That's the main thing, yeah. The next bit is even what look like exceptions are actually the same thing in a less obvious way.

When a woman knows she's attracted to a guy and is bummed out that he's not picking up on her subtle signals, that's a lot like a man knowing he's attracted to a woman and being bummed out that she's not giving him super clear signals to ask her out. He could ask her out anyway, if he's willing to face rejection, and that would greatly increase his chances of getting a date with this woman. It'd also greatly increase his chances of making salient information like "Desirable women don't desire you". Even assuming there are no external reputational costs of doing this, that kind of information erodes his ability to see himself as desirable, and that's important to be able to justify asking in the first place -- because "Hi. I'm a loser, will you date me?" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

So maybe he could ask -- or maybe she could be obvious enough that he does notice her signals -- but that comes with the risk of learning "(S)he's just not that into you" and collapsing the would be asker from a state of hope and fear to a singular state free of both fear and hope. There's a real puzzle in how to best deal with unpleasant information so that we can separate the wheat ("This particular person isn't interested in me at this time") without inadvertently accepting in too much chaff ("I'm a loser and no one wants me") -- because sometimes the latter is true, in part, and we not only have to figure out how much truth there is there but also what to do about it. More skillful behavior will often be more bold, but there's also generally a grounded security there that enables such boldness. Rather than advise people to make their interest harder or easier to miss, I'd invite them to notice why it is they're not being bolder, and help them make sense of whether that's appropriate and if there's anything they can do to mitigate the costs of failure.

Once you actually get to "Yes, I want to maximize my chances with this person and I'm willing to face the consequences of that", rather than wanting to balance p(success) with saving face, then bold moves become natural -- whether yin or yang, implicit or explicit. And those bold moves do indeed work better at the thing they're aimed at, than the moves that don't commit to this target.

Inversely, once you are squared away on "No, I don't actually want a date with person if that's the case -- and it might be", you get more skilled and subtle flirtation instead of a clumsy "DO YOU ALREADY WANT TO DATE ME? NO? OKAY!". And these subtler moves are also more effective at what they're aimed at, than moves that go all in at the wrong thing.

but man it sure sounds like "not noticing womens' subtle cues" is the near-universal experience, even among other women when people actually try to test that.

Yeah, I get where you're coming from. That's definitely a near universal experience. I've been there. As have my friends.

One story that stands out is when my friend was tutoring an attractive woman during college. She kept doing things like leaning over exposing her cleavage to him. At one point she conspicuously announced that she had to take her birth control and then took it in front of him. At the time he didn't think "Ooh, she wants to do me" because "What? She just needs to take her birth control." seemed like a better explanation.

But he sure noticed -- or else he wouldn't have remembered and told me the story. He just wasn't confident enough to risk asking and hearing "Ew, no! You creep!" -- and she  probably wasn't confident enough to make things more obvious for him and risk hearing "Ew! Control yourself, you ugly slut!".

I wasn't there and I'm only guessing, but I'd guess that she really did want something that she didn't get, and that her "not clear enough" was... well, protective, still, but not effective at getting what she wanted in a safe way.

I would guess that this is approximately 100% of the time in practice,

The problem here is how you define the denominator. Something like "cases where a woman 1) definitely wants a date and 2) sends subtle cues instead of asking"? Because if so, then sure. But that's missing the point.

The vast majority of subtle cues are sent when desire for a date is up in the air. While "not noticing women's subtle cues" may be near-universal, it's not nearly as universal as interacting with women at all. There are far more moments of eye contact, smiles, questions asked, etc. There's noise in the data and the baselines aren't always obvious, but every interaction is an analog indicator of the level of interest. Far more often than "Girl definitely wanted a date, you didn't notice that she definitely wanted a date, and therefore didn't ask her out" are things like "Girl thought you were kinda cute, held eye contact and smiled a fraction of a second longer than is her normal. You felt a bit more comfortable prolonging the interaction to talk to her than you would have with less eye contact and smiles, and eventually you both go on your way". It's not that if you would have asked her point blank she'd have agreed to a date. It's that if you wanted stay for a moment and have a bit more idle chit chat, she'd have been happy to do that. And if that went well, then she might have wanted more -- now that she has more evidence that she at least likes talking to you.

