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SilasBarta comments on Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks - Less Wrong
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Some thread necromancy...
Not yes. I remember listening to one PUA (don't remember the name, has a strong foreign accent) say that if they tell you to go away, you should tease them about it, and not go away.
And for him, it apparently works.
Great job there, women. I just love when I can't tell if you're serious that I should go away.
Hey cowards -- you can vote me down all you want, if that makes you feel better. It still won't change the f'ed up incentive structure that results from women favoring men who trivialize of their rejections.
That is the real problem, not the fact that I'm talking about it.
Oh boy, I guess I'm one of the cowards.
I didn't downvote you for articulating an admittedly fucked up incentive structure. I downvoted you for bitterly criticizing all women because you find the behavior of some women to be inconvenient.
(Tangent: why dance around "fuck"? We all know what you meant, and I'm pretty sure this community has figured out that particular words aren't intrinsically evil.)
If you want to know what to do about the fucked up incentive structure that so irks you, it's really quite simple: don't be a dick. If you have to run the risk of ruining someone's evening or making them feel unsafe, that's really not worth a minor bump to your odds of getting laid on a particular night out.
1) It is appropriate to target women in general with this critcism. Even if they don't engage in this kafkaesque practice, they fail to criticize women for promoting it, even as they complain about the (predictable) results of this policy.
When I dislike a practice common among "my own", I criticize my own, even and especially if I'm pure as snow on that issue. That goes double for when I criticize the countermeasures that only exist because of this practice. Why should I expect any less from women?
2) It's not about what I want, or about inconviences. If the good men unilaterally disarm by following your policy, their numbers get thinned out over time, as typically happens under unilateral disarmament. Why do you consider that to be a pro-woman policy?
You're going to have to present some evidence that "good" men are systematically disadvantaged in getting relationships if you want this to be a universally accepted premise in this discussion. But if we're only speaking anecdotally, then in my experience jerks find it easier to get laid, but good men find it easier to obtain long term relationships involving children. Anyhow, if you want to bring up the betterment of the gene pool as a serious argument, then you have to prove that abusive men are at more of a reproductive advantage than they were historically.
And how do you get "unilateral disarmament" from "going away when a woman tells me to go away" anyway? What about the relationships that ensue from encounters that both partners enjoy and want to continue? Hint: the majority of healthy relationships.
Women can't change the way they behave until they're assured that behaving with assurance and aggressiveness won't penalize them socially or put them at risk of violence (since women can't back up their assertiveness with physical force). You're severely oversimplifying the issue if you think it's just a matter of women "choosing" to behave differently than they do.
I did -- the PUA I mentioned. I can cite more if you want.
That seems like an unnecessarily high threshold to meet. If a policy is destructive on its face, I needn't wait for the damage to suggest it not be done.
That's game-theoretic terminology. "Uniltareral disarmament" refers to abandoning a selfish strategy (analogous to giving up your weapons in an international conflict), irrespective of whether the other players abandon it as well. I contend that giving up the strategy of "persisting after being told to go away" is a case of UD.
Well, that's what we all wish were true and want to believe anyway. Recalling the earlier part of the thread I resurrected, there is a non-trivial number of cases of healthy relationships that originated from excessive persistence (edit: sorry, sentence wasn't complete first time around).
What? Only telling a suitor to go away when you really mean it is aggressiveness? The entire problem I'm citing is that women tell suitors to go away in more cases than they really mean (at least retrospectively). That would imply that any problem would be in the opposite direction!
I didn't say that it was. Remember, the problem I cite is not that women reject when they don't really mean it, but that they do so and also complain about men who ignore their rejections. You really can't have it both ways.
Please do cite more. Understand that your claims are difficult for me to just accept, because in my experience when women offer men a flat refusal, in the vast majority of cases they mean no. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but you seem to be implying that when women offer a flat refusal, there's a significant, even close to 50% chance that they actually mean yes. You need more evidence than the word of a PUA or an anecdote about a woman you know to support that claim for people who haven't had the same experiences as you.
People generally treat criticisms of one's own group differently from criticisms of other groups, though which is considered to be more acceptable varies. Compare "America: love it or leave it" and the reclamation of racial slurs, for example. I generally lean more towards the latter camp because, ceteris paribus, criticisms that come from within a group are less likely to have untoward motivations.
I'm sorry, but the genetic argument is ridiculous. Even 500 years would be a preposterously short amount of time for a selection pressure this weak to have a significant effect, and I find it trivially unlikely that humans will both exist and not have mastered genetic engineering (assuming genetics are even still relevant) after we've seen another five centuries of progress.
