The yin master finds out from her friend that a certain guy with potential is coming to dinner. She wears a dress with a subtle neckline and arrives early to secure a seat with an empty chair next to it. When the guy arrives, she holds eye contact a fraction longer than usual and invites him to the empty chair by laughing a fraction louder at his silly joke. She leans away when he starts talking sports, but angles slightly towards him when he’s sharing a story of how he got in trouble that one time abroad. The story is good, so she mentions off-handedly how long its been since she saw a good painting and it’s his cue to ask for her number.
This was the one fleshed-out concrete example in the post, and the best part IMO.
I found it quite helpful for visualizing what's going on in so many women's imaginations. The post itself delivered value, in that regard.
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).
That is what we typically call a completely fucking idiotic strategy. Just do the simple direct thing, chances of success will be far higher.
Now, one could reasonably counter-argue that the yin strategy delivers value somewhere else, besides just e.g. "probability of a date". Maybe it's a useful filter for some sort of guy, or maybe she just wants to interact with people this way because she enjoys it? I won't argue with the utility function; people want what they want. But I will observe that it's an awfully large trade-off, and I very much doubt that an actual consideration of the tradeoffs under the hypothetical woman's preferences actually works out in favor of the subtle approach, under almost any real conditions.
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.
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.
I would guess that this is approximately 100% of the time in practice, excluding cases where the man doesn't pick up on the cues but happens to ask her out anyway. Approximately nobody accurately picks up on womens' subtle cues, including other women (at least that would be my strong guess, and is very cruxy for me here). If the woman just wants a guy who will ask her out, that's still a perfectly fine utility function, but the cues serve approximately-zero role outside of the woman's own imagination.
If the typical case was actually to send very clear unambiguous cues which most men (or at least most hot men) actually reliably can pick up on, then I would not call the strategy "completely fucking idiotic"; sending signals which the intended recipient can actually reliably pick up on is a totally reasonable and sensible strategy.
(Of course there's an obvious alternative hypothesis: most men do pick up on such cues, and I'm overindexing on myself or my friends or something. I am certainly tracking that hypothesis, I am well aware that my brain is not a good model of other humans' brains, 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.)
I'm again not sure how far this generalizes, but among the kind of men who read Less Wrong (which is a product of both neurotype and birth year), I think there's a phenomenon where it's not a matter of a man being cognitively unable to pick up on women's cues, but of not being prepared to react in a functional way due to having internalized non-adaptive beliefs about the nature of romance and sexuality. (In a severe case, this manifests as the kind of neurosis described in Comment 171, but there are less severe cases.)
I remember one time from my youth where a woman was flirting with me in an egregiously over-the-top way that was impossible to not notice, but I just—pretended to ignore it? Not knowing what was allowed, it was easier to just do nothing. And that case was clearly not a good match, but that's not the point—I somehow didn't think through the obvious logic that if "yang doesn't step up", then relationships just don't happen.
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.
1
1That was a very useful answer, thank you! I'm going to try to repeat back the model in my own words and relate back to the frame of the post and rest of this comment thread. Please let me know if it still sounds like I'm missing something.
Model: the cases where a woman has a decent idea of what she wants aren't the central use-case of subtle cues in the first place. The central use case is when the guy seems maybe interesting, and therefore she mostly just wants to spend more time around him, not in an explicitly romantic or sexual way yet. The "subtle signals" mostly just look like "being friendly", and that's a feature because in the main use case "being friendly" is in fact basically what the girl wants; she actually does just want to spend a bit more time together in a friendly way, with romantic/sexual interaction as a possibility on the horizon rather than an immediate interest.
Relating that back to the post and comment thread: subtle signals still seem like a pretty stupid choice once a woman is confident she's romantically/sexually interested in a guy. So "send subtle signals" remains terrible advice for women in that situation. But if one is going to give the opposite advice - i.e. advise a policy of asking out men she's interested in and/or sending extremely unsubtle signals - then it should probably come alongside the disclaimer that if she's highly uncertain and mostly wants to gather more information (which may be most of the time) then subtle signals are a sensible move. If the thing she actually wants right now is to just spend some more time together in a friendly way, with romantic/sexual interaction as a possibility on the horizon rather than an immediate thing, then subtle signals are not a bad choice. The subtle signals are mostly not distinguishable from "being friendly" because "being friendly" is in fact the (immediate) goal.
