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Wellness Wednesday for April 17, 2024

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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Lower IQ filter down to >120 (80thp) as opposed to ~135(99p).

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.

Attractive.. okay keep this one, but don't be a k-drama protagonist about this

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.

Politics - For the most part, drop this.

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.

Also I doubt this woman meets all these filters. I mean what are the odds right? You have rose tinted glasses on.

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.

first grade teacher

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.

120 (80thp)

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:

|  IQ   | p     |
|-------|-------|
| 140   | 0.996 |
| 135   | 0.990 |
| 120   | 0.909 |
| 112.6 | 0.800 |
| 110   | 0.748 |
| 108   | 0.703 |

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.