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MrMind comments on Solved Problems Repository - Less Wrong
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Comments (270)
"How do I find out how a particular person thinks/feels about a particular subject/issue/situation?" Ask them.
I'd call this an 80% solution because sometimes they don't quite know (and even more rarely, they deliberately lie), but it's still wayy better than not asking in most cases.
Warning: This is worth negative points in many situations.
I don't know if I agree. What situations did you have in mind? I can think of a lot of situations where knowing the answer is much more important than "points".
Explicitly asking about social hierarchies/status positional moves.
Ohh. "Hey friend, do you feel insecure around me because I'm more successful than you?" type questions?
exactly.
That's a good point; I guess those are hard to ask directly. Though maybe you can still ask a variant of it if you're careful and kick into their abstract reasoning? Maybe something like "Oh my gosh, friend, I feel so insecure around person because they're more successful than me! Does that ever happen to you successful people?" Of course, they might answer the way they wish they could answer and keep acting weird around you anyway.
Though, I feel like that's a question you half-know the answer to before you ask. Are there situations where knowing the answer to a status-related question is important for making a decision and guessing wrong has a high penalty?
uh...every situation?
Sounds like you worry a lot more about status than I do. o_O
That's a high-status thing to say :)
My guess: you don't live in a very large city, so most of the people you interact with already know well (cf this), whereas that doesn't apply to RomeoStevens; and/or you are in the hard sciences or similar and he is in the humanities or similar (cf this).
Sounds like he's male. A while ago, I read something in a thread on reddit about women in IT, where a woman complained about women having to prove themselves all the time there. And I was thinking that yes, that sucks; you'd think that after a time, people would recognize that hey, this woman knows her stuff. But then a man asked what was the problem with that, after all, it wasn't like men didn't have to prove themselves with every interaction as well.
I suspect that depends (among other things) on the wording of the question, the tone of voice, the context and the non-verbal communication. I can't remember such a question backfiring when asked in a ha ha only serious/lampshade hanging way.
"Do you want to have sex with me?"
Sometimes, just the act of asking changes the answer...
How to put this delicately... do we have any data on whether this is more likely to change a "yes" to a "no" than the opposite?
My graphs are in another state, but from memory, in 40-ish trials:
There's a lot of fuzz in the numbers and methodology, but 5% conversion was pretty far below my then-average for an otherwise warm, flirty conversation, so I didn't investigate further. Honestly I wouldn't even have done that many trials, except that I knew a fellow who swears by it.
Are you sure they were actually unrelated reasons and not just excuses?
No, of course not. I doubt they were excuses, just because I didn't have any reason to excuse the "just ask directly" strategy, but presumably all those outcomes were influenced a least a bit.
I'm more in the range of 10-ish, so I guess that if there's a chance that asking for sex solves the problem of the OPer, it's in the range of 5-7%. Which to me is an anti-solution.
Any data? Yes. In my personal experience that kind of question were able to kill flirty and touchy behaviour 100% of the time.
Double-blinded, debiased, large sampled data? I don't think, but it might be a fun project for some social scientist out there.
There is also the possibility that sex would not have happened anyway but brining it up that that was your intention made them want to distance themselves from the situation. And the possibility that it would have happened if you hadn't asked but only because the flirty/touchy behavior was leading them towards wanting to have sex but asking interrupted the process (this is distinct from the original claim in that the problem wasn't asking but asking too soon).
I'm aware, unfortunately there's no way to tell. Asking does seem to lower the frequency, though, at leas as far as I can tell in my cultural environment.
That's surely possible. Based on observations in my personal life though I don't deem it much probable... Anyway, the original point was that there are very important situations in which asking for feelings is very bad and quite far from a solution. In this regard, asking too soon to me is a subset of asking, not just an entirely different issue
My personal experience only contains switches the other way. Maybe I don't ask enough and others don't ask me enough.
You mean that asking increases the probability of sex happening? Interesting... I wonder if it's something reproducible or just a cultural artefact.
How do y'all have sex without asking at some point? Do you just kinda follow a script and try to guess the other person's script from their body language and hope that you get it right enough that they don't have to stop and correct you, and that your default ideas of sex more or less match? And once sex is underway, do you switch to words, or have some other method for requesting things, or just have the same kind of sex every time?
Or am I mistaken about what "asking" covers? I'm counting both asking after a makeout session and commencing sex five seconds later, and asking "Wanna meet up five days from now and do these sexual things?" and then initiating those things on the assumption you're working from the same script.
Comrade, do you enjoy borscht?
In my experience there are more or less three stages:
1) Flirting without physical contact, or only with physical contact that might be acceptable for an acquaintance (brief touches, possibly friendly hugs) leading up to some kind of asking-out or other fairly direct "are you interested in me" question
2) More overt flirting, possibly later-stage physical contact, possibly leading up to kissing
3) After kissing or similar-level contact, if things seem to be getting hot and/or heavy, body-language-only communication halts. Serious Discussion is had about What Will Happen Next, including sex and/or Future Plans. This is fairly explicit and consists of things like "Do you want this to be a serious relationship?" and "Do you want to do sex act X?" and "I need to tell you about Y."
I doubt this is really applicable to anyone else, because our culture doesn't seem to really have a script that is standardized enough for anyone to follow, but it's a script that I like pretty well. I've skipped steps, but more or less always follow the "Talk about it explicitly once physical contact reaches a certain point" part, and I think it is helpful.
I usually just go forward and if a girl is uncomfortable she will stop me. Apparently this is much less awkward than asking directly.
