Dark Academia, The Sapiosexuality Hypothesis, And Critique of High-IQ Societies

One of my less important and skippable posts. It has some really interesting ideas that I'm going to implement very soon, but it's not very well developed or explained too clearly, just like a first draft touching upon the basics of the project that I have now, which is much more developed and that I have tried to express in a better way.

You could read if you're curious, but I suggest you don't waste your valuable time if you're not, and just keep checking out my blog every few weeks or months and keep an eye out for a title similar to this one, with a similar theme, possibly also having Dark Academia in the title. Though this post does have one idea that I'm not going to repeat in the new post, but in one other post about friendship, and in much greater detail; just the sapiosexuality hypothesis extended to friends in general, and for every interest and value instead of just sexual preference and intelligence.

I'm going to create such a post soon, and that's going to be a different kind of post because it won't just talk about abstract ideas like I do in most of my important posts, but ideas as well as practical implementable realistic projects grounded in reality and pragmatic and feasible enough to be implemented right away which is the reason I wish to get started on it as soon as possible.

In this post, I'm going to talk about groups of people who value knowledge and learning, and then connect it with findings from social and positive psychology.

I have this hypothesis that philomaths or sapiosexuals- or really anyone who loves knowledge or has intellectual interests and hobbies- are themselves intelligent people and that there is a significant amount of overlap with logophiles and philomaths, and I wanted to propose this theory and find out how many of you can relate, and what you think about it.

I came up with this idea while researching about different sexualities and sexual preferences, and while trying to learn more about sapiosexuality, and to me it sounded more like a preference than a sexuality, but that's irrelevant to the present discussion, so here's the idea.

As I understand it, Sapiosexuality is being attracted to high intelligence rather than other superficial physical traits that most people find attractive. Keeping aside the issue that we don’t even know what “intelligence” is, because there are as many theories as there are researchers, here’s the idea.

I came across this while thinking what sort of person I want to be later in my life, and even though now I have come closer to where I started from by identifying some of my core virtues or values I prize, such as lifelong learning and rationality, it took a lot of introspection and soul-searching, and I wish to focus on one of the frameworks that I used while trying to discover my true values.

The framework I’m talking about is a technique I came across to help you determine what sort of person you wish to grow into, and what you should focus on if you’re interested in self-improvement and being your best self, and it involves reflecting on what sort of attributes and qualities your ideal partner or companion would have, then working from there. In other words, think about the qualities your role model or ideal companion or partner would have, and try to cultivate those values in yourself.

Let me explain this, but I remembered that there is another theory I have that involves Freud and psychoanalysis and a complicated way for people with low self esteem and inferiority complex to have a subconscious desire to boost their ego by finding similar people whom they praise because that’s what psychology tells us they’d do and in turn face cognitive dissonance if they don’t apply it to themselves but let’s not get into it right now.

It was just one of those weird and interesting ideas my brain generates from time to time, like today morning, when I realized that technically your brain has attachment issues unless you're a determinist, and the brain is an insecure parasite that attaches to an illusory 'self' because it's too uncomfortable with itself, or the idea that when in fact there is no free will and it's just our brain, and the idea of how brain tells us that we must have free will and we are in control of it.

But it's the brain itself that's sentient, but then again being immaterial the brain prolly isn't even sentient itself, but sentience arises out of it and so it kind of also is, but then how is it able to think about itself and also not know about its own ability to be sentient.. okay, I'll stop. I thought trying to explain would be a bad idea, turns out my brain was right.

Coming back to the main topic: my point is, I don’t know how true that theory about ideal partners is, but I have applied it to friendship and found it really helpful to stop trying to fit in with people who don’t have the same levels of motivation, ability and interests as me, and I’m much more satisfied this way, even if a bit lonely. Being surrounded by people you have to pretend to fit in with and being lonely is always better than being alone and being lonely.

It’s like going in reverse with the theory. Sapiosexuals, Philomaths and other groups of people that are attracted to knowledge and learning would prefer people who are highly intelligent, so they may try to themselves cultivate qualities and train their cognitive abilities to become or at least appear highly intelligent and engage in intellectual hobbies and have interests in similar domains that require high cognitive ability.

I don’t know if they’d do it, but at least logically it seems to check out, because if they really are attracted to highly intelligent people, then they’d be similar to them, because social psychology tells us that people who like each other have similar values, desires and interests, and the reverse also holds true; people with similar preferences are more likely to be friends and partners. And so sapiosexuals are more likely to be philomaths, bibliophiles and logophiles than the average occurrence of such people in the population.

This is just a theory, I need to empirically test it first, but first I need to know if people who identify as sapiosexuals actually engage in such activities and have the interests that my theory predicts they’d have. So kind of a subjective psychological test, but it's not even that, because I think it's supposed to follow some sort of rules or structure, but whatever.

