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DaFranker comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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People can be atrociously and remarkably bad at asking for help, or even noticing that they need or could use some help.
This is independent of and multiplied by all the social complications and signalling factors involved. As per schminux's explanation, asking for help (use of the umbrella) in this case would socially be interpreted as even more of a favor-debt, and possibly even as a signal of implicitly-romantic-interest (like a woman asking you to buy her a drink at a bar).
Yes, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to point this out. Let me put it in more LW-friendly terms: when a woman sees an unfamiliar man offering to help her in some way, she assigns nontrivial probability to the hypothesis that the man is offering to help her for sexual reasons, and she assigns nontrivial probability to the hypothesis that the man is going to be angry and possibly violent if she rejects the sexual advances she expects, with nontrivial probability, to occur later if she accepts that help. This situation has sufficiently negative utility that it is worth avoiding even if the probability of it happening is not all that high.
Haha, that's an awesome way to word it.
But yeah, I was already agreeing with that part.
My point is only that, to the same woman, it's my understanding that many cases of initiating the interaction will look even worse.
Thus, the real problem to find a solution for is "How does one credibly signal need or offer for help while optimizing the chances that it will have a positive result and avoid social failure modes?", or something close to that, and the solution definitely doesn't look like "Do your own thing and don't ask for help or offer help".
Fair. I don't know a great solution to this problem, and "do your own thing" is at least not as bad as various other possibilities.