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army1987 comments on Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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How can I tell if someone is sexually and/or romantically attracted to me, if a combination of living in a country with somewhat lenient proxemic norms and having the “nice guy privilege” means that all the obvious ways to tell yield lots of false positives? People smile at me, compliment me, touch me, buy me drinks and give me lifts in their cars all the time, even when they're in a committed monogamous relationship with someone else and even in front of their boyfriends/husbands.
Make a move that indicates interest in a manner that is socially acceptable and effective. This seems to be both an suitable application of empiricism and an adaptive interpersonal strategy in a non hostile social environment.
Again, using a heuristic that returns false positives (or, in objective terms, using strategy that includes active investigation even with non extreme estimated probability of interest) is an effective interpersonal strategy in a healthy social environment. If the environment is such that making social overtures when it so happens that there is not interest comes with a particularly high cost then it is probably best to find a better tribe. (Or to compartmentalize the forms of social interaction that you do in your various locations---a strategy otherwise known by such catchy yet crude morals as "Don't shit where you eat!")
Your friends, acquaintances and/or people you casual interact with sound great! Good for you (sincerely).
(First, this can be a bad idea unless I'm actually interested in them myself, for obvious reasons, but henceforth I will assume I am.) It's not like I never do that, but when I do, four things can happen: 1) they push me away or freak out, 2) they do nothing in particular or reciprocate lukewarmly, 3) they reciprocate enthusiastically, or 4) they escalate further. Now 1) is emotionally painful, but at least it's clear what I should do (namely, don't do that again and move the hell on)¹; on the other hand, with women from most parts of my country with whom I have any amount of familiarity at all² it basically never happens. 2) is particularly ambiguous, as it might mean that they don't like me but don't want to hurt my feelings, that they like me platonically but not romantically, that they're still not sure of their own feelings and want to take things slow, that they like me but they're shy, and probably also something else I haven't thought about. Unfortunately, this has been the most common response in my experience. 3) is also somewhat ambiguous, as it might mean that they're romantically interested in me, but also that they like me as a friend and they are particularly expansive. It is also a very common response IME. 4) is relatively unambiguous (though possibly not sure-fire -- maybe they just are extremely expansive or something), but somewhat rare. So, in most cases I only get a limited amount of information. (On the other hand, if I observe the way they interact with everybody else, and know or guess how much they've drunk, I can try to figure out how shy or how expansive they are, which can help me interpret their interactions with me to some extent.)
Yup. I got response 1) above a lot when I was in Ireland. It felt awful. (And I didn't know yet that the correct response to that was “don't do that again and move the hell on”, which only made things worse.) Actually it still occasionally happens now that I'm back in Italy (usually in cold approaches initiated by me without a wingman, or with a low-agreeableness wingman), but now I just shrug it off and move on, at least during days when I'm sufficiently thick-skinned (namely, if in the last couple days I've ingested at least as many calories as I've expended).
Okay, it doesn't necessarily indicates disliking, it might also indicate an extreme level of shyness -- but I wouldn't want to be with someone that shy anyway.
Apparently, even having been introduced to them by a mutual friend and talked to them for a couple minutes counts, at least if the mutual friend is female.
Honestly, the examples you give (except maybe for buying drinks) are not strong evidence of sexual attraction. Would you be reading things into these behaviors if you weren't attracted to the person or the gender?
But to try to answer your question: Why not ask? Either directly ("I'm confused by the signals you are sending, and want to make sure I am reading them accurately - because this has been a problem of mine in the past") or indirectly ("Hey Y, I'm confused by the signals X is sending me and want to make sure I'm reading them accurately").
But remember that your feelings for X are not a reason for X to have feelings for you. So there's a serious risk that revealing your feelings will rupture the friendship. This is not a good fact about the world - but taboos on discussing implicit signals do exist despite being really unhelpful.
And I don't understand what you mean by "nice guy privilege."
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.
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.