necate comments on How to come to a rational believe about whether someone has a crush on yo - Less Wrong

-3 [deleted] 14 May 2015 12:10PM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 14 May 2015 09:18:03PM 3 points [-]

Why?

1) It's largely pointless in terms of one's behaviour and psychological well-being. If you have an all-consuming infatuation and you're not acting on it, the reason for not acting probably isn't because some test statistic hasn't crossed a predesignated threshold.

2) The whole sentiment of "I will calculate your love for me" is attached to a cluster of non-attractive features that probably get binned as "creepy". No, this isn't right. No, this isn't fair. But it is the case.

3) The notion of a "prior" on other people being attracted to you is essentially asking "how attractive am I?" This is information that can't be deduced by observing other people's romantic behaviour, any more than you can measure your own height by reading about other people's height.

Your attractiveness is not some inherent frequency by which people think you're attractive: it's made up of all the attributes and behaviours that people like about you. Maybe you should figure out what those things are and how to make them shine more, rather than trying to guess the odds on any given person finding you attractive.

Comment author: necate 15 May 2015 10:48:14PM 0 points [-]

Since not everyone thinks my approach is totally wrong like it seemed in the beginning I will re-enter this discussion although I said that I would abandon the approach. I did plan to abandon it, not because I understood why it was completely wrong but because I saw the massive dislike of it as enough evidence to believe it is wrong.

Concerning 1)

As I mentioned my point was not to do nothing, try to analyse and then come to some kind of result whether another person likes you. It is to assign probabilities on whether that person has a crush on you in order to decide how to act.

Concerning 2) If you decide to do certain things in the process of flirting you always assign probabilities to whether to person has a crush on you or not. If this would not be the case than there would be no development in the flirting process. You would give exactly the same signals at the beginning and at the end. You only progress to more obvious signals because based on what you have seen before you think it is more probable that that person likes you. The only question is do you let your subconscious assign the probabilities or do you make a conscious effort to do that. Most people will let their subconscious assign the probabilities. I agree that a lot of people will find it creepy if I decide to make conscious decisions here, but A) I do not have to let them know that I make a conscious decision and B) those people would probably also have problems with me making conscious decisions on other issues where they do not and if a person is not willing to accept that that is how I make my decisions it is probably the wrong person anyway.

Concerning 3) yes my attractiveness something specific to me. But my attractiveness is not the only factor deciding how likely it is for someone to have a crush on me. I am not sure how to explain this properly, but in a world where every person would only have a crush on someone once in his/her entire life the chance of someone having a crush on me would be lower than in a world where people on average have a crush on a hundred people during their life. In the second world there are just way more crushes to be distributed and I don’t see why regardless of my attractiveness I should not get more of them. Therefore I think it is relevant to know how many crushes other people have in general. Of course I cannot say that the prior for someone having a crush on me is the same as the average prior of people having a crush on other people in general. But my believe about the prior for myself should be related to the average prior.