As they say, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Some like women curvy, some like them slim. Some people prefer Roman noses, others prefer snub noses. My wife is beautiful; some might disagree but their opinion doesn't matter.
Above average intelligence is even easier to find. That's partly because many men are intimidated by smart women, and partly because "above average intelligence" often just means "common interests". You want to find a woman who can hold an interesting conversation with you on topics you care about.
It's true that people's aesthetic tastes may differ in some ways, but they do converge in most ways. There's a reason why supermodels are almost universally considered attractive. So not only is this guy ruling out 99% of the girls out there, he's competing with almost everyone for the remaining 1%.
But that's not even the main point of my comment. Even if he was only willing to date girls in the "top 1 percent", that might still be achievable if he used a filtering process that can semi-reliably identify girls in that group who are single and potentially interested in him. But that's not what he's doing. He's going on a blind date with a completely random girl, once per week. If you're extremely selective in what you're looking for, but are relying on a low-frequency completely-random-sampling strategy, of course that's never going to work.
That said, me analyzing the heck out of what is obviously a humorous post, is probably not helping me achieve any of my life goals either.
It's also the same with "beauty". Even industries that hire primarily based on beauty (modeling, acting etc) have widely differing criteria based on their own niche in the marketplace. American models are quite different to British models, for e.g. The French magazines require a different look to, say, German magazines. Catalogue models vs editorial models. Throughout Europe, various markets require different heights, different looks and different personas. That doesn't even take into account racial differences across the world.
No, he's not. From the article: "beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population."
He's assuming a normal distribution but he's not assuming a universal agreed standard of beauty.
Is Tristan Miller well known? Is he a leader in his field? Is he wealthy or otherwise successful?
http://www.girlsaskguys.com/sexual-behavior/a22977-girls-on-...