Your argument would just as well prove that no one can criticize anyone outside their group. Surely you don't mean that? And how would it invalidate the argument? At the least, it would be a valid point to say,
"I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?"
Right?
Phrasing my point in terms of a gene pool might be imprecise, but there are relevant effects at all the relevant levels.
For one thing, the genetic effects are augmented by memetic effects. That is, it's not that there's just a "disrepect women" gene that is being selected for. It's that children will learn from their parents, even if they don't say, "Hey, you've got to ignore women who tell you to go away."
Second, there's the dating pool. If dating capability feeds on itself, then prematurely complying with a request to leave will cause the dating pool to be dominated by disrespectful men, and women increasingly believe that their only option is a disrepectful man.
So there are enough natural selection-related effects that even if you ignore the purely genetic effects -- which as you point out, are going to be minimal -- that we do have to worry about the propagation of disrespectful men as a result of respectful men not using all the effective strategies that the former use.
I've realized the same issue myself. At least, the "dating pool dominated by disrespectful men" part. It may not currently be the case that women believe that their only option is a disrespectful man. But I have noticed that some women seem to conflate high levels of care for their comfort and consent with wimpiness or a lack of masculinity.
If scrupulous men restrain themselves out of deontological moral principles, even if it's the "right" thing to do, what is the effect on the larger system? The effect is that our good little deontologists may select themselves out of the dating pool, leaving only men who are less scrupulous. That's good for women, how, exactly?
Silas is right that the incentive structure is broken. There are incentives for men to engage in advances that take risks with women's comfort levels (high-risk, high-reward), to fulfill common female preferences for excitement or being "swept off their feet." I'm not completely sold on Silas' specific example, because I don't think that on average there is a great benefit to pursuing past a rejection on an approach, but I think these double-binds occur in other areas (for instead, asking permission for a kiss). The problem is that for men to "disarm" themselves of such behavior, it puts them at a pragmatic disadvantage vs. men who don't, at least with typical heterosexual women (so if you're a geeky woman reading this, remember that this criticism is probably not about you).
Another problem is that women who respond in a way that incentivizes men taking risks with their comfort levels is that their responses "vote" for a set of norms that is counter to the interests of other women. If it's correct that the majority of women respond this way, then we may be seeing a tyranny of the majority where their needs for certain male behaviors and outlooks dominate the needs of other women. It's tempting to suggest that women get together for a big pow-pow, and come up with a unified set of norms for how they like to be approached, or at least with ways to signal their preference sets in advance... then get back to men. Of course, that's impossible in the real world.
From the perspective of morality, we tend to look at the agents of a morally-questionable behavior, which are men in this case. Yet on a societal level, it's just not going to work very well to try to persuade people to throw away utility for an above-average level of scruples that people they are interacting with don't really seem to care about. To actually change society, it is necessary to look at the patterns of incentives that people are under, and the source of the incentives. In other words, we need to think more like economists and psychologists, and less like moral philosophers.
I like the careful way you've picked this apart and have upvoted your comment.
However, I'm wary that the logic has no bottom. If everyone gets worse to compete (there is no reason to suppose that only men who are scrupulous, or even only men who suppose themselves scrupulous, will do this), where is the floor? You have to hard-code in some deontic principle to prevent everyone from trending less and less careful. Depending on how fast things change, female choice on the whole could become irrelevant (if you ignore her when she says "no" once, and then ignore her twice to compete, and then four times because everyone got the last memo and you don't stand out anymore, and then...). If that happens, there's no way for the entire female gender to go "oh, crap! We don't like this at all and will start preferring sweet guys to incentive the behavior we want!" Female preference no longer needs to enter into the equation if ignoring it is the way to "succeed". Yes, this is a horror story; but I'm not actually sure it doesn't resemble things that happen on a smaller scale in some places.
While we're talking about reconstituting the dating pool with incentives, why not just obey the stated preferences of all women whether you believe them or not, and thereby reduce the success of the ones who say "no" and don't mean it? That seems to make as much sense.
No, because if you successfully convince most men to do this, then you will actually increase the selection pressure towards aggressive courting behavior.
That's the bit that some men get so bitter about -- from their perspective, proposals like yours look just like deliberate attempts to weed the "nice guys" out of the gene pool, or at least the dating pool. Thus, the conspiracy theories about how women, the media, and "society" at large are collaborating to give men bad dating advice that increases selection pressures towards "bad boys" - i.e., those who don't comply with the advice.
