Honestly, the examples you give (except maybe for buying drinks) are not strong evidence of sexual attraction.
That’s my point. The stereotypes say they are, but the stereotypes are wrong.
Why not ask? Either directly
Because of what you say in the following paragraph. I don’t want to risk to screw things up.
or indirectly
Because when I do, Y always answers that X is into me, even if I’m pretty sure she isn’t. I guess that’s because Y, unlike me, is buying into the stereotypes.
And I don’t understand what you mean by “nice guy privilege.”
It’s explained in the comment linked to. (That’s where I took the term from.)
That’s my point. The stereotypes say they are, but the stereotypes are wrong.
Where are those stereotypes coming from—romantic comedies? They are laughably wrong. Stereotypes generally are naive caricatures of reality (nerds are awkward and obsessive), not characteristics that exist to drive a story without any reference to what would really happen. In short, if a characteristic seems to run on Rule of Funny (TVTropes!!!), you can safely assume it is uncorrelated with reality.
[Nice guy privilege is] explained in the comment linked to. (That’s where I took the term from.)
Looked at the link, still don’t understand the term (or maybe just the relevance). Some folks avoid doing things that are emotionally unsafe for others (i.e. avoid “math is stupid” jokes around nerds). It isn’t surprising that this allows a less restrictive social norm about potentially sensitive subjects. But you don’t get points just for not being a jerk (even if it is unfortunately rare).
If you are asking for personal advice, I would advise playing it safe by ignoring these signals if X is in a committed relationship and not poly. You may miss an enjoyable encounter / relationship, but you avoid the need to navigate a lot of social volatility that you don’t seem to think would be easy or enjoyable. Classic low risk / low reward.
As an intermediate level step, you might consider finding some X who isn’t sending you signals and ask for advice about how to be better at reading and sending signals. If X responds, “Who’s sending you signals?” or otherwise fishes for gossip, you’ve learned that X is not capable of giving useful advise. Don’t create drama by revealing emotional info, just find another person to ask. Also, a quick plug for the books of Tony Attwood.
In short, if a characteristic seems to run on Rule of Funny (TVTropes!!!), you can safely assume it is uncorrelated with reality.
I would say instead that things that can qualify for the distinction “Funny” are almost certainly strongly correlated with reality and, indeed, differ from reality (or ‘normality’) to a fairly consistent degree (although that degree varies based on target audience, see Monty Python fans vs Friends fans.)
As you note, it depends substantially on genre. Surreal humor and slapstick humor is anti-correlated with reality. Romantic comedy and the generic sitcom are only uncorrelated.
As you note, it depends substantially on genre. Surreal humor and slapstick humor is anti-correlated with reality. Romantic comedy and the generic sitcom are only uncorrelated.
We seem to use the term correlation and how it applies to reality irrevocably differently. A negative correlation with reality is not something that seems to describe slapstick humor (or anything that humans would be capable of imagining) while the correlation between romantic comedy and reality is merely overwhelming.
Am I being idiosyncratic with my usage? I’ll try to stop that. What I meant:
correlated: high temperatures --> ice cream melting anti-correlated: low temperatures --> ice cream melting uncorrelated: price of tea in China --> number of FAI programmers
The point of my usage was that one would make more errors thinking anti-correlated things are correlated, but knowing things are anti-correlated gives one more information about P(A | B) than knowing they are uncorrelated, where P(A | B) = P(A).
Where are those stereotypes coming from—romantic comedies?
I think I’ve nailed what allowed them to survive in my mind, and it’s complicated, involving the valley of bad rationality.
Looked at the link, still don’t understand the term (or maybe just the relevance).
I meant the fact that apparently certain interactions which would be considered to be sexual advances if performed by/on jocks will be considered to be platonic if performed by/on nerds.
If you are asking for personal advice, I would advise playing it safe by ignoring these signals if X is in a committed relationship and not poly. You may miss an enjoyable encounter / relationship, but you avoid the need to navigate a lot of social volatility that you don’t seem to think would be easy or enjoyable. Classic low risk / low reward.
