Vindication of my Euro-centric girl strategy

Razib's "hot sci-fi geek" thread is still getting comments, the most recent of which is from a European guy noting that a girl who American guys offered as an example of a good-looking chess geek (here) would not qualify as that good-looking in her continent of origin.

This is confirmation of my previous advice to look for a girlfriend among Europeans raised in Europe. They're better looking in most countries (Swedes for blonde-lovers, Greeks for callipygiophiles, etc.). Because the females have grown up surrounded by better looking people than in the US, a female who is objectively a 7 will subjectively view herself as less than 7, and so will be less discriminating in her tastes / standards than a 7 in the US. And since the Euro males have grown accustomed to a higher standard of female looks, an objective 7 female will get less attention there than if she were raised in the US. Thus, regardless of the guy's objective score, he'll find a more receptive audience among 7s in Europe than in the US. This feature of human psychology -- that we are programmed to adjust our preferences to accord with our percentile rank in the local population, rather than our absolute score -- is obviously adaptive, but it can be exploited in the modern age where global travel isn't difficult or prohibitively expensive.

The worst group to approach, strategy-wise, is those who are objectively high-scoring but who grew up surrounded by lots of unattractive people. For example, those in the right-tail of a distribution with a low mean (Queen of the Trailer Park / Band Geeks), and particularly those in the right-most cluster of a distribution that approaches a bi-modality of haves and have-nots as far as sexiness goes (see next paragraph). This makes the contrast stand out more, boosting their ego. The same is true of intellectual snobbery: kids who went to secondary school in a high-scoring, unimodal environment should think less of themselves than their intellectual counterparts in a public school magnet program, an oasis surrounded by a desert of mediocrity, as they would describe it.

For example, females from the better-looking ethinic groups who are reared in the US often have a special name: X-American Princess, for X = Jewish, Italian, Persian, Indian. Italian-American girls grow up recognizing that their mean attractiveness is beyond that of girls of other ethnic groups, such as English-Americans. They find this out not only through their own self-other comparisons, but through the amount of attention they get. Back in Italy, there's not so much hetereogeneity, so they wouldn't get as much attention from boys growing up. This creates a huge split between the attitudes of Italian-Italian and Italian-American girls, which anyone who's visited anywhere in Italy for more than a few days will have noticed. Admittedly, another component of the "princess" phenomenon is social status, but Persians and Italians are happy to boast as well about how good-looking their co-ethnics are.

South Asia, though, is heavily stratified by class, and thus by looks as well, as the higher-status males choose the better-looking females for their wives. (Over time, this cross-assortative mating results in there being a greater fraction of females who are both brainy and beautiful as well as a greater fraction who are unattractive and slow-witted.) So, the prediction is that there would be less of a chasm between Indian-Indians and Indian-Americans compared to the Italian case. This doesn't mean there would be no difference between Indians in India vs the US -- in my personal experience, those raised in South Asia have better manners and are more publicly agreeable (of course, I don't know how they behave or what they think in private). Now, these were international students I met during my undergraduate years, and so were drawn from the super-elite in South Asia, as no financial aid was given to international students, but South Asian-Americans who I run into also tend to be high-status. Attractive females in both locations are predicted to be highly conscious of how much better-looking they are compared to other females, just perhaps a little more so in the US. But since I've never actually been to India, the heterogeneity could be far greater than I imagine, and attractive Indians in India could have more inflated egos -- I welcome any clarification in this matter.

In any event, though it may sound like you're preying on the insecurities of another, my advice is not to create further insecurities or manipulate others -- it is simply to take advantage of auspicious circumstances. In this case, it means approaching girls who were raised in a population whose attractiveness distribution is more homogenous and higher in the mean than your own.