What I really like about this model is that it answers the question "under what circumstances should one apply this advice vs apply its opposite?", which is something which most advice should answer but doesn't.
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.
11The other issue with your choice of denominator is that if the woman definitely wants the date she likely won’t be subtle.
You mean, like the woman in your anecdote about your friend tutoring in college…?
The problem with your argument is that it doesn’t at all explain all the cases where the woman definitely wants a date, is definitely interested in the guy, is very frustrated by (what she would characterize as) the guy’s obliviousness (and quite likely complains about this to her friends), and yet still won’t say anything.
When you have a situation where the woman knows the man is going to be interested in her
But of course this is an absurd requirement. If she knows he’s going to be interested, of course that makes it vastly easier!
… and yet, according to your own account, women still won’t say anything in that situation, despite having a guarantee of a positive response. What does that tell you?
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 fact there is no such as “forcing the man to contend with” anything. People (not just men) are, as it turns out, perfectly capable of totally ignoring a cue like this, and indeed of not even noticing it in the first place. A woman who thinks that leaning in and waiting to be kissed is somehow a guarantee that a man will correctly perceive the cue, is sadly, sadly mistaken.
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.
Sorry, but this is empirically false.
The problem with your argument is that it doesn’t at all explain all the cases where
I understand that I hadn't made this part very clear in the comments I made prior to this comment of yours. I have since addressed it in my latest response to johnswentworth.
But of course this is an absurd requirement. If she knows he’s going to be interested, of course that makes it vastly easier!
It's also not the real requirement, as I was cutting corners for sake of brevity at the cost of precision. The actual requirement is trickier to nail down both concretely and concisely, but it's closer to "she has to know he respects her" to be still a little inaccurate or "it has to be worth it, in expectation" to be tautological but vague.
It's completely possible for a woman to not know if a man is interested or not, and be absolutely terrified of how he might respond, and find the courage to find out anyway. It's also something that can be deliberately facilitated by the man, if he understands why she hasn't made herself more open to him as of yet.
… and yet, according to your own account, women still won’t say anything in that situation, despite having a guarantee of a positive response. What does that tell you?
Oh, no. Women will absolutely ask you out if you put them in a position where you guarantee a positive response and won't give one until they ask you out.
In the situations where they don't, it tells you that they don't have to. If a beautiful woman physically takes the distraction out of your hands, drags you to her bedroom, and undresses herself... does she really have to ask? Or does it maybe go without saying?
In fact there is no such as “forcing the man to contend with” anything. People (not just men) are, as it turns out, perfectly capable of totally ignoring a cue like this, and indeed of not even noticing it in the first place. A woman who thinks that leaning in and waiting to be kissed is somehow a guarantee that a man will correctly perceive the cue, is sadly, sadly mistaken.
You're not thinking of the situation I'm describing.
I'm referring to the situation I outlined in my first comment:
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?
It's not just "leaning in waiting to be kissed". It's actively taking steps to ensure that it cannot be missed. It's flat out refusing to engage with anything else -- and when that's not enough, holding her face close enough to his that her nose is touching his cheeks until he addresses it.
If this were to ever happen to you, you might not be able to make sense of it. You might not know what to do with it. You might rationalize that she's not interested just weird. You might choose to run away, rather than engage with it. You might even deny noticing anything strange has happened.
But what you can't do is fail to notice.
Hey, why don't you talk to Carla anymore? "Dude, she got weird. She won't respond to anything I say and always tries to press her face up against mine. I dunno, I guess we just drifted apart? Nothing out of the ordinary happened."
I'm not buying it.
Sorry, but this is empirically false.
With all due respect, I don't think you're in a position of being able to judge the veracity of claims like this. Before you can judge a claim true or false, you have to understand what the claim is -- and it doesn't look like you do.