(Personally, I think it's silly to ascribe to malice in this situation what is adequately explained by failure to think in such a systemic and evolutionary fashion... which is too high a bar for the average person, regardless of gender.)
It's fun to watch you discover the visceral horror of natural selection, especially sexual selection. Yea that's right, there is no ground floor, you fall forever. If females exhibit even a mild preference for bigger tails, or bigger brains, or higher persistence, or whatever else, then in relatively few generations the tails or brains or persistence will grow preposterously huge.
About your last paragraph: everywhere in nature runaway sexual selection involves females selecting males for a disproportionate value of some characteristic, never the other way around. A population's changes depend on the mating criteria of females, not the mating criteria of males.
It's almost that absolute, but not quite. Regarding role reversal in sexual selection, Alison Jolly writes in Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution, page 88-89:
So, I take HughRistik's point to be that this would be a good thing for society to do, or maybe even a community, but that it is ineffective to the point of futility for an individual to do, and thus doesn't "make sense."
I, personally, can't have more then a trivial effect on "the success of the ones who say 'no' and don't mean it," but I can have a large effect on my own dating success, simply because there are millions of the former and only one of the latter. A lonely boycott of lying women wouldn't be a good way to change women; it would just leave me with a smaller dating pool.
As it happens, I do try very hard not to date or re-approach women who firmly say "no" (as opposed to "not now" or "maybe") and don't mean it, simply because I find that sort of thing annoying, and, as a geek, I can usually find enough geeky women to date that I don't absolutely need to hit on the less self-aware ones. I also find self-awareness pretty attractive, so the boycott carries a private incentive for me in that it helps me find people I actually want to date. Still, that doesn't mean that the boycott makes any political sense at all -- the average man who tried to participate in the boycott would simply go on less dates and be less happy.
Yup. And I'm not (yet) speaking about what is the most moral solution. Maybe it's the only "moral" solution for men to boycott women who incentivize male behavior that puts their comfort levels (and those of other women) at risk. Still, I think we can only decide the moral solution once we understand the practical problem.
Yup. And not just boycotting for "lying" (or misstating preferences), but for incentivizing any behavior that takes risks with women's comfort levels. If someone wants to ask men to unilaterally disarm themselves of this behavior, that's fine, but they need to know the consequences of what they are asking, and that it will doom men who listen to spend long periods in saintly celibacy while women compete over less scrupulous men and form seemingly normal and happy relationships with them.
"Follow our moral prescriptions that society doesn't believe are necessary, and martyr your dating life while changing nothing about society! Sign up here!"
Exactly. The ability of individual men like you and me to circumvent this problem, and find women who don't have problematic preferences sets, doesn't make the problem go away on a societal level. There are only so many women without those problematic preference sets to go round.
Hmmm... If someone offered me paperclips, and I turned down the offer, I would want the being to keep offering.
I don't know how this applies to apes, but it's something to think about.
Yes, this applies to apes as well. If an attractive woman offered me sex and I refused (most likely due to being busy with something or someone else), I'd want her to offer it again later. But in refusing I don't lie about my preferences: if I really mean to answer "never" I say "never", and if I mean "not now" I will say "not now". This is a frequent complaint leveled at human females: they often say words to the effect of "never" but later behave as if they'd said "not now", and vice versa.
Yes, but you would never turn down the offer in the first place, so it's moot.
Please regard this as responsive to the substance of Alicorn's sibling post:
"The reason that men (who care about women) can't 'just' obey stated preferences is because that effectively cedes the dating pool to men who aren't as respectful to women ... as I've said about six times now.
"The reductio about an indefinite persistence threshold (if men ignore the first rejection, must they ignore the second, etc.) fails in that it is only necessary for respectful men to be as persistent as disrespectful men, and no more. This suffices to prevent disrespectful men from saturating the dating pool. Women, for their part, can 'opt out' of any negative effects of such a policy by simply being consistent with rejections, while men cannot (for the above reasons)."
(I would have just replied directly, but that would make me a terrorist.)
Silas, if you can't address Alicorn directly, then it's probably not best to address her indirectly by asking me to pass an argument along to her. (Update: Thanks for changing your language to make your post more clearly directed towards me.)
However, I'm planning my own reply to Alicorn, and if you think there is a point that I am leaving out, or something that needs to be emphasized, I invite you to reply to me personally either in the thread (if your reply is framed as a communication to me rather than to Alicorn) or by PM. If I agree with an argument that you pose to me, or convince me that a certain point needs more emphasis, then such an argument might naturally find it's way into my discourse not just with Alicorn, but in general.
