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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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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.