I would never dream of hooking up with someone in a committed monogamous relationship with someone else (unless I’ve never talked with the guy and he’s several thousand miles away and I’m very drunk, or something like that), due to acausal concerns (BTW, if I’m friends with a woman’s boyfriend/husband, even my System 1 seems to get that—I just don’t feel attracted to her no matter how gorgeous she is); and I don’t think those people were actually considering that, either—I was just mentioning them as examples of evidence that those signals are unreliable.
As an intermediate level step, you might consider finding some X who isn’t sending you signals and ask for advice about how to be better at reading and sending signals.
A couple women (when I asked them why they were single) told me they didn’t even know how to send such signals (and in their previous relationships, it had been their exes that had done almost all the work in initiating the relationship). I assumed that if they can’t send them, they can’t even teach me how to read them, and generalized that to women in general. I now realize that that generalization was groundless, and I’ll keep this in mind. But the fact is, asking for that out of the blue would feel weird to me, and I can’t think of a good way of steering a conversation towards there. (And for some reason, being the one to initiate the interaction never seems to work for me. Ever.)
I meant the fact that apparently certain interactions which would be considered to be sexual advances if performed by/on jocks will be considered to be platonic if performed by/on nerds.
Short answer, certain populations of women are interested in a population of men of which you are not a member and don’t want to be a member. This is not something to mourn—the odds are high that you wouldn’t enjoy a relationship from that population—because your emotional needs were not being met. But not all women are like that.
A couple women (when I asked them why they were single) told me they didn’t even know how to send such signals . . .
Either those women are very confused or they were not comfortable being completely open with you. Possibly pointless digression: I realized my wife was interested in me because she was using my watch to time a competitive debate round, refused to return it to me, and denied having it when asked by the team captain—while not showing any other signs of hostility towards me. (Yes, I agree that flirting is weird).
Back to topic: Talking about implicit social signals is taboo in modern Western culture. So everyone but your very very close friends will lie to you about signals. The lies are applause lights intended to avoid hurt feelings or causing you emotional distress, but they aren’t useful in figuring out appropriate social moves.
Short answer, certain populations of women are interested in a population of men of which you are not a member and don’t want to be a member. This is not something to mourn—the odds are high that you wouldn’t enjoy a relationship from that population—because your emotional needs were not being met. But not all women are like that.
I completely agree. I can’t see the relevance of that with what I was talking about, anyway. (EDIT: And BTW, I don’t enjoy the company of people of either gender from that population. My threshold of tolerance does seem to be more lenient with women than with men, but that might be due to women having a narrower bell curve so that the 20th percentile man is dumber than the 20th percentile woman.)
Either those women are very confused or they were not comfortable being completely open with you.
In at least one case, I’m pretty sure it was the former (as she was completely open with me with much, much more serious stuff, and was confused about other stuff as well).
In at least one case, I’m pretty sure it was the former (as she was completely open with me with much, much more serious stuff, and was confused about other stuff as well).
Thus, you need to find someone with higher social competence to get advice from. Also, I discussed elsewhere the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
Also, I discussed elsewhere the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
I once used to play chess for a while, and the skills involved in chess didn’t feel particularly related to the skills involved in reading people. (In particular, chess against a human doesn’t feel much different from chess against a computer to me unless I take the game too seriously and resort to Dark Arts, which makes me feel awful.) Poker seems much closer to me, and I’m indeed practising with it (online and with fake money for now).
I see I was a bit unclear. Simply playing a game involves social interactions, even if social skills are not relevant to playing the game. This is especially true in a game with more than two players.
Those interactions are low risk, socially speaking, because the focus of the interactions is playing the game—that’s what I meant by structured interactions. But the interactions still give you an opportunity to collect data about others’ behavior and practice your social maneuvers.
By adopting effective techniques from others and considering the reactions of your techniques, you can improve your social skills without seriously risking losing a status contest—it’s quite rude to initiate a status conflict during the play of a board game, so you can expect far fewer conflicts that the average social setting.
So what? Hanging out drinking/eating/chatting/whatever with a group of friends none of whom I’m particularly romantically interested in also involves social interactions that are low-risk. Why would the information gathered during board games, of all things, be more relevant than that gathered the rest of the time?
Yes, it had occurred to me that you might have been assuming someone with little experience in interacting with peers at all, rather than just romantically, and I was going to edit my comment to point that out but you replied before I got a chance to do so.
