most situations smart young men would find themselves in, given assortative mating and homophilic social sorting (“Different Worlds” and Young Earth Creationists come to mind). A 40-point IQ gap is pretty vast for just an acquaintanceship to be made and maintained, much less a potential relationship.

Not on a dating app! I was swiping on pretty faces, and only filtering later. This current boyfriend met her during a modeling gig, and that means that the IQ in the room was probably not much hotter than room temperature (in Fahrenheit).

If that dog is a near-labrador-sized member of the Breed of Peace: after the nannying experience, you might not still be around to see a given kid come out.

I probably wouldn't beat a Velvet Hippo. I'd just try and protect my genitals, so that they could suck out some sperm IDF-style when they found my half-eaten corpse. For the sake of argument, I'll recalibrate it to labradoodle or smaller.

when it comes to IQs the testing is done so the population mean for men and women are both 100. i assume you could alter the composition of questions so men or women as a group had a higher mean than the other group. so your impression of women's IQs being lower than what a test might show could be because you are measuring based on aspects that men generally do better than women.

Maybe I misunderstand you, but this is imo calculated the wrong way. Presumably, most of the dudes family is also 130 IQ, and you already explicitly spelled out that her parents and siblings are all 130 IQ. If the expected child IQ of a 130 IQ pairing from a 130 IQ wider family is actually 118 ... What astronomical luck did the families have up to then?

First, heritability is a red herring, since we're not in an adoption study or similar situation. These are rich parents raising their own rich daughter. The relevant factor is regression to the mean, which is generally estimated to be ca 0.5, i.e. if you take your spousal IQ_s, and compare it to the population mean IQ_p you're descended from, then you're kids IQ will be roughly (IQ_s + IQ_p)/2.

The population mean you regress to is generally speaking that of your actual sub-population, which is your wider family; Ideally you also know the IQ of your grandparents and uncles and aunts, that improves the estimate further. It's not always 100, which is a very common misconception. It's generally trivially acknowledged for clear examples, such as ethnic ashkenazi jewish among gentiles, but it even holds among seemingly homogenous groups. The reason you see regression towards 100 is partially that assortative mating in superficially homogenous groups is only moderate, so usually there is some difference between the respective spousal family background, and partially an artifact of averaging. But it certainly holds for ethnically separated groups with rather strict assortative mating as is typical in large parts of India, as I understand it.

So the expected child IQ of a 130 IQ pairing from a 130 IQ wider family is simply 130. With a single spouse at 90, the spousal average becomes 110 instead, and the final number after regression is around 120. Still a 10 point difference though, so I guess not a big difference on that account.

Goddammit, I knew I'd done something wrong. I was actually aware that it's not correct to use the population mean of 100, but I was unsure how to account for it. Thank you for the correction.