By being philomaths or polymaths, for instance, they’d be more likely to be similar to the person they’d like to have as their partners, and so more likely to be discovered by another person who shares their interests and preferences.

So once you have the qualities and attributes you value, you could work on cultivating them in yourself, so you can be more at peace with yourself, be happy being by yourself, and paradoxically also make it more likely that you attract the sort of people who are similar to you and so have the qualities you wish to have in an ideal partner.

I think this would work because similarity in values and interests is one of the strongest predictors of how much you are going to like a person, and moreover, you already wish the qualities you're yourself aspiring to cultivate in yourself, so it only follows that sooner or later the people who have the same preferences as you would come across you sooner or later, because company is important, who you spend time with largely determines who you are, people seek different things in relationships, and as social psychology tells us, birds of a feather do flock together, metaphorically speaking, at least in this case.

This also ties in with my critique of high IQ societies and my suggestion to improve them. One is measuring motivation, and the other is creating communities like this one, where members are united by values rather than natural abilities, even though both are a product of chance and pretty much immutable, one is more deeply prized, and more importantly a better predictor of social connection, as it’s an established finding in social psychology that the metaphor ‘birds of a feather flock together’ holds true for humans too.

In high IQ societies all that people have is some raw natural ability, but that means very little if they’re not motivated, because I suspect that motivation might be even more important than IQ, as IQ is necessary but not sufficient by itself to achieve great goals, but motivation might be, and it might also be a more accurate and reliable predictor of talent and future potential. I explored this more deeply in my post analyzing the Unabomber. These societies face other challenges as well, but I won't get into them here.

Plus I feel like we need more societies built around common values, communities that are built around people who share the same values and preferences, such as dark academia and sapiosexual communities, because that unites people who are similar in what they want out of their life, not something they just happen to have by chance and doesn’t tell anything about them, even though it’s still largely chance, but then again I’m biased in favour of determinism and randomness.

This also relates to something I have written about in my blog post titled 'Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal' which essentially explains how imitation is driven by a deep-seated desire to share and connect with others over shared experiences and aesthetics. I encourage you to check it out; it's a beautiful idea.

The societies I’m talking about could be built around values and principles like lifelong learning, compassion, polymathy or rationality, and to do that we need to develop these terms more rigorously and define them more exactly to remove all the ambiguity and have conditions under which they hold true.

This also ties in with one of my projects that involves rigorously and formally defining all values using logical and mathematical language, or at least come up with a framework to truly discover determine an individual’s true values and interests using the scientific method and tools from various disciplines and getting them a step closer to self-actualization, or what activities would maximize the likelihood of them achieving their ambitions and goals aligned with their true interests, desires, values and abilities, and live a fulfilling life.

It would also be immensely helpful for people to find companions and partners, as there are so many people on Earth, but we only interact with very few over a lifetime, and this problem is even greater and more urgent to solve for people who have interests or preferences that are relatively rare in the population, so they’re unable to fit in and as a result that negatively impacts their mental health and they feel lonely.

They feel lonely because it would be hard to find other people like them, and the tragic thing is that almost every such person would feel lonely unless by some miracle or small chance they happen to discover each other, and if they do, they’d be best friends, but the sad thing is they probably won’t.

I have another solution to such loneliness which I discuss in another blogpost, and also describe this issue in more detail, but I’d like to end this topic here. Before ending this post I'd like to explain why this is important and why it matters in case it's not clear. Your company determines what sort of person you become. It depends on what sort of people you surround yourself with, because however hard you try, you can never be completely free of social influence.

So it makes sense to choose your peers wisely, especially as it's been found that the teenage years, when people form social groups that last for a long time, are the years when your neuroplasticity is at peak, so how you spend your time then, the type of people you talk to, the activities you do and the habits you form would determine the sort of person you grow up to be, including your personality traits and other cognitive aspects.

I read somewhere quite a while ago that it's also been found using brain scans that brains literally sync during conversations with others, even online. I don't have the link but you could find it online, and I didn't check the paper for it's experimental methods, statistical techniques used and verification standards, but there was a paper, and it probably still exists.

It's also important that you don't just surround yourself with like-minded people, because then you'd create an intellectual echo chamber and not be able to understand diverse perspectives and worldviews to empathize with fellow humans who hold different opinions and beliefs.

But it's also important that you find people who have the same values and ambitions as you, whom you can respect and admire, push each other to be their best self and grow into the glimpse of the ideal person that you may get from time to time. Someone you can understand and who can understand you, around whom you can be your genuine self and not need to pretend to be someone you're not just for the sake of fitting in, is important.

Please let me know if you have any comments. Feel free to connect.