The cues here have to be ambiguous, because her desire itself is ambiguous. Because what a relationship with you would be like is ambiguous. If you try to cram it into a binary box of "Wants the date or wants not the date", then you're going to be rounding down a lot of real interest because of a flinch from seeing a maybe as a maybe.

The other issue with your choice of denominator is that if the woman definitely wants the date she likely won't be subtle. Or "definitely won't be subtle", depending on how you operationalize "definitely wants". She might definitely want the date conditional on him being interested, but he might not be definitely interested -- and who wants to be on a date with someone who doesn't want to be there? That woman who seemed to want something with my friend probably wouldn't want it anymore if he were to respond with "Eh, I suppose you'll do", for example, so she's not trying to maximize her odds of getting with him.

When you have a situation where the woman knows the man is going to be interested in her, and she knows that he's worth seducing, that's when you get really really obvious clues like leaning in and forcing the man to contend with the fact that she's there waiting to be kissed.

In short, approximately everybody senses women's cues whether they recognize it or not, whether they know what to do with it or not, and they're only subtle and ambiguous to the extent that their purpose is served by being subtle and ambiguous.

Now, one could reasonably counter-argue that the yin strategy delivers value somewhere else, besides just e.g. "probability of a date".

Yeah, probability of a date isn't something you want to Goodhart on.

That said, the post conspicuously avoids asking: how well will this yin strategy actually work? How much will the yin strategy improve this girl's chance of a date with the guy, compared to (a) doing nothing and acting normally, or (b) directly asking him out? It seems very obvious that the yin stuff will result in a date-probability only marginally higher than doing nothing (I'd say 1-10 percentage points higher at most, if I had to Put A Number On It), and far far lower than if she asks him (I'd say tens of percentage points).

You're greatly underestimating the power of the "yin strategy" both to create desire where there was none and also to be very very obvious when it needs to be.

The normal pattern is for woman to give some subtle cues, and if the man doesn't respond to them, the woman doesn't do more and doesn't get the date. Sometimes this is due to the woman in question not recognizing how subtle she's being, and losing out on a date with a man she's still interested in. Much of the time though, the woman isn't attached to "obtain date" as the goal, and is better described as probing than "trying to manipulate him into asking her out". I've had women explicitly tell me that they know they would be more likely to get a date with the guy if they were to make themselves more available (whether by explicitly asking him out or otherwise), and that they don't actually want the date unless the guy demonstrates sufficient interest/courage/perceptiveness/etc.  

That doesn't mean that the yin is weak, or stalls out if the guy doesn't get the hint. In situations where the man is demonstrating sufficient perceptiveness/interest/courage and still is holding out for whatever reason, women can make these "subtle cues" very very very obvious. Like, way more obvious than explicitly asking (which could conceivably be insincere). For example, a woman who wants to be kissed might hold eye contact a bit longer, lean a bit closer, and might speak a bit less, as if to appreciate the silence -- which is subtle and could be missed. 

But if she holds unbroken eye contact, flat out doesn't respond to anything he says in attempt to distract her or test her resolve, and leans all the way in until her lips are mere millimeters from his, waiting for minutes until he responds.... that's yin, but not something that can be missed, you know? And it's not a joke and it's not a whim. 

"Do you want to kiss me?" is something that could be decoupled from, but if she embodies the invitation full force, he'll feel it if he wants to kiss her -- even if he might not have wanted to before.

I am not exactly sure why this difference - a total inversion! -

The boxing and corporate situations don't seem that different to me. In both cases, the higher ups are providing direction and the people lower down are allowed to ask questions -- but might get in trouble for trying to challenge those higher up.

In the situation where you describe talking to a senior statistician, "Why'd you use the mean instead of the median?" sounds a whole lot like "Why don't we stand like this instead?" in a boxing gym. Those are both "Hey expert who is deservedly above me, please enlighten me", and both work. If you say to your coach "You're wrong, this stance is better", that sounds more like "Really, you should be taking direction from me because I know better than you". If instead, you were to tell the senior statistician "You're wrong, in this case the mean is better" in that same tone, I could see him being shocked and annoyed with your arrogance. Especially if you try to condescendingly explain stats 101 considerations that he obviously has taken into account.