In case someone else is reading: I think that attempting to go straight from having no life to having sexual success skipping the intermediate steps is a bad idea, unless 1) you’re mainly interested in one-night stands, 2) you have very lenient ethics about that kind of stuff (in which case, why don’t you just pay prostitutes?), and 3) you’re living in a city so big that there’s a negligible chance that someone you meet today knows someone you meet tomorrow (>10^6 inhabitants). Unless you’re very good-looking (>90th percentile for men or >50th percentile for women) and/or something, I think it’s unlikely that someone who wouldn’t enjoy being friends with you would enjoy being in a relationship with you, either.
(The numbers “10^6”, “90” and “50” in the paragraph above were pulled directly out of my ass, though I guess they’re in the right ballpark.)
I think I’ve nailed what allowed them to survive in my mind, and it’s complicated, involving the valley of bad rationality.
In case anyone’s wondering (I’m having another episode of insomnia, as I could have expected since that’s what usually happens to me when I oversleep six mornings in a row, so...), here’s the story:
Step 1: Absorb the stereotype that certain behaviours are sexual advances from the general memetic environment (not just “romantic comedies” but also news of people sued for sexual harassment for having complimented/touched a coworker). (I was a very nerdy boy at the time, so I had hardly any first-hand experience in that area. My parents had received a very religious upbringing and had continuously been together ever since my mother was 15, so they didn’t have much experience either.)
Step 2: Decide to turn off the TV and go out in the real world. Realize that such behaviour is actually also common in platonic friendships, and it doesn’t necessarily show romantic attraction. (At first I thought that was a quirk of the particular social circle I was in, then as I changed social circles and later as I went to university I realized it was more universal than that. My mother was still very sceptic (“That girl was hugging you all the time! I think she likes you. Do you like her? Why don’t you...” “Mum… She has a boyfriend! They’ve been together for three years!” “But… [confused look] I still think she likes you”), which I ascribed to her upbringing; in particular, my grandparents were very incredulous that I hang around with females and didn’t have sex with them—apparently, in rural southern Italy in the mid-20th century platonic friendships between men and women were not a thing, or something.)
Step 3: Go study abroad in Ireland, living in an university residence mostly populated by foreigners. Find out that here behaviour that in Italy was completely normal would freak people the hell out. Ascribe that to your physical appearance. (I looked somewhat like Rubeus Hagrid back then, whereas in Ireland hardly any guys wore long hair or a beard.) Get a haircut, trim your goatee and moustache, and shave the rest of the beard off. Pay attention to what other guys are wearing, and try to imitate them. Order a copy of the Goodbye Couch fitness program and start doing it every day. Meanwhile, notice that everybody is hooking up all the time and you aren’t, and ascribe that to still not being good-looking enough; do not minimally suspect there might be something wrong with your behaviour. Be reminded by your mother of the stereotype according to which everybody who goes to study abroad gets laid, and be told by her that the reason you aren’t is that you’re not pushy enough. Completely renew your wardrobe, hit the point of diminishing returns with your fitness program, and continue optimizing your appearance as much as you can short of plastic surgery. (By that time, I had managed to make out with a couple of girls—all of whom had cold-approached me first, and who would afterwards give me a fake phone number or tell me they have a boyfriend—thereby disproving the hypothesis that there was a quantum suicide machine destroying the world in all branches of the wave function where that happened.) Realize that you still you’re not having the success with women you were expecting (or, more accurately, that the stereotype told you to expect), become the extremely embittered beast all feminist blogs in the planet (which I hadn’t seen at that point) complain about, start freaking people the hell out again, get called names, get kicked out of night clubs a couple times, have people unfriend you on Facebook, and don’t realize what the hell is going on. Witness the all-time nadir in your self-esteem.
Step 4: Go back to your home town in Italy. Accidentally stumble upon the Schrödinger’s Rapist post. Read it. Read the comment thread, too, and a few related posts as well. Have an epiphany. Realize it all makes perfectly sense. Realize it completely explains what happened to you in Ireland. Resolve not to exhibit certain behaviours ever, ever again. Confirm your suspicion that there’s something seriously wrong with your mother, because all her advice about women so far has been the exact opposite of what the Schrödinger’s Rapist post says, but don’t think too much about that.
