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Salemicus comments on How to come to a rational believe about whether someone has a crush on yo - Less Wrong
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Unfortunately there is the common failure mode where Alex keeps making bigger and bigger signals, while Billy makes no signals at all, but A interprets everything B does as maybe some kind of signal. So this method still relies on being able to tell, at least to some extent.
If you aren't good at reading other people's signals, then the following heuristic is a pretty good one:
Fully agree with first part. Last part is wrong.
Better solution is, if you are in doubt and are bad at reading signals, ask a friend.
This worked out well for my husband and me. I had told him I'd had a dream in which we were making love, and he asked a friend if that meant I liked him. And they told him yes, of course (or I'd not have told him even if I'd had the same dream). Been together for ~20 years now.
I'm impressed that he could possibly fail to interpret that as a very direct hitting-on with high certainty.
So, whatever you want, the other person wants the opposite? That's an awful heuristic! Remember, reverse stupidity is not intellegence!
Nope. The rule is conditional on "wondering." For the vast majority of people I meet, it doesn't occur to me to wonder whether they have a crush on me. So if I'm wondering whether they like me, something unusual must have triggered it.
Similarly, if I like someone and they like me too, most of the time I don't wonder about it, I know. So if I'm still puzzled as to whether they like me, then it's because they don't like me, but I'm trying to read non-signals as signals.
Maybe you're overoptimistic, and try to "read non-signals as signals" but other people might be under-confident and not see signals which are there because they have difficulty imagining that someone could like them.
Of course, if you are even remotely credence calibrated in this matter, then uncertainty signifies ... uncertainty.
This heuristic is terrible if you're trying to find a romantic partner since following it consistently will always lead you to believe that the people you're interested in and whose reciprocal interest isn't clear to you are not interested in you. If you live in a society where your potential partner isn't supposed to make overt signals about their romantic interests (because of gender roles or something), this may result in never finding a partner.
Also, suggesting that people who "aren't good at reading other people's signals" should condition anything based on the presence of uncertainty about reciprocal interest seems like it'll produce inconsistent results at best. In this case, I think they should take the potential failure mode and increase signaling until A (or a trusted friend) gives a unambiguous signal.