I asked the speaker - a mathematics professor I didn’t know - a direct question. He took it poorly, and rejected my question with a cutting remark [...] Part of the problem is that it’s just too easy for the senior. Imagine an undergrad, giving a math talk, trying to do the same thing to a mathematics professor in the audience who asked a question. Be as cutting as you want - nobody is going to laugh at the mathematics professor!

Okay, I think I see where the confusion is coming from now. You seem to be assuming that status markers like position as a professor accurately track actual ability/knowledge that supposedly justifies this position. If you have an bright undergrad and a math professor who doesn't know enough math to be respected as a math professor, then the undergrad's position doesn't stop him from being able to expose the professor as a fraud. Imagine that situation again, where the undergraduate's criticisms are spot on and the professor can't address the question without exposing the fact that they don't actually know math.

This stands out to me pretty strongly because as an undergrad I never shied away from pointing out where my professors made mistakes, and I've had it go both ways. My physics professors actually knew physics, and as a results were always secure. On the other hand, my philosophy of science professor didn't actually know philosophy of science, so when tried to roll me over by posturing I could just keep poking holes until he was visibly fighting back tears and he explicitly asked me to stop correcting him.

Questions of “who is better” in Boxing can be resolved by spending three minutes in the ring with each other (and Go is the same, except it takes an hour). Skill differences in programming, or god forbid project management, are much harder to measure.

Philosophy is even less concretely resolvable than programming yet that was resolved so I don't think it's a huge deal, but I do think having a three minute definitive test available does help make these dynamics more clear.

In jiu jitsu, for example, you're supposed to be nice to the lower belts but you can never offend them as an upper belt beating them up. Nor do you have anything to worry about when rolling with an upper belt that can mop the mat with you at any time they want. 

But when a lower belt can demonstrate superiority over an upper belt, that's when things get tense. That's why jiu jitsu people can sometimes be weird about strength/quickness/wrestlers/leg locks. Any time a white belt can beat a brown belt, the brown belt has to find a way to square that with their social position -- and sometimes that's tough.

I think the bigger difference is who pays for poor performance. If you're my boxing student, then your poor performance just means you get punched in the face. So if I'm criticizing your actions I'm just trying to help you achieve your goals of not getting punched in the face. If you're my employee then your performance hurts my bottom line, and you don't feel it unless I take action to make you. So if I'm criticizing your actions it's because if affects me, and I'm probably going to do something to make sure it affects you -- so you know there's pressure to do better or else risk getting fired.

2) If I manage to create a strong object-level want, I will boost my attention without needing to coerce myself

[...]

I was more curious about how the difference between a third-person and a first-person perspective affects my meditation. 

This is what I'm talking about. Defaulting to the third person perspective and forgetting about the first person perspective causes a lot of trouble. It's not just "here's an unrelated hack for making it easier to do meditation", it's that it completely changes your meditation. 

You notice that your third person "I should focus on the breath" is missing the point, and redirect to the first person perspective of "Sensations of breath are arising", but in doing so you no longer even have a claim to the relevance of the breath. So now you have an experience of attending to sensation of breath for no reason, because of fairly handwavy third person reasons. 

I'm pointing out that you can use meditation as practice for bringing more conscious awareness to your everyday life by bringing more conscious awareness to your practice of meditation itself. It's a very different experience when you know in first person why what you're attending to is the most interesting thing at the moment, and in third person knowing that you're right to think this is what's worth attending to. 

That doesn't mean you "give in" to first person perspectives and give up awareness of your third person perspective, just that you don't give in to third person ideas either and give up or attempt to disconnect your first person perspective. It's practicing being aware of both, and noticing when your behaviors don't make sense according to your own perspectives.

Untrained people (and semi-trained people like me) can't sustain focus for extended amounts of time—even if I set my mind to the breath, it will slip away.