Step 5: Accidentally stumble upon Less Wrong. Read about the conservation of expected evidence. Think, of all things, “Aha! In order for a woman touching me to be evidence that she’s not sexually interested in me, a woman not touching me would have to be evidence that she is sexually interested in me, which is preposterous. So that cannot be the case; a woman touching me must be evidence that she’s interested.” (Note how this argument is, mathematically speaking, valid, but it tells nothing about how big or how small the effect is, and how easily or how hardly it is screened off by other evidence, which depends on prior probabilities, conditional probabilities, etc. Welcome to the valley of bad rationality.)
Step 6: Go back to university. Notice how even platonic friends will express their affection physically, in a way that you’re no longer used to after the experience of Step 3, but don’t act upon what you’re inferring from Step 5 because of what you learnt in Step 4. Essentially, find yourself back to Step 2, except that you’ve run out of low-hanging fruit about how to improve your looks. (This is where I was one year ago.)
Well, I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect—things are not so bleak. Now I’ll try to fall asleep again, and when I wake up and read this comment will laugh at myself. Or delete it and wonder what the hell is wrong with me.
Are you above average in looks and status? If yes, then whatever cues you are using will probably result in less false positives than an ole regular chap. My personal experience suggests that anyone romantically/sexually attracted to you will do anything to either see you, or reschedule to see you. There is, in my opinion, a 75% chance of someone being disinterested in you if they are “busy” when asking them to hang out. If they do not reschedule or make any attempt to reschedule there is a 98% of them being disinterested. This only works on guys/gals that you are not already familiar friends with because friends will turn you down because they know they will see you again.
I’d like to add a caveat (not just about romantic/sexual attraction, but about social interactions in general) to the idea of inferring how much someone likes you from how much time they want to spend with you: deontologists/theists/people from guess cultures (to point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace) sometimes will want to interact with you not because they think they would enjoy it, but because they think they have an obligation to.
(My parents both grew up in such a culture (I heard that in certain parts of Naples, rejecting someone’s offer of coffee was considered as rude as insulting them), so when I and my sister were growing up (and were extremely socially awkward) they constantly drummed into our heads the meme that when people (who are mostly from the consequentialist/atheist/ask culture cluster in personspace where we grew up) stood us up, it was their fault because they were assholes (which didn’t explain why they stood up us but not each other); they hardly ever hypothesized it was our fault because we just weren’t fun to be around. (On the other hand, I sometimes went to parties with people I found very boring because I just didn’t realize I was allowed to not go there.) I wish I had realized that much earlier. (Even today, my mother insists that I ought to offer private tutoring for free to a friend of my sister’s because otherwise she would cut a bad figure, that I ought to pick as my doctoral advisor the same professor who supervised my MSc thesis because otherwise he might be disappointed, and other crap like that.)
I guess about 70th percentile among males roughly my age I see around (though there may be selection effects in which males roughly my age I see around, given than in certain places (e.g. buses) I see many more ugly males (and ugly people in general) than in other places (e.g. dance clubs), and I’m not sure that my aesthetic judgement isn’t totally out of whack (given that I’m straight); OTOH I do seem to be cold-approached more often than the average male is, but I’m not actually sure how often the average male is cold-approached, either). I’m 90% sure I’m between 50th and 90th percentile.
and status?
Depends on how you measure it. On other hand, lots of people deeply admire me for my academic achievements, singing skills, and sense of humour; OTOH I’m somewhat nerdy (I scored 25 on the AQ test and 43rd/48th percentile extroversion in two Big Five tests—and I’m pretty sure I used to be much worse until a few years ago, and I’m useless at pretty much all sports). As a result, I think I achieve a high-variance strategy (as described here) whereby some people think I’m awesome and other people think I’m a freak. (Money-wise, I’ve never had economic troubles despite never having earned much due to having wealthy parents (though they don’t admit they are wealthy, as for some reason (too much TV?) they seem to only compare themselves to richer people and never to poorer people); but I don’t like to show off (because I don’t think I deserve money merely for being born from the right vagina), so I drive an old small car, wear cheap clothes, and when people notice my expensive smartphone I point out it was a graduation present from my father who had bought it second-hand.) (Not 100% sure the parentheses are balanced, but still.)