Agreed. Well, there are ways to be successful while acting consistently with the stated preferences of some women, but it still requires a bunch of work-arounds and a greater level of attraction.
Well, in the short term, yes. But if more men start pursuing in an aggressive way, then there is more competition, which could create incentive to pursue more aggressively than other men. On the other hand, there could be a ceiling on how much aggressiveness in advances can be successful. This sounds like an empirical question.
There are some cultures where men pursue women very aggressively in ways easily cause street harassment, and it's plausible that these norms occurred through a run-away process where men had to one-up each other in terms of aggressiveness.
Theoretically, yes. But there are some additional practical considerations given that women have preferences for masculine, culturally successful men. It could be that in a certain culture, what is considered "masculine" mating behavior also risks making women uncomfortable a large proportion of the time. Unattractive men who exhibit that behavior are considered an annoyance. Attractive men who exhibit that behavior are accepted as mates. Men who do not exhibit that behavior in the first place are considered unattractive, and end up as rejected and invisible, because the women don't see they as appropriately masculine and attractive in the first place. This is truly a lose-lose situation for both genders.
From a practical standpoint, women can demand that men make advances in less aggressive ways, and reject them for displaying too much aggression. Yet from a psychological perspective, it might be harder to get mainstream heterosexual women to do that, because it would mean going for guys who don't display culturally masculine courtship behaviors that those women may associate with attractiveness, and it would mean rejecting guys who are attractive to them.
Maybe mainstream heterosexual women can just "get over" this psychology if they are educated about the effect of their aggregate choices on cultural norms... but maybe it's not that easy.
Please just reply directly, instead of making these kinds of comments. No one (except Eliezer) has the authority to tell you not to reply to someone's comment on an open comment section.
I appreciate you having the courage to voice that opinion openly. (This was a very contentious issue, if you can believe it...)
You're right, I don't mean that. I would say, rather, that the burden of conscientiousness is greater when one is criticizing a group to which one does not belong; dangerous thoughts and all that. My problem was not with what you were saying, necessarily, but that the manner in which you said it ignored this burden of conscientiousness. If you had said, "I cooperate by monitoring behavior in my group. Why do you defect?" I doubt I would have had any problem with the comment.
Why do you make the bolded assumption? In cultures where long-term monogamous relationships are the norm, dating capability annihilates itself by taking those who possess it off the market.
And for that matter, why are you worried about women increasingly believing that disrespectful men are their only option? If disrespectfulness is a self-reinforcing phenomenon as you suggest, we should expect to see respectful men as almost entirely marginalized. And yet the past fifty years have displayed the opposite trend: there is much more belief now that women should expect/demand a certain level of respect from their romantic partners. Whether or not this is acted upon proportionately (and while I suspect that it is, I have neither scientific nor personal evidence that this is so), I'm not sure how your model explains what evidence I do have.
Okay, but that's exactly my complaint. Now what?
I'm referring to confidence effects: i.e. the more success you have earlier, the more you have later.
We do -- hence the widespread phenomenon, noticed even among women, of women being attracted to "bad boy" types, which was attenuated in more conservative eras. Plus, the increasing frequency of divorce and domestic violence.
[citation needed]
Divorce has been on a steady upward trend. If fraction that are due to domestic violence is constant, that's all that's necessary for my point. If not, you're right, I don't have e.g. battered women's shelter stats handy, but even if you ignore that part, the divorce rate alone is strong enough evidence.
I had the same reaction. I'd be surprised if this is true since violent crime generally has been on a downward trend. I did some googling and couldn't turn up much data, though a couple of hits seemed to support my suspicion that this is a difficult question to answer due to historical widespread under-reporting of domestic violence and a suspected increase in frequency of reporting more recently.
I'm not sure why this is evidence that women increasingly believe that disrespectful men are their only option or that respectful men are almost entirely marginalized. Is the argument that the increased number of divorces largely affect respectful men, in that when divorces were more difficult to obtain, women could only obtain divorces when their spouses were demonstrably problematic (and therefore, more likely to be disrespectful), and that easier divorce procedures allow women to divorce respectful men more easily?
I'm not an expert on either current or historic divorce law, but it's my understanding that under earlier regimes, in many instances, women could not obtain divorces easily even with abusive husbands, because of proof difficulties. Perhaps more easily obtainable divorces just allowed more women to divorce disrespectful men.