I wonder whether MrMind's was intended to be a direct quotation or a paraphrase.
If you want to optimize for no->yes, which I presume you do, I would say start with something much less intimate, like kissing. And even then, you'll probably want it to happen when there's already some vectors pointing in that direction.
If you ask the sex question out of the blue / too early, then that signals that you just generally have sex on your mind, which in many cases is seen as a bad thing. And depending on tone it can convey lots of other undesirable ideas. There are also (many) situations in which your conversational partner may simply not want to say yes to that question too early, and therefore you don't want to ask the question yet.
It's... kind of like inferential distances? If your state of mind is all sexy, but your partner's is not, then it can be weird to just jump suddenly to sex. The difference (I guess) is that unlike just explaining something, there are indeed serious drawbacks (slaps, etc) from assuming the inferential gap is small. In general, I think it's a valuable skill to be able to quickly gauge where someone is on the inference or arousal spectra and respond accordingly. Perhaps separate skills though.
Asking out of the blue is highly antagonizing because it transgresses against conversational norms very badly, and this changes the perception of the situation. Basically, from her point of view, the probability that you are either a pickup artist, crazy/dangerous or a psychology student (in decreasing order of likelyhood) just approached unity. None of those three are likely to be fun for her, so bye-bye.
It is be possible to clarify the situation without failing social skills forever. - "Are we flirting"? can work, for example.
My theory is that it just signals very low social skills, an undesirable feature in general for women.
.. This is bad reasoning. If status was really what women wanted, the vast majority of men would go to their graves without ever getting laid. It is not at all difficult to get a high-status man to sleep with you, after all.
Danger avoidance and pleasure seeking suffice to explain the observed facts, so why on earth are you over-complicating your hypothesis ?
Simplest Theory: What a typical women wants sexually is a satisfying sex life without becoming a rape or domestic violence statistic. I find this to be a much better fit for observed behavior than bullshit pseudo-scientific theories that postulate enormously complicated drives. How the frack would brainware favoring something as ephemeral as "status" have evolved? And in what way would it be consistently advantageous over "Get laid. Do not get killed"?
Do you feel attracted to all people of your preferred gender by the same amount?
If we didn't have brainware for favoring status, people wouldn't have a preference for attaining it, or the ability to recognize it, at all. I suspect anyone who's been through an ordinary public school will be able to attest that humans, from an early age, tend to have some degree of motivation to have standing among their peers, and are able to follow cues to determine who has such standing and who does not. If we've established that such apparatus exists at all, it's not a big jump to implementing it in mate selection.
I'm going to disagree with Kindly and say that there is a readily apparent advantage here. For most of our evolutionary history, high status would be associated with ability to provide for offspring. A leader who has many underlings paying tribute can much more easily support raising children in safety and abundance than one of the underlings whose resources are being taken in tribute. If we're looking at a culture with really large status differentials, say, Ancient Egypt, a Pharaoh who's already had two hundred kids by various women is still more able to support the raising of a few more than a peasant laborer who hasn't had any children at all yet.
We can confirm via genetics that humans alive today have considerably fewer male ancestors than female, because it was rarer for women to go without having any children than men, but men were more likely to have many children by different partners. Reports of sexual activity among men and women support the same pattern today.
If both men and women had drives that amounted only to "get laid, don't get killed," we would be unlikely to observe such a pattern. Among animals, organisms with more than a very small amount of processing power tend to implement more complex selection strategies than this. Take, for example, all the herbivores where the males have horns they use to compete with other males over females.
Keep in mind that beyond attempting to survive and have offspring, there's a genetic advantage in displacing competitors. Every specimen benefits from getting their genes as large a share of the next generation as possible. This will tend to complicate reproductive strategies well beyond the level of "survive and have kids."
I seem to recall someone mentioning a study concluding that probably only about 40% of men who ever lived had children, compared to about 80% of women.
However, there's a huge difference between "no children who lived long enough to have descendants" and "no sex".
Uh, the same way anything like pairbonding evolved? What about maternal feelings towards children? What about paternal feelings toward children? What about complicated behaviors like nesting, animal mating rituals, and dominance fights among (to pick the first of dozens of examples that sprang to my mind) elk? Status games ABOUND in nature, and mating that isn't just "getting laid" takes place among tons of species, and humans especially. Having a high status man sleep with you isn't anywhere near enough to safely and happily raise children, even assuming you get pregnant.
If we ignore your weird ignorance of nature: Social skills do not equal high status. they correlate with high status, but they're not the same thing. Not understanding what is appropriate to say to someone you're trying to get into bed is a sign of foolishness and lack of care far more than it's a sign of low status.
Well, I said they're after social skills, not status. And there are others factor involved, for example availability.
It wouldn't, but "Get laid. Do not get killed" is a low bar to clear. Once you can do that, your goals may change to finding the best possible partner to get laid with/by (what is the correct preposition here?) and this is where status comes in.
As to your other objection:
Women also have status. High-status women sleep with high-status men and low-status women sleep with low-status men. (Also high-status men sometimes sleep with other high-status men and so on.)
I don't see a need to separate social skills with pleasure seeking/danger avoidance. Generally, someone with a lot of social skill isn't a rapist, and someone with a lot of social skill would probably have a lot of experience giving pleasure as well.
In my experience, women have been more open to me once they've seen that I'm popular with other women. If I were in academia, I would test this by designing a variation of that classic approach-random-women-and-ask-for-sex experiment with one group of males being seen in the company of a lot of women and another group of males approaching alone.