Maybe we should taboo "lie".

Good suggestion!

But obviously a plausible explanation for the whole scene is that Alice thinks Bob is socially competent on this matter when he in fact isn't.

I suspect that the typical mind fallacy is the primary cause of men and women not understanding each other.

People here are projecting their truth fetishes (which I share) onto the rest of the world.

This strikes me as an overgeneralization. In this particular scenario, an agent is attempting an ineffective strategy, which could be fixed by being explicit (Bob's strategy is also ineffective, but the path for Alice to improve is less ambiguous. As I pointed out in my first comment, since Alice determines the success or failure of Bob's strategies, she can decide to turn any strategy he tries into a failure). There are comparable numbers of people defending Bob and defending Alice, which suggests the truth fetishists (of which I am not one) may not be sizeable enough to stand for all people here.