[ExI] shining example and COVID-19

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 12:49 PM SR Ballard <sen.otaku at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think high-IQ women actually are actually choosing to not have children,
> rather than lack of appropriate mates. They believe (correctly in most
> cases) that children will limit their ability to do the kind of work they
> enjoy doing. Without nannies, there won’t really be anyone to take care of
> the kids, as she likely selected a high-IQ mate.
>

### Yes, there is an element of lack of love in this situation. It appears
to me that in a lot people the love for their children is an afterthought -
they don't start out with much of a desire to have children but once
exposed to the smiles and cuteness they do develop parental feelings. This
is not surprising - under natural conditions having children was to a large
extent an effect of sex drive rather than a desire to have children. We
evolved to have a sex drive - in men a simple desire to have sex with
fertile and healthy females, in women a bit more complex drive strongly
modified by hypergamy, the interest in powerful rather than merely pretty
men. Since men can potentially have children with negligible effort, men
don't need to be too picky about short-term mates, although we still need
to be careful about the quality of long-term mates. For women having a
child is inevitably more costly and therefore women have to choose their
mates, even short-term mates, very carefully. This explains female
hypergamy. Either way, children happen as a result of drives that do not
consciously consider children.  After a child is born, however, it must be
supported and protected from human and non-human predators, which is why we
evolved to trigger parental feelings after exposure to one's own child, and
to a lesser extent, on exposure to younger siblings.

The above psychological setup is an evolutionary hack that worked well
under natural conditions but it fails miserably now. For example, most
girls are not exposed to younger siblings during puberty, and the
development of their parental feelings is weakened. And it's much easier to
satisfy sex drive without having children, thanks to contraceptives and
porn. Another factor is signaling. Under natural conditions, the survival
of a woman's children depended not only on the social status of their
father(s) but also on the social status of the woman. Women are driven to
raise their social rank among other women, and today this drive finds a
proxy outlet in careerism. To advance her career, a woman needs to signal
conscientiousness, intelligence and conformity, and thus she ends up
wasting her best child-bearing years in college, separated from children,
engaging in unproductive sex and beavering away at credentials.

So, yes, women today don't have as much love as their ancestors used to,
and thus fewer children are born.

And don't get me started on what's wrong with young men today, those whiny
bastards.

---------------------


>
> However, lots of people who are high-IQ show some traits that might belong
> to the “Asperger” family, and their children are likely to have more of
> these traits than either individual parent. This would limit the ability of
> such children to produce offspring.
>

### This is a pretty complicated subject, hard to address in a post. Autism
is associated with low IQ but then high-IQ is mildly associated with some
autistic traits. Hard to tell what is the overall impact on general
fertility but I would think it's relatively minor.

Rafał
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