What I would say is that untrained people don't sustain focus on their breath for extended amounts of time. When you introduce the word "can" you're claiming more than just what is observed and making claims about what they would do in other counterfactuals too. If we're careful with those counterfactual choices, I think the claim that they "can't" turns out to be false.

The difference between "trying to try" and "trying on the object level" can be the difference between struggling for months and succeeding in seconds.

I do not understand what you mean with "There can be though, if that's what you want". Do you mean "It's possible to will/train yourself to have a coherent self"?

Something like that, yeah. 

Like, you might want to go get Chinese food but not spend your money. Your desires for Chinese food and money are tugging you in different directions rather than in one coherent direction. But it's possible to make up your mind and coherently want to pay for the Chinese food or else not want to eat it. You have to recognize that you can't have the food without paying the money, and figure out which of your new options you prefer.

Do this enough, and you become relatively more coherent.

When I practice focus meditation, I train myself to sustain a focus on my breath, for unusual amounts of time, to unusual degrees.

Right, and to what end? What drives you to want to do this unusual thing? Why isn't that already connecting to a desire that pulls your focus to your breath? 

The answer to these questions is what allows you to resolve the conflict between "I want to focus on my breath" and "I am not focusing on my breath".

Your model of things seem to assume that this level of focus is possible to sustain through "really wanting to" [...] I am reading your reply as supporting a model of cognition akin to homo economicus.

Sorta. Yes, I think that you're probably physiologically capable of far more focus than you're currently demonstrating in your meditative practices. And yes, I'm looking at revealed preferences and not buying into people's claims of desiring things that the evidence shows they don't actually desire.

There's no magical law preventing you from being wrong about what you want. How might you notice if you were? What would that look like?

One way to test this would to take a non-meditator and give them a lot of money if they managed to sustain attention for an hour. (In this hypothetical, let's say we have a way to measure this). The way I model this, no amount of money would be sufficient to accomplish an hour of focused attention for a non-practitioner.

Not necessarily. There are a couple assumptions you're making here.

One is that they'd be physiologically capable of doing it, in my view. If we replace "focus on the breath" with "lift 500kg", the answer to "Why aren't you already lifting it, if that's what you want?" is partly that you just can't. Even if you were to try your genuine hardest, it would not lift -- but there'd be real signs that you were attempting to lift it, and it wouldn't at all look like "just not interested in lifting this weight". I do think you're physiologically capable of focusing on your breath to a greater extent, but it's worth noting this requirement because failing because "can't" is different than failing because "don't wanna, so not really trying".

Another is that "offering a lot of money" is enough to make them really want to do it. There's no magical law saying that people will always be motivated by things that you think "should" motivate them. Indeed, people are usually not very good at drawing these connections. Replace offers of money with a gun to the head, and you'll get stronger results -- the reality of the consequences there are a lot more obvious, so it takes a much dumber person to fail to make the connections.

Eddie Hall's 500kg lift is a dramatic example of this. You can watch it and think "Yeah yeah, he's just really big and strong, no need for the overly dramatic music" -- until you notice blood spontaneously dripping from his nose. And apparently his eyes, and ears -- and brain. He says that the most he could do in the gym was 457kg, and that what it took to get that extra 10% was putting himself in the mindset that he was "lifting a car off of [his] kids". It's not that he "couldn't" lift 500kg in the gym, it's that it wasn't worth the risk and he knew it, so he was only motivated to give 90% effort. Give people the motivation to actually try, and they don't get magic powers but they do produce significantly more force because they'll actually try.

Heck, it often takes much much less than that. My favorite example is when my friend was able to tap a big strong guy with a wristlock, and she had to argue with him about whether he was strong enough to resist. He insisted that he was genuinely unable to muscle through it, until she said "Jimmy muscled through when I had both hands on it, so unless he's a lot stronger than you, you can definitely resist when I have one hand on it". Surprise surprise, he was able to after that.
 

How?

Well, you weigh your options, and figure out what you want.

Instead of "I should do this, but I'm struggling to get myself to do it", you notice that you don't want it, and reflect on the consequences and whether you continue to want them once you realize what you're asking for.

