I agree with almost all of what you've said here, except for the idea that taking the middle way is correct in this instance.

Also, let it be stated in advance that anything I say about my behavior patterns, social strategies and so forth is noticed in hindsight. I am not actually a Machiavellian mastermind who plots every interaction to maximize for making you all my slaves. (Of course I am telling you the truth. I am your friend. )

My favorite approach to social tactics is taking the Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres route: I perceive that people are generally trying to box me into a social role, namely self-consciousness, and it feels from the inside like my options are to allow this and be shy and uncomfortable, or rebel against it and be angry and uncooperative. Usually noticing those two choices causes me to pick the first, then the second in frustration, then the first because I want to be conciliatory, &etc.

Or... I can weird their paradigm. I can do this in many ways, but there are two I seem to choose most:

1. Vacillating confusingly between acting shy, uncomfortable, innocent, stupid and generically cute, and acting energetic, forward, eccentric and Michael_Vassar-ish. Note that when doing this I don't necessarily take hits to my well-being or attack that of others, because when performed ideally both social roles feel like fun games. This can be described as going the fae route and is only suitable for use in the short term and preferably in settings with several other people, because otherwise it's just glorified gaslighting unless I know exactly what I'm doing.

2. Making goddamn everything explicit. If I don't like a thing, I say, calmly, pleasantly, that I don't, and offer solutions or ask the other person to help me come up with solutions. If I like a thing, I say I like it. This doesn't mean telling everyone about all of my thoughts, but it does mean not stewing on a discomfort or distress, and trying to never subtly intimate things about my mental state.

My problem is that I'm too meta. Making the issue about my personal self-esteem leads me into a terrifying infinite conceptual loop of pleasure and displeasure with my characteristics. Noticing these characteristics and how I can best use them is much simpler for me - the issue of a self-worth feels like a wrong question when there are results to be got. This doesn't mean that I think women and girls with low self-worth are being Insufficiently Meta and therefore deserve what they get; it means that the issue of what happens in their minds is totally separate from that which happens in my own.

I notice in hindsight that this comment might read like one big essay about one-upmanship (against you and your philosophy.) It's not meant that way; the thing that happened is I noticed myself accepting your statements unquestioningly after reading them and not replying, and felt the need to fix that.

Perhaps lukeprog's assistant should make a separate account to post these through, to avoid getting this complaint every time they make such a post.

I notice about equal proportions of my male and female acquaintances/friends showing this kind of fear of being seen as showing off. It seems like it's perceived as a much more attractive trait in women, so people create two categories to describe it: shy, insecure, awkward girls, and beta, submissive, loser men. [Note that I think this kind of behavior is perceived as a subset of beta-malehood, not the whole thing.]

My shot-in-the-dark theory is that men nearly always prefer to be described as aggressive, competitive, forward &etc, while for women there are serious tradeoffs in being perceived as such. I have an intuition that's not generally explicit that acting shy, nerdy and awkward is the best default behavior for me, and acting assertive and making strange claims is best for when I can reasonably expect to get away with it. So this intuition seems to categorize Spock Rationality as belonging in the first category (kind of like how hot girls memetically do countersignalling by saying they play video games) and actual rationality as belonging in the second.

I also notice that nearly everyone I know who's referred to themselves as shy, awkward, or insecure behaves, well, not shy once you get to know them; this suggests that my intuition is pretty widespread. When it's written out like this it's an obvious simple utility calculation - which action will result in me winning most often if I take it every time in situations like these? - but I don't have a good model of what the standard male version of this utility calculation is.

This is funny to me, because the first time I met a group of Less Wrongers, one of them tickled me a day or two into us having met. However, the person in question was MBlume, who is known to not be scary.

This comment does all of the things I was concerned about Alicorn's not doing. The conversation I'd expect to ensue from her comment would be an argument over the definitions of "torture," "incomprehensible bossing" &etc, which wouldn't be explicit so much as the bashing together of "Doing these things to autistics is good" and "Doing these things to autistics is evil." I have good reasons to expect this, because it's what I've seen take place subsequent to such a remark a million times and with no positive outcome in any instance. (Add any amount, to taste, of "You're not a real autistic so you can't remark on the subjective experience of the Less High Functioning" and "People are actually being tortured and killed, so I shouldn't have to be nice to you or explain these things out. Therefore I'll just vaguely antagonize at you until you go away.")

I'll also point out that "doing things that are abhorrent to people for no goddamn reason" doesn't pay attention to the fact that people who do e.g. ABA do believe that what they're doing will improve the quality of life of whoever they're doing it to.

I remain badly uncomfortable with this portrayal of the situation as "High status men are permitted to touch arbitrary women in their social group more," and this being presumed to be the same as "Women are more happy when high status men touch them [than when low-status men do.]" I can allow someone to touch me for a lot of reasons: fear, paralysis, having been Psychology-of-Persuasion'd into it, being friends with them, being ecstatic about something unrelated, sexual or aesthetic attraction. However, I have good reason to believe that nearly all men don't just want to touch women, they want to touch women and have those women be happy about it, in the moment and afterwards. For certain when I think about touching someone, I'm displeased at the thought of them pretending to enjoy it and feeling vaguely skeeved, but not knowing why/not thinking they have the ability to prevent me from doing so.

I was also pleasantly surprised to notice how little this thread was mindkilled.

As for something I learned, the distinction between individual interpretation of someone's behavior as charismatic v. an individual's social status within a group was made salient in a way that let me notice it. There's several other things I can't call to mind but which I'm pretty sure I did learn.

No, but I think my female LW acquaintances might as individuals object more to being described as "status-oriented, competitive and aggressive concerning their rationality" than my male LW acquaintances.

This comment seems like it could be perceived as straw-manning. Backing up your statement with evidence that this is an accurate model of what people do with their autistic children would help.