BOLLOCKS!
There is plenty of time at a proper date to see if a girl is into your stuff. He asked for good openers and those are the good topics. Politics and Religion are not good openers, no matter what. I always ask some probe questions to know if the girl is not a religion-nut which is important for me, but not really AS important as you might think.
I've met many many girls that love religion and politics topics. They do. But I have seen them turn dudes down when they lead with that. It's not worth the risk in my opinion. And I work with Computer, Physics and EE PhD girls. Do you what they want out of a night out? Fun.
I don't think that a girl knowing your Turing Machine is really relevant for a relationship. It never is. Besides, talking about that shit nonstop is incredibly self-important. What about her?
I don't doubt that there are girls like that. But I'm looking for someone who is intellectually fearless. Looks don't do it alone for me. If the acquisition of knowledge doesn't motivate her, then she's not going to understand why I'm going to be making $25,000 a year for the next five years, working 7 days a week.
First - not an atheist? Deal-breaker for me. It means she doesn't think critically and logically about life.
Second, I like a girl that can hold her own in an argument, if it comes up.
Third, my ideal night out (or in) is coffee and philosophical discussions, board games, or video games. So yeah, that's the kind of person I'm looking for.
I'm not expecting her to know my field of study, but I'm expecting her to be mildly interested, or at least understand it enough to make some conclusion from it and segue into her interests. I'll do the same.
On my first date, she's pursuing a PhD in psychology, and I'm pursuing a PhD in AI. You think I'm going to say, "Well, I work with computers. I've just been setting up some audio equipment in the lab." ? No, I'm going to say, "I'm working on how to make computers learn language as children do, and we actually do read psychology papers to get inspiration on how humans learn. I've got an idea of representing concepts in high-dimensional space. Here, let me demonstrate with this napkin..."
After that, I can ask about her field of research, etc. And we talked about depression, eating disorders, which are terrible first-date topics, but it tied into our pasts, so we learned so much about each other. Not only that, but she learns about my compassion for people with those illnesses.
Never once did I feel nervous, because I just had to be myself.
Intelligence is my most attractive trait, and there are a number of women that are very attracted to it (there's even a word for it: sapiosexual). I'll be damned if I don't flaunt it.