My personal experience suggests that anyone romantically/sexually attracted to you will do anything to either see you, or reschedule to see you.
Well. For some reason (not enough Hollywood movies?) I assumed that moving heaven and earth in order to see someone would come across as desperate and creep people out (both when deciding whether to do that, and when updating my beliefs when someone doesn’t do that). But now I see that I had no good reason to assume that. Will keep this in mind. (Also, as a result of the arrogance I got after hanging around on LW, I sometimes assumed it just hadn’t occurred to people that they could do $magic_trick if they really wanted to see me.) I’m thinking about who has gone way out of their way to see me and who hasn’t, and I can’t see anything obviously wrong with the answers.
This only works on guys/gals that you are not already familiar friends with because friends will turn you down because they know they will see you again.
Yes, I’ve used this particular thought pattern myself. (Of course it doesn’t always work because sometimes black swans happen before I get a chance to cash in the rain check, but still.)
Wow, this comment has grown much longer than I expected.
That’s my point. The stereotypes say they are, but the stereotypes are wrong.
Because of what you say in the following paragraph. I don’t want to risk to screw things up.
Because when I do, Y always answers that X is into me, even if I’m pretty sure she isn’t. I guess that’s because Y, unlike me, is buying into the stereotypes.
It’s explained in the comment linked to. (That’s where I took the term from.)
Where are those stereotypes coming from—romantic comedies? They are laughably wrong. Stereotypes generally are naive caricatures of reality (nerds are awkward and obsessive), not characteristics that exist to drive a story without any reference to what would really happen. In short, if a characteristic seems to run on Rule of Funny (TVTropes!!!), you can safely assume it is uncorrelated with reality.
Looked at the link, still don’t understand the term (or maybe just the relevance). Some folks avoid doing things that are emotionally unsafe for others (i.e. avoid “math is stupid” jokes around nerds). It isn’t surprising that this allows a less restrictive social norm about potentially sensitive subjects. But you don’t get points just for not being a jerk (even if it is unfortunately rare).
If you are asking for personal advice, I would advise playing it safe by ignoring these signals if X is in a committed relationship and not poly. You may miss an enjoyable encounter / relationship, but you avoid the need to navigate a lot of social volatility that you don’t seem to think would be easy or enjoyable. Classic low risk / low reward.
As an intermediate level step, you might consider finding some X who isn’t sending you signals and ask for advice about how to be better at reading and sending signals. If X responds, “Who’s sending you signals?” or otherwise fishes for gossip, you’ve learned that X is not capable of giving useful advise. Don’t create drama by revealing emotional info, just find another person to ask. Also, a quick plug for the books of Tony Attwood.
I would say instead that things that can qualify for the distinction “Funny” are almost certainly strongly correlated with reality and, indeed, differ from reality (or ‘normality’) to a fairly consistent degree (although that degree varies based on target audience, see Monty Python fans vs Friends fans.)
As you note, it depends substantially on genre. Surreal humor and slapstick humor is anti-correlated with reality. Romantic comedy and the generic sitcom are only uncorrelated.
We seem to use the term correlation and how it applies to reality irrevocably differently. A negative correlation with reality is not something that seems to describe slapstick humor (or anything that humans would be capable of imagining) while the correlation between romantic comedy and reality is merely overwhelming.
Am I being idiosyncratic with my usage? I’ll try to stop that. What I meant:
correlated: high temperatures --> ice cream melting
anti-correlated: low temperatures --> ice cream melting
uncorrelated: price of tea in China --> number of FAI programmers
The point of my usage was that one would make more errors thinking anti-correlated things are correlated, but knowing things are anti-correlated gives one more information about P(A | B) than knowing they are uncorrelated, where P(A | B) = P(A).
I think I’ve nailed what allowed them to survive in my mind, and it’s complicated, involving the valley of bad rationality.
I meant the fact that apparently certain interactions which would be considered to be sexual advances if performed by/on jocks will be considered to be platonic if performed by/on nerds.
I would never dream of hooking up with someone in a committed monogamous relationship with someone else (unless I’ve never talked with the guy and he’s several thousand miles away and I’m very drunk, or something like that), due to acausal concerns (BTW, if I’m friends with a woman’s boyfriend/husband, even my System 1 seems to get that—I just don’t feel attracted to her no matter how gorgeous she is); and I don’t think those people were actually considering that, either—I was just mentioning them as examples of evidence that those signals are unreliable.
