I see this a lot on Tinder of all places. Lots of women identifying as "sapiosexuals" who claim to only care about intelligence.
Whatever happened to just being attracted to a good and kind person?
Whatever happened to just being attracted to a good and kind person?
Be very careful reading too much into what a woman says in these contexts. What's really conclusive is what she does.
She might say she wants this, this, that. Don't really take that at face value. What matters in the end is what she does not what she says.
How are you going to find someone's good/kindness from an online chat?
As an Asian, I disapprove this message.
A poor person understands that thousand dollars is more than ten dollars, and million dollars is more that thousand dollars. A poor person can recognize an expensive car; for a sufficiently poor person even the fact that someone owns a car already suggests certain level of wealth. Of course there are ways to make yourself appear more wealthy than you are -- the car may be rented, and you may actually be deep in debt -- and there are "invisible" forms of wealth -- no one knows how much you own in stocks or bitcoins -- but when you observe people, there is some correlation between how rich they are and how they live, and you don't need to be rich yourself to see the difference.
On the other hand, levels of intelligence that are above you seem pretty much the same. Not just intelligence, but also education, etc. If you know absolutely nothing about quantum physics, you may listen to Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra, and have no idea which one of them is right. Under specific experimental conditions you may be able to compare levels of intelligence above you, otherwise IQ tests would be impossible to construct for people smarter than the average psychologist -- a person who can solve puzzles 100 times faster than me is probably smarter than a person who can solve puzzles "only" 10 times faster than me -- but in normal life, when you meet two highly intelligent people in different circumstances, when they have different professions and different hobbies, it is difficult to compare them.
I guess what I am trying to say is that a person with IQ 100 and a person with IQ 150 can both be sapiosexual, but it will make the latter much more choosy. In other words, you cannot be a choosy sapiosexual unless you are intelligent yourself. (A person attracted to 50% of population probably would not label themselves as "sapiosexual", if all they mean is pretty much that they are not attracted to retarded people.)
However, I think it is possible for a less intelligent person to identify the most intelligent among 2-3 disagreeing smarter people if all of them is rational and accepts solid evidence/results of thought experiments AND the most intelligent is good at articulating his/her rationale for having a belief.
With this method, the perceiver must have a pretty high threshold of intelligence and rationality themselves in order to identify good reasoning and detect issues with bad reasoning/biases though.
Another method is looking at the results of several predictions in different domains. Assuming roughly equal initial expertise and data, the more intelligent should get more predictions right.
The latter method only requires knowledge/intuition of basic statistics.