Specifically, I assume you're objecting to the first part "approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not", but you don't seem to be noticing the distinction between "sensing the cue" and "being aware that you have sensed a cue, and having concluded that it counts as an a cue". These are easy to conflate, but they're wildly different things.
There's essentially no limit to how far a man can explain away a woman's cues. Heck, in high school a girl told my mom that she wanted to have my baby, and I was still telling my friends "You're wrong, she's not into me". I get that.
At the same time, I couldn't help but respond to what she was actually doing. When she'd jump in front of me to try to stop me and get my attention, I could change direction and walk around her, but I had to sense her presence in order to do that. Sure, I had alternate explanations for why she was doing what she was doing, but that shows recognition of the thing to be explained.
Even on subtle things where it's like "The woman at the front desk smiles and says 'Hi'", I might not know that she's smiling a little more (or a little less) than her normal or what the exact significance is, but the woman I'm going to be responding to is the woman smiling as much as she's smiling -- and people respond differently to people who are warmer towards them than than those who are slightly less warm. She will still be able to steer my behavior on the margin by how inviting she is towards me, even if I don't have a moment of "Oh, THIS IS A CUE!".
People sense, with some noise, the degree to which people smile at them, touch them, laugh at their jokes, bend over in front of them, etc. People respond to what they sense, because it is the only thing to respond to. If they were presented with something different they would be responding to something different. This is all that subtle clues are intended to do. Whether these cues overcome priors, and whether the person in question allows themselves to admit when it does, is an entirely separate question.
Specifically, I assume you’re objecting to the first part “approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not”, but you don’t seem to be noticing the distinction between “sensing the cue” and “being aware that you have sensed a cue, and having concluded that it counts as an a cue”. These are easy to conflate, but they’re wildly different things.
What is the distinction between “sensing the cue” and “being aware that you have sensed a cue”?
If, in “approximately everybody senses women’s cues whether they recognize it or not”, you mean by the phrase “sense women’s cues” something which can be done without even being aware that you have sensed anything, then what exactly are you saying? Is this claim falsifiable at all? How would you falsify it?
How would the world look different in the following two cases:
-
Everyone senses women’s cues, although some (many?) people do this without having any awareness at all that they have sensed anything whatsoever.
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Some people do not sense women’s cues.
What observations would you expect to make in one of those scenarios but not in the other?
Heck, in high school a girl told my mom that she wanted to have my baby, and I was still telling my friends “You’re wrong, she’s not into me”. I get that.
Which is perfectly sensible, because I have in fact encountered cases where women would say things like that to men, but give no other indication of being interested in said men, and would react with bafflement to suggestions that they were interested in dating said men, etc. (Being a third party in these cases, I could observe in a disinterested way, and found these observations quite instructive.)
The same, by the way, can be said of this:
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?
I have absolutely known women who have done this with guys whom they had no intention whatsoever to kiss or do anything else with.
At the same time, I couldn’t help but respond to what she was actually doing. When she’d jump in front of me to try to stop me and get my attention, I could change direction and walk around her, but I had to sense her presence in order to do that. Sure, I had alternate explanations for why she was doing what she was doing, but that shows recognition of the thing to be explained.
As far as I can tell, you are using the phrase “sense a cue” in a way that I can only describe as completely useless. Obviously it is impossible to literally not perceive the the physical presence of a woman in front of you (assuming that you aren’t blind, it’s not dark, your eyes aren’t closed, etc.), but that is not what anyone means by “sense a cue”. What the phrase means is “recognize a specific action or behavior as a cue”.
“Recognition of the thing to be explained” is worth nothing.
For example, suppose I am walking down the street and I see a woman walking in the opposite direction toward me. Is this a “thing to be explained”? Taking the broad view, sure. What might the explanation be? Obviously it is “this woman happens to have some reason to be walking in that direction, just like any number of people who walk down streets every day”. What is the correct reaction? Nothing; no reaction is required or appropriate.