A couple women (when I asked them why they were single) told me they didn’t even know how to send such signals (and in their previous relationships, it had been their exes that had done almost all the work in initiating the relationship). I assumed that if they can’t send them, they can’t even teach me how to read them, and generalized that to women in general. I now realize that that generalization was groundless, and I’ll keep this in mind. But the fact is, asking for that out of the blue would feel weird to me, and I can’t think of a good way of steering a conversation towards there. (And for some reason, being the one to initiate the interaction never seems to work for me. Ever.)
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
Short answer, certain populations of women are interested in a population of men of which you are not a member and don’t want to be a member. This is not something to mourn—the odds are high that you wouldn’t enjoy a relationship from that population—because your emotional needs were not being met. But not all women are like that.
Either those women are very confused or they were not comfortable being completely open with you.
Possibly pointless digression: I realized my wife was interested in me because she was using my watch to time a competitive debate round, refused to return it to me, and denied having it when asked by the team captain—while not showing any other signs of hostility towards me. (Yes, I agree that flirting is weird).
Back to topic: Talking about implicit social signals is taboo in modern Western culture. So everyone but your very very close friends will lie to you about signals. The lies are applause lights intended to avoid hurt feelings or causing you emotional distress, but they aren’t useful in figuring out appropriate social moves.
I completely agree. I can’t see the relevance of that with what I was talking about, anyway. (EDIT: And BTW, I don’t enjoy the company of people of either gender from that population. My threshold of tolerance does seem to be more lenient with women than with men, but that might be due to women having a narrower bell curve so that the 20th percentile man is dumber than the 20th percentile woman.)
In at least one case, I’m pretty sure it was the former (as she was completely open with me with much, much more serious stuff, and was confused about other stuff as well).
Thus, you need to find someone with higher social competence to get advice from. Also, I discussed elsewhere the possible value of structured social interactions like board gaming.
I once used to play chess for a while, and the skills involved in chess didn’t feel particularly related to the skills involved in reading people. (In particular, chess against a human doesn’t feel much different from chess against a computer to me unless I take the game too seriously and resort to Dark Arts, which makes me feel awful.) Poker seems much closer to me, and I’m indeed practising with it (online and with fake money for now).
I see I was a bit unclear. Simply playing a game involves social interactions, even if social skills are not relevant to playing the game. This is especially true in a game with more than two players.
Those interactions are low risk, socially speaking, because the focus of the interactions is playing the game—that’s what I meant by structured interactions. But the interactions still give you an opportunity to collect data about others’ behavior and practice your social maneuvers.
By adopting effective techniques from others and considering the reactions of your techniques, you can improve your social skills without seriously risking losing a status contest—it’s quite rude to initiate a status conflict during the play of a board game, so you can expect far fewer conflicts that the average social setting.
So what? Hanging out drinking/eating/chatting/whatever with a group of friends none of whom I’m particularly romantically interested in also involves social interactions that are low-risk. Why would the information gathered during board games, of all things, be more relevant than that gathered the rest of the time?
If you have more advanced social skills than my advice is aimed at, feel free to ignore it. Sorry for misjudging your concerns.
Yes, it had occurred to me that you might have been assuming someone with little experience in interacting with peers at all, rather than just romantically, and I was going to edit my comment to point that out but you replied before I got a chance to do so.
In case someone else is reading: I think that attempting to go straight from having no life to having sexual success skipping the intermediate steps is a bad idea, unless 1) you’re mainly interested in one-night stands, 2) you have very lenient ethics about that kind of stuff (in which case, why don’t you just pay prostitutes?), and 3) you’re living in a city so big that there’s a negligible chance that someone you meet today knows someone you meet tomorrow (>10^6 inhabitants). Unless you’re very good-looking (>90th percentile for men or >50th percentile for women) and/or something, I think it’s unlikely that someone who wouldn’t enjoy being friends with you would enjoy being in a relationship with you, either.
(The numbers “10^6”, “90” and “50” in the paragraph above were pulled directly out of my ass, though I guess they’re in the right ballpark.)