What happens if you don't lift 500kg? You don't get people saying "he broke a record"? Yeah, I guess that's okay. Your kids will die? On second thought, maybe I can try harder. That latter one feels different, you know?

What happens if you don't sit there for an hour focusing on nothing but your breath? Why is that bad? What happens if you do? And what is so appealing about that? Not "come up with rationalizations that sound plausible", but moves you?

It's easy to get very disconnected from what we actually care about, and what we can do. It takes some work to get back in touch and sort out the contradictions, but the path is absolutely there.

Some time ago, I realized that the perspective "I want to focus on the breath" is self-defeating. [...] The problem with "I should focus on the breath" is that it assumes a self who is monitoring, evaluating, striving. 

It often makes sense to talk about "I". "I" makes sense. I am writing this, for one. You know exactly what that means, it is clearly true, and there is nothing that noticing this requires you to flinch away from.

"Should", on the other hand, falls apart very quickly and is usually functioning to preserve a disconnect from reality. Valentine talks about it here, and So8res talks about it here.

You say you should focus on your breath. Why? Why aren't you already drawn to your breath, if that's what you want to focus on?

Sensations of the breath are arising, yes. And so are many other things. If those sensations are interesting and worth attending to (according to you), then simply noticing that they're there is enough. If it's not, then "I want to focus on the breath" is empirically shown to be false -- so now you have a question of why you're trying to force yourself to do a thing you don't want to do.

The lack of "self language" when talking to oneself comes straight from maintaining connection to reality instead of BSing yourself. I might tell my wife I want to eat lunch, if that helps coordinate with her. But if I'm telling myself that I want to eat lunch, then with whom am I attempting to coordinate? I'll just eat or not eat. It's not that there's never any such thing as a "self" that has enough coherence to become a useful model, it's that when you're saying "I want to focus on my breath" and then choosing not to, there's clearly no coherent self wanting to focus on those sensations.

There can be though, if that's what you want. 

Instead, skeptics often gesture to hallucinations, errors. [...] However, such arguments reliably rule out human "understanding" as well! 

"Can do some impressive things, but struggles with basic arithmetic and likes to make stuff up" is such a fitting description of humans that I was quite surprised when it turned out to be true of LLMs too.

Whenever I see a someone claim that it means LLM can't "understand" something, I find it quite amusing that they're almost demonstrating their own point; just not in the way they think they are.

My "c'mon guys" here is not "c'mon the empirical evidence here is overwhelming." It's more like "look, which world do you actually expect to result in you making better decisions faster: the one where you spend >0 days on testing and reflecting on your thinking in areas where there is real feedback, or the one where you just spend all your time on 'object level work' that doesn't really have the ability to tell you you were wrong?".

(and, a host of similar questions, with the meta question is "do you really expect the optimal thing here to be zero effort on metacognition practice of some kind?")

I mostly agree in general and I feel ya on the "c'mon guys" thing, yet I don't do my own separate "rationality practice".

For me, it's basically the same reason why I don't spend much time in a weight room anymore; I prefer to keep my strength by doing things that require and use strength. I'm not against weight lifting in principle, and I've done a decent amount of it. It's just that when I have a choice between "exercise muscles for the sake of exercising muscles" and "exercise muscles in the process of doing something else I want to do anyway", the latter is a pure win if the exercise is anywhere near equivalent. Not only is it "two birds with one stone", it also streamlines the process of making sure you're training the right muscles for the uses you actually have, and streamlines the process of maintaining motivation with proof that it is concretely useful.

The option isn't always available, obviously. If your object level work doesn't have good feedback, or you're not strong enough to do your job, then specific training absolutely makes sense. Personally though, I find more than enough opportunities to work on meta cognition as applied to actual things I am doing for object level reasons.

The thing that seems more important to me isn't whether you're doing a separate practice for the sake of learning, but whether you're reflecting on your thinking in areas where there's real feedback, and you're noticing that feedback. I do think there's a place for working on artificial problems, but I also think there's an under recognized place for picking the right real world problems for your current ability level with an expectation of learning to level up. And an underappreciated skill in finding feedback on less legible problems.