To everyone making this same brilliant point: the divorce rate continued to increase after the relaxation of these restrictions on it, which would mean we're not just seeing the conversion of "would have divorced" cases. And if the causes after that relaxation remain constant in relative proportion, that means more domestic violence.
Just because that PUA gets women after they've told him to go away, doesn't mean that when they told him to go away they didn't mean it. It just means that he eventually changes their minds (at least temporarily). There's a Master vs. Slave thing going on.
But if they don't stick to their original rejection, then they are incentivizing (there, I finally started using that word!) the very behavior they claim to oppose.
Yes, I had earlier drawn the analogy to akrasic purchases from telemarketers. But why aren't there women who, on principle never go out with a man they rejected once, just as there are people who, on principle, never purchase a product through telemarketing / spam?
Edit: And why isn't there social pressure against going out with a man you had recently rejected, just as there's social pressure against buying from telemarketers / spam. ("You idiot! That just encourages them!")
I think Silas is actually pushing in a correct direction. I'm just not sure there needs to be a solution.
The thing is, if you're a (straight) man, it's no credit to you if you're with a woman who's a pushover. And if you're a (straight) woman, it's also no credit to you if you're with a man who's a pushover. Having a date who can stand up to you is a sign that you're a quality person -- persuasive, attractive, admirable, etc.
And as long as men are proposers and women are accepters, this means that women want men who are relentless in pursuing them, and men want women who relentlessly evade them. (Something like the Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn dynamic.)
I don't see this as a problem ... in most cases. Obviously we don't want men to threaten or attack women. And we don't want too much of a stigma against women who say "yes" right away. But, appropriately moderated, it's not a terrible dynamic. And I think we do moderate it; increasingly, people consider rape unacceptable, and consider female sexual eagerness acceptable, if a little ill-advised.
Okay, but how would men get reliable advice on which kinds of "standing up" are okay, and which kinds convert them into an evil terrorist creepy stalker guy that all women should stay away from? Or to distinguish between "stop for real" and "try harder"? And how would the existence of this advice not destroy its usefulness to women, as I warned about before?
Edit: And if there doesn't need to be a solution, that suggests I shouldn't care about date rape, stalking, abuse, etc. because this is all just the predictable result of women filtering for non-pushovers. But that's ridiculous -- surely, something needs solving.
Is it not obvious that physical force, or the credible threat of physical force, pushes things into a new category?
Maybe it's just that I'm used to a traditional, hard-and-fast understanding of the word "coercion."
Are you, personally, Silas, ever unsure if you're being a stalker?
I, CronoDAS, personally, have frequently been unsure if I'm being a stalker.
Physical force includes a sexual advance that isn't welcome. If women react the same way whether or not the advance is welcome ... do you want to finish that sentence?
I've been kicked out of a group and given a very kafkaesque explanation after I tried to contact a female who had been friendly toward me, but then suddenly did a 180 and became (somehow!) ultra-scared of me before I had a chance to understand what was going on.
I've heard several females complain about a guy who followed them to or from home and yet suffered no consequences.
Sadly, the answer is yes. And even more sadly, these women know exactly what they need to do differently, but don't do that.
But women usually don't react the same way to welcome and unwelcome advances. At the very least, women are far more likely to react positively to a welcome advance than to an unwelcome one. Therefore, a negative response should cause you to update your estimate of her receptiveness down. Maybe not to zero, but definitely below 50%, and don't you want to err on the side of not causing her significant fear or distress?
I'm not sure what your second to last paragraph even means--elaborate?
As for women knowing exactly what they need to do differently, you still haven't addressed my point on the social penalties for women who behave assertively (by sticking to their guns instead of yielding to pressure and giving in despite an initial refusal). At any rate, why are you putting the onus on women? I might as well say that if men just changed so that they always respected women's stated preferences, then women would soon adapt to become more honest and direct. But don't you see how this is just wishful thinking? Instead of bemoaning the fact that people don't behave the way you'd like them to, try to think of ways that the current social structure can be changed. Perhaps by persuading parents to teach their sons to be more respectful and their daughters more assertive, portraying respectful men and assertive women more positively in entertainment, and so on.
Of course, but the point is this only counts as weak evidence.
No, not to zero (that's impossible), and probably not even to 50% (given the tendency of women to change their minds on account of persistence, as some women here have already testified to). And like I've explained several times already, I don't want to err in the direction if it means ceding the romantic world to men who are even less respectful of women (see the end of this comment, or heck, any post I've made today on this topic for why unilateral disarmament is dangerous in this case).