In case anyone’s wondering (I’m having another episode of insomnia, as I could have expected since that’s what usually happens to me when I oversleep six mornings in a row, so...), here’s the story:
Step 1: Absorb the stereotype that certain behaviours are sexual advances from the general memetic environment (not just “romantic comedies” but also news of people sued for sexual harassment for having complimented/touched a coworker). (I was a very nerdy boy at the time, so I had hardly any first-hand experience in that area. My parents had received a very religious upbringing and had continuously been together ever since my mother was 15, so they didn’t have much experience either.)
Step 2: Decide to turn off the TV and go out in the real world. Realize that such behaviour is actually also common in platonic friendships, and it doesn’t necessarily show romantic attraction. (At first I thought that was a quirk of the particular social circle I was in, then as I changed social circles and later as I went to university I realized it was more universal than that. My mother was still very sceptic (“That girl was hugging you all the time! I think she likes you. Do you like her? Why don’t you...” “Mum… She has a boyfriend! They’ve been together for three years!” “But… [confused look] I still think she likes you”), which I ascribed to her upbringing; in particular, my grandparents were very incredulous that I hang around with females and didn’t have sex with them—apparently, in rural southern Italy in the mid-20th century platonic friendships between men and women were not a thing, or something.)
Step 3: Go study abroad in Ireland, living in an university residence mostly populated by foreigners. Find out that here behaviour that in Italy was completely normal would freak people the hell out. Ascribe that to your physical appearance. (I looked somewhat like Rubeus Hagrid back then, whereas in Ireland hardly any guys wore long hair or a beard.) Get a haircut, trim your goatee and moustache, and shave the rest of the beard off. Pay attention to what other guys are wearing, and try to imitate them. Order a copy of the Goodbye Couch fitness program and start doing it every day. Meanwhile, notice that everybody is hooking up all the time and you aren’t, and ascribe that to still not being good-looking enough; do not minimally suspect there might be something wrong with your behaviour. Be reminded by your mother of the stereotype according to which everybody who goes to study abroad gets laid, and be told by her that the reason you aren’t is that you’re not pushy enough. Completely renew your wardrobe, hit the point of diminishing returns with your fitness program, and continue optimizing your appearance as much as you can short of plastic surgery. (By that time, I had managed to make out with a couple of girls—all of whom had cold-approached me first, and who would afterwards give me a fake phone number or tell me they have a boyfriend—thereby disproving the hypothesis that there was a quantum suicide machine destroying the world in all branches of the wave function where that happened.) Realize that you still you’re not having the success with women you were expecting (or, more accurately, that the stereotype told you to expect), become the extremely embittered beast all feminist blogs in the planet (which I hadn’t seen at that point) complain about, start freaking people the hell out again, get called names, get kicked out of night clubs a couple times, have people unfriend you on Facebook, and don’t realize what the hell is going on. Witness the all-time nadir in your self-esteem.
Step 4: Go back to your home town in Italy. Accidentally stumble upon the Schrödinger’s Rapist post. Read it. Read the comment thread, too, and a few related posts as well. Have an epiphany. Realize it all makes perfectly sense. Realize it completely explains what happened to you in Ireland. Resolve not to exhibit certain behaviours ever, ever again. Confirm your suspicion that there’s something seriously wrong with your mother, because all her advice about women so far has been the exact opposite of what the Schrödinger’s Rapist post says, but don’t think too much about that.
Step 5: Accidentally stumble upon Less Wrong. Read about the conservation of expected evidence. Think, of all things, “Aha! In order for a woman touching me to be evidence that she’s not sexually interested in me, a woman not touching me would have to be evidence that she is sexually interested in me, which is preposterous. So that cannot be the case; a woman touching me must be evidence that she’s interested.” (Note how this argument is, mathematically speaking, valid, but it tells nothing about how big or how small the effect is, and how easily or how hardly it is screened off by other evidence, which depends on prior probabilities, conditional probabilities, etc. Welcome to the valley of bad rationality.)
Step 6: Go back to university. Notice how even platonic friends will express their affection physically, in a way that you’re no longer used to after the experience of Step 3, but don’t act upon what you’re inferring from Step 5 because of what you learnt in Step 4. Essentially, find yourself back to Step 2, except that you’ve run out of low-hanging fruit about how to improve your looks. (This is where I was one year ago.)