Or: I’m riding the subway and a woman brushes my arm as she walks past. Is this a “thing to be explained”? Sure. What might the explanation be? Obviously it is “it’s a crowded subway car and there’s no particular reason to take extreme care not to make physical contact with anyone, and this sort of accidental casual contact happens all the time”. What is the correct reaction? Ignore it; no reaction is required or appropriate.
Or: the woman in the cafe is smiling when she hands me my order. Is this a “thing to be explained”? Sure. What might the explanation be? Obviously it is “she smiles at everyone; she just smiled at the old lady before me, and now she’s smiling at the couple after me; being friendly is good for business, probably”. What is the correct reaction? Smile back, be polite, otherwise nothing; no special reaction is required or appropriate.
In each of these cases, I “recognized the thing to be explained”; and the explanation for thing to be explained was it was a totally mundane behavior that had nothing to do with anyone sending any cues.
In the cases of failing to notice cues, what happens is that a man “recognizes the thing to be explained” in the same way that I “recognized the thing to be explained” in my three examples above; he identifies the explanation for the thing as something mundane; he then does not react in any particular way, because generally in such mundane cases no special reaction is required or appropriate. But whoops! Actually the woman was strenuously sending all sorts of cues! But the man completely failed to perceive any of them, because the idea that these cues were somehow extremely obvious was just a fantasy in the woman’s head. All the man perceived was various behaviors which have various mundane explanations, just like the overwhelming majority of behaviors in which we engage every day.
So, back to the actually useful question: is it possible to not recognize a behavior or action as a deliberate cue that is being sent? Yes, absolutely it’s possible, it happens all the time and is definitely the explanation for approximately 100% of cases of “woman sends cues, guy doesn’t respond, woman does nothing more and doesn’t get date”, exactly as @johnswentworth wrote.
What is the distinction between “sensing the cue” and “being aware that you have sensed a cue”?
There is a meta level jump between noticing "She's smiling" and noticing "I have noticed that she's smiling". "She's smiling" is a very different thing than "I have noticed she's smiling".
If you're lacking awareness of the latter but not the former, that doesn't mean that you won't smile back at someone who smiles at you. It just means that you either won't notice that you're doing it, or you won't know why you are.
Failure to grasp this distinction gets people all sorts of confused and ineffective. Until you grasp the importance of this distinction, you won't be able to understand the rest.
I think perhaps you have missed the point I was making, which is that what you call “being aware that you have sensed a cue” is just what everyone else calls “sensing the cue” (perhaps “perceiving the cue” might be a better phrase, by the way; that does seem to me to be more consonant with how the concepts of perception and sensation are used elsewhere…). Whatever we call it, the interesting and important thing is the part where the intended cue-recipient ends up having any idea whatsoever that a cue is being sent (or, more likely, instead fails to end up with any such idea).
Thus we had the following exchange:
Approximately nobody accurately picks up on womens’ subtle cues, including other women (at least that would be my strong guess, and is very cruxy for me here). … (Of course there’s an obvious alternative hypothesis: most men do pick up on such cues, and I’m overindexing on myself or my friends or something. I am certainly tracking that hypothesis, I am well aware that my brain is not a good model of other humans’ brains, 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.)
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, given the way you are using the phrase “sensing the cue”, we can now see that the second quote is totally non-responsive to the first. Like, it’s literally just a non sequitur.
An analogy: suppose that certain billboards, signs, etc., were designed in such a way that they secretly also worked like those Magic Eye pictures, and if you squinted at them just right, you could see a hidden image. Suppose that such special double-duty displays weren’t marked in any obvious way.
Now, suppose I said: “You know how some billboards and signs and such are secretly also magic eye images? I have no idea how to spot when a sign is one of those! Much less how to squint at them the right way, even if I did spot them…” And suppose you replied: “Well, you know, the light reflected from the those signs is hitting your retina, so you can totally tell that the signs exist.”
Would that be an even remotely useful reply?
Does the reply point out any errors in the complaint, or contradict the complaint in any way at all? No, of course not. Does the reply talk about anything whatsoever to do with the reason why the problem exists? Not in the least. Can it possibly point the way to a solution? Not a chance.