I'm not sure what I could say that would make it clearer than it already is. Women have told me that men have done things much closer to stalking than I have ever conceived of, yet received nothing in the way of punishment.
Yes, I did, because you claimed that they face an incentive structure that causes them too be insufficiently assertive, yet the very problem under discussion is that they act too assertively, in that they reject more often than they really mean (assertiveness is not in general bad, of course). Since you've cited a factor that would have the opposite effect from what you need it to in order to make your point, I'm not sure why you think it's relevant.
There's a fundamental difference that breaks the symmetry you assert: for men to always respect is an "unstable equilibrium", while for women to always be truthful is not.
In other words, the more men we convert to respectful, the stronger the incentives are for the remaining men to ignore rejections from women because they have less competition for these women. Any universal practice of respect by men would be instantly shattered by the tremendous incentives for any man to defect.
In contrast, for women to be truthful does not increase the incentives for other women to use fake rejections. That is why addressing it on the male side is much more of an uphill battle, and one which rewards exactly the wrong men.
As for what to do, am I not doing exactly the right thing my alerting women to the toxic incentive structure they create by this practice and what arguably underlies many of the ills of men they complain about, but for which few of them ever make the connection? That's the first step on the road genuine progress in this area, don't you think?
Nah. From my experience, this matters way less to men than to women. Whether a woman "stands up to me" doesn't factor into my judgment of her as a partner. Moreover, if a woman "evades" me, this is a turn-off for me.
For some evidence about people being into pushovers, check out the results of this study by Botwin and Buss
These results would be more probable if women cared more than men about avoiding "pushovers."
I have definitely seen guys go for elusive women. Sometimes -- just as it is with women -- you don't go with what they say, but with the pattern of behavior. And sometimes the pattern is that they chase the unattainable and unavailable. Or women who seem "classy," hard to win and hard to impress. But it may not be as common as a male pattern.
Nah. Imagine that some women are exceptionally attractive to men for some arbitrary reason, but you cannot see this reason because you're not a man. Then these women will start behaving more "elusively" out of necessity, thus prompting you to see the nonexistent causal pattern of men chasing elusive women. From my experience, women don't accurately assess the attractiveness of other women (they fixate too much on clothing, accessories, "style" etc. instead of qualities that matter to men), so my theory should make you a little paranoid from now on :-)
Then wouldn't elusive behavior become a status signal of sorts? "Oh, person X is being elusive; there must be something there I'm not seeing!"
Yes, definitely.
I doubt it would work on men. We can assess female attractiveness directly in like 2 seconds, no need for signals and definitely not enough time to notice elusive behavior.
And this, my friend, is the "part of 'No!'" that men "don't understand".
Again, it may seem clever to use explicit rejections and then expect men to "just know" that it's fake by your "behavior" ... but that creates a really rotten incentive structure.
I think you've hit upon the root of the problem; like the other phenomena you mention, the strength of the trend seems to be diminishing.
What is your evidence that there are no such women?
Because I'm familiar with standard advice given to women, and I never see a taboo against "giving in" to continued unwanted advanced "just because you decide you like the guy now".
That's evidence that such a social taboo is not very common, but there could easily be women doing it on their own accord and just not talking about it much. "Don't reward guys for keeping to bother you" seems obvious and unremarkable enough to follow without explicitly mentioning it all the time.
Without wanting to cite fictional evidence I think it's worth noting that guys being rewarded for continuing to bother an initially uninterested woman is a very common and long-lived trope in fiction.
Yes, and that's in fiction that is most popular with women. To borrow the form of a Penny Arcade strip, it's like this:
Jane: Geez, we go through all this effort to raise awareness about respect for women, and men never seem to get the message! Why is that?
Lisa: (with a guilty look) It's a goddamn ... it's a goddamn mystery!
Earlier, at a focus group session Lisa is participating in...
Focus group director: So, what kinds of behaviors do you women like to see in the male characters in the novels you read?
Lisa and the rest of the group: Ignoring the woman's rejections!!!
I suspect that women are very underrepresented among people who:
a) frame dating someone a "reward" for them, and
b) carefully monitor the game-theoretic implications of their actions
Are you female? Do you think you have sufficient understanding of what empathic inferences you can make from your mind to theirs?
That wasn't supposed to be an argument for such behavior being common (I'd guess it's not particulary), just for the possibility of such behavior existing without being much talked about.
Yes, there can always be invisible evidence.
If you really can't reliably tell when people are being serious or not, err on the side of respecting their articulated preferences.