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HughRistik comments on Mate selection for the men here - Less Wrong
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I am not as old as you (I am in my early 20s), but I have come to the same conclusions independently.
If an interest or proficiency in rationality is related to cognitive or personality traits that show sex differences in mean or variance, such as systemizing or Openness to Ideas, then the pool of female rationalists would be lower that the pool of male rationalists. Consequently, barring polyandry, not all male rationalists can date female rationalists.
Yet even though a female rationalist might be a good match for a male rationalist in many ways, it is not self-evident that a male rationalist will only be compatible with females with a similar interest in rationality. What types of women he will be compatible with is an empirical question, that can only be answered through experimentation (i.e. dating women with different types of personalities).
Even though many male rationalists might think that they would be ideally matched with someone who thinks like them and inhabits an attractive female body, in practice, this may not happen. In females, an interest in rationality may be correlated with other masculine features, personality traits, body language, etc... which may or may not be attractive to the male rationalist, depending on the degree. While commonality due to similar thought processes might increase compatibility, there might be less chemistry. Or the chemistry might be just fine, and they might drive each other crazy for other reasons, especially if they have unresolvable philosophical differences and they both have a need to be right.
If a male rationalist cannot date a female rationalist, either due to scarcity or incompatibility, there are other more common types of women he might be quite compatible with. Specifically, I recommend women who are high in Openness to Experience. She will be more open-minded and interested in your views of the world, and if you are also high in Openness, you will be more interested in hers, and you both will be more understanding of the other in the event of disagreement.
Female rationalists may well be great matches for male rationalists. But they are rarer, and they don't hold a monopoly as good matches for a male rationalist. Consequently, a male rationalist is best off dating a variety of women until he discovers through actual experience what types of women he is best matched with.
Is that really true? It could easily be an availability bias on my part, but I find most non-airheaded women to be supremely rational on the instrumental level. Much more level-headed and focused on results, and far less likely to get obsessed about some stupid thing the way men do, with the possible exception of a man or a social drama, and in both cases, those things are usually short-lived by comparison to male irrational obsessions, or so ISTM.
(Of course, most of the women I meet these days besides my wife are either at internet marketing conferences, or else customers of mine. So, could easily be some sort of bias factor there!)
Yes, but there is a sense of the word "rationalist" that makes HughRistik's quote (and my post) make sense. Something like "strongly motivated to learn science and the art of rationality" or "the kind of person you become if for the last 20 years you have been strongly motivated to . . ."
For the last 20 years???
I'm thinking of "rationalist" in the sense that is used here (such as actually self-identifying as "rationalist"), which may be, as you have argued, overly disdainful of some forms of instrumental rationality (I'm still thinking through that issue).
And note that my post acknowledges that it is based on this premise which may well be false:
It could be that rationality has many components, some of which are more common in males and some of which are more common in females.
That's actually a good example of the sort of obsession I notice rational females avoiding. ;-) (To be fair, I certainly know of women who irrationally obsess on other labels and causes, I just try not to hang out with them.)
This is actually exactly the attitude I take. 'Doing rationality' is the good part, 'being a rationalist' just makes me more likely to want to signal stuff, or to disregard other useful viewpoints. I don't have to be a rationalist to do rationality, so why would I?
But using rationality makes you a rationalist, in the same way that using science makes you a scientist.
Whether you label yourself that, or consider yourself to belong to some social category, is irrelevant.
This is like saying that because an insectivore eats insects, a locavore must eat locations (like some sort of kaiju), ignoring the fact that the word is used to mean "person who eats locally grown food". Words have meanings based on things other than their etymology and grammatical construction.
Acknowledged. However, I think it's a bad idea to make 'rationalist' mean something other than "one who consistently uses rationality".
I don't like 'locavore'.
HughRistik writes, "I recommend women who are high in Openness to Experience."
My two most personally-useful long-term relationships have been with women high in Openness to Experience. The Wikipedia article says that this trait is normally distributed, so I will add that both women were definitely in the top quartile in this trait and probably at least a standard deviation above the mean.
HughRistik, since we seem to see things similarly, maybe we should talk.
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