I could swear there was a similar Scott Alexander post, about flirting deliberately skirting the edge of plausible deniability to avoid prematurely creating common knowledge. With an analogy to spies trying to identify a fellow operative without overtly tipping their hand in case they were mistaken and speaking to a non-spy.
Can’t find it now: might have since been deleted, or might have only ever existed on LiveJournal or Tumblr or something.
Ah that’s interesting, thanks for finding that. I’ve never read that before, so that wasn’t directly where I was drawing any of my ideas from, but maybe the content from the post made it somewhere else that I did read. I feel like that post is mostly missing the point about flirting, but I agree that it’s descriptively outlining the same thing as I am.
I could swear there was a similar Scott Alexander post, about flirting deliberately skirting the edge of plausible deniability to avoid prematurely creating common knowledge. With an analogy to spies trying to identify a fellow operative without overtly tipping their hand in case they were mistaken and speaking to a non-spy.
Can’t find it now: might have since been deleted, or might have only ever existed on LiveJournal or Tumblr or something.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/26/conversation-deliberately-skirts-the-border-of-incomprehensibility/ is similar but not explicitly about flirting.
You’re probably thinking of the russian spies analogy, under section 2 in this (archived) livejournal post.
Ah that’s interesting, thanks for finding that. I’ve never read that before, so that wasn’t directly where I was drawing any of my ideas from, but maybe the content from the post made it somewhere else that I did read. I feel like that post is mostly missing the point about flirting, but I agree that it’s descriptively outlining the same thing as I am.
That definitely looks like the one. Appears I’d forgotten some of the context/details though.