If you follow this up with “ah, but there is a distinction between noticing ‘the billboard exists’ and noticing ‘I have noticed that the billboard exists’”, is that relevant or useful? It is not. Yes, I am indeed aware of billboards, and aware of my awareness of billboards, and aware of that… is this fact even slightly relevant to my (and most people’s) hypothetical inability to spot which billboards are, hypothetically, also secretly Magic Eye images? Alas, no.
I think perhaps you have missed the point I was making, which is that what you call “being aware that you have sensed a cue” is just what everyone else calls “sensing the cue” (perhaps “perceiving the cue” might be a better phrase
I haven't. It's just something you're going to struggle to understand until you recognize the difference -- and the importance of the difference -- between the quotation and its referent. So that's where we have to start.
It is true that many people will call the thing I refer to as "being aware that you have sensed the cue" "sensing the cue", yes. But it is also true that people will call what I refer to as "sensing the cue" "sensing the cue".
It's not that people who refer to “being aware that you have sensed a cue” as “sensing the cue” simply have a different definition of terms, it's that they're failing to track a critical distinction.
It's not possible to understand "female signals" -- or male signals, or your own signals, even -- until you understand the importance of the things people perceive and understand which they aren't aware that they perceive and understand. It all hinges on the fact that your assumption that you have to be aware of things for them to matter is unjustified -- and, it turns out, very very false.
I'm happy to explain where your billboard analogy goes wrong, but we really gotta nail this down first.
It all hinges on the fact that your assumption that you have to be aware of things for them to matter is unjustified—and, it turns out, very very false.
What do you mean by “matter” here?
Remember, we’re talking about the following situation:
- Woman attempts to “send cues”, with the intended result being that a certain man will perceive these cues and react in a certain desired way.
- Man has no idea that this is happening.
- Man does not react in the desired way to the supposed cues that the woman is supposedly sending (and how could he, not being aware of any such things?).
- Woman is annoyed, frustrated, etc., that she is not getting what she wants.
Now you’re claiming that, somehow, these cues are nevertheless being “sensed” (ok, sure), and also that they nevertheless “matter” in some way.
What is the meaning of “matter” in this context that makes your claim true?
EDIT: By the way, this is false in my experience:
But it is also true that people will call what I refer to as “sensing the cue” “sensing the cue”.
I’ve never encountered this usage from anyone other than you.
Remember, we’re talking about the following situation:
If that's what you think we're talking about then I have a couple questions for you:
1) I told you that I addressed this failure mode in another comment. Why did you ignore when I told you this instead of reading that comment and responding to what I said over there instead? Isn't that the only thing that makes sense, if that's all you want to talk about?
2) Why are you talking whether men pick up on these things in general? It feels like you're saying "We're talking about the people who died during heart surgery. In this context, where's the evidence that heart surgery works!?". The evidence for the effectiveness of heart surgery obviously isn't in the corpses... but you're smart enough to know this, so wtf?
Even though it's normally rude to point out so bluntly like this, I certainly prefer the respect of "What you're saying sounds obviously dumb. What am I missing?" than the polite fictions that condescend and presuppose that you're not only in error but also too emotionally immature to admit it.
I'm placing my bet that you also both want and deserve this kind of honesty -- and will either say "Oops, good catch", or else point out something I'm missing that makes it seem less like you're flinching from admitting what you sense.
We'll see if it pays off. If not, I'll probably bow out.
EDIT: By the way, this is false in my experience:
You're still misunderstanding what I'm saying though. Again, you can't judge truth of a statement until you know what the statement means.
- I told you that I addressed this failure mode in another comment. Why did you ignore when I told you this instead of reading that comment and responding to what I said over there instead? Isn’t that the *only *thing that makes sense, if that’s all you want to talk about?
I read the comment in question (this one, yes? if that’s not the comment you meant then please link the correct one) and it did not seem to me to have addressed this. (I did not particularly find anything specific to respond in it, either, although I certainly can’t say that I agree with the model you give therein.)
- Why are you talking whether men pick up on these things in general?
Because, as I have said, I agree with johnswentworth when he wrote:
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.
I would guess that this is approximately 100% of the time in practice, excluding cases where the man doesn’t pick up on the cues but happens to ask her out anyway. Approximately nobody accurately picks up on womens’ subtle cues, including other women (at least that would be my strong guess, and is very cruxy for me here). If the woman just wants a guy who will ask her out, that’s still a perfectly fine utility function, but the cues serve approximately-zero role outside of the woman’s own imagination.
EDIT: In fact, let me expand on this.
Your linked comment answers the question “why don’t women just ask, if they really want the guy”. (I find the answer unconvincing, as I said, but that’s actually beside the point here.) But the reason I brought up the scenario in question wasn’t to pose the question “why don’t women just ask”, but rather to point out that in said scenario:
- The woman is definitely sending cues as hard as she can.
- The man does not pick up on those cues.
- If asked later, the man will say that he did not perceive any cues. (Indeed, he’d be surprised by the question—“Cues, what cues? From whom…? That one woman? Flirting? With whom? With me?! No, you’ve got something mixed up, surely…”)
- If asked later, the woman will say that the man did not pick up on any cues. (And will be very frustrated by this; she was being so obvious, how could this absolute dunce of a man not have noticed?! Ridiculous! And she was really into the guy, too…)
So even in this case where one person is trying as hard as they can to send cues, nevertheless the other person is totally oblivious. (Does this happen all the time? Yes it does.)
Given this, does the suggestion that actually, everyone is perceiving all the cues all the time, is obviously silly. If even trying this hard, “sending” this “loudly”—at such extreme “transmission intensity”—can fail to be enough to get the signal through, at all, then how could it be true that the signal is actually successfully getting through pretty much all the time? The answer is obvious: it can’t be true.
(Now, you might say: “but I am making no such suggestion, because you have misunderstood my…”—sure, fair enough. But this should, at least, clearly and definitively answer the question of why I brought up that scenario and what relevance I think it has to the general question.)
(Edit ends.)
So, to again try to summarize: you claim that people (and in particular, men) “sense the cues” that other people (and in particular, women) send. What exactly it means to “sense the cues”, in your usage, remains unclear. It likewise remains unclear how (or if) that claim is responsive to johnswentworth’s claim quoted above (with which I agree). It certainly seemed like you were disagreeing with him. But then, based on your later explanation of how you are using the relevant words, it seemed like you were not disagreeing with him but instead were saying… something… unrelated…?
Could you, perhaps, express your position on this matter using the same terminology as is being used by your interlocutors? (I understand if you prefer an idiosyncratic usage, and it’s fine if you return to that usage afterwards, but it would help if you could “translate” your point into the normal usage at least temporarily, just so that we could at least get clear on what it is that you’re actually saying.)
Even though it’s normally rude to point out so bluntly like this, I certainly prefer the respect of “What you’re saying sounds obviously dumb. What am I missing?” than the polite fictions that condescend and presuppose that you’re not only in error but also too emotionally immature to admit it.
Yes, of course, likewise.
EDIT: By the way, this is false in my experience:
You’re still misunderstanding what I’m saying though. Again, you can’t judge truth of a statement until you know what the statement means.
Well, I’m definitely confused about at least one thing. Namely, I am confused about whether you claim that you have already explained what you mean by “sense the cue”.
If you haven’t already explained it… well, the obvious question is “why not”, but never mind that, we can move past it, and instead proceed to: please do go ahead and explain it.
If you have already explained it (as seems to me to be the case), then what makes you think that, despite your explanation, I do not understand what you meant? (As far as I can tell, you’re not saying “aha, I conclude from this here statement of yours that you didn’t understand my explanation”, but rather “I know in advance that you didn’t understand my explanation, and on the basis of that fact, I conclude that this here statement of yours is false”. But how do you know it in advance…?)
flinching from admitting what you sense
Needless to say, I can’t decipher this comment, because I am once again (or still?) not sure how you’re using the word “sense” here…
Perhaps you could go ahead and explain what you