Well, I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect—things are not so bleak. Now I’ll try to fall asleep again, and when I wake up and read this comment will laugh at myself. Or delete it and wonder what the hell is wrong with me.
Are you above average in looks and status? If yes, then whatever cues you are using will probably result in less false positives than an ole regular chap. My personal experience suggests that anyone romantically/sexually attracted to you will do anything to either see you, or reschedule to see you. There is, in my opinion, a 75% chance of someone being disinterested in you if they are “busy” when asking them to hang out. If they do not reschedule or make any attempt to reschedule there is a 98% of them being disinterested. This only works on guys/gals that you are not already familiar friends with because friends will turn you down because they know they will see you again.
I’d like to add a caveat (not just about romantic/sexual attraction, but about social interactions in general) to the idea of inferring how much someone likes you from how much time they want to spend with you: deontologists/theists/people from guess cultures (to point in the rough direction of an empirical cluster in personspace) sometimes will want to interact with you not because they think they would enjoy it, but because they think they have an obligation to.
(My parents both grew up in such a culture (I heard that in certain parts of Naples, rejecting someone’s offer of coffee was considered as rude as insulting them), so when I and my sister were growing up (and were extremely socially awkward) they constantly drummed into our heads the meme that when people (who are mostly from the consequentialist/atheist/ask culture cluster in personspace where we grew up) stood us up, it was their fault because they were assholes (which didn’t explain why they stood up us but not each other); they hardly ever hypothesized it was our fault because we just weren’t fun to be around. (On the other hand, I sometimes went to parties with people I found very boring because I just didn’t realize I was allowed to not go there.) I wish I had realized that much earlier. (Even today, my mother insists that I ought to offer private tutoring for free to a friend of my sister’s because otherwise she would cut a bad figure, that I ought to pick as my doctoral advisor the same professor who supervised my MSc thesis because otherwise he might be disappointed, and other crap like that.)
I guess about 70th percentile among males roughly my age I see around (though there may be selection effects in which males roughly my age I see around, given than in certain places (e.g. buses) I see many more ugly males (and ugly people in general) than in other places (e.g. dance clubs), and I’m not sure that my aesthetic judgement isn’t totally out of whack (given that I’m straight); OTOH I do seem to be cold-approached more often than the average male is, but I’m not actually sure how often the average male is cold-approached, either). I’m 90% sure I’m between 50th and 90th percentile.
Depends on how you measure it. On other hand, lots of people deeply admire me for my academic achievements, singing skills, and sense of humour; OTOH I’m somewhat nerdy (I scored 25 on the AQ test and 43rd/48th percentile extroversion in two Big Five tests—and I’m pretty sure I used to be much worse until a few years ago, and I’m useless at pretty much all sports). As a result, I think I achieve a high-variance strategy (as described here) whereby some people think I’m awesome and other people think I’m a freak. (Money-wise, I’ve never had economic troubles despite never having earned much due to having wealthy parents (though they don’t admit they are wealthy, as for some reason (too much TV?) they seem to only compare themselves to richer people and never to poorer people); but I don’t like to show off (because I don’t think I deserve money merely for being born from the right vagina), so I drive an old small car, wear cheap clothes, and when people notice my expensive smartphone I point out it was a graduation present from my father who had bought it second-hand.) (Not 100% sure the parentheses are balanced, but still.)
Well. For some reason (not enough Hollywood movies?) I assumed that moving heaven and earth in order to see someone would come across as desperate and creep people out (both when deciding whether to do that, and when updating my beliefs when someone doesn’t do that). But now I see that I had no good reason to assume that. Will keep this in mind. (Also, as a result of the arrogance I got after hanging around on LW, I sometimes assumed it just hadn’t occurred to people that they could do $magic_trick if they really wanted to see me.) I’m thinking about who has gone way out of their way to see me and who hasn’t, and I can’t see anything obviously wrong with the answers.
Yes, I’ve used this particular thought pattern myself. (Of course it doesn’t always work because sometimes black swans happen before I get a chance to cash in the rain check, but still.)
Wow, this comment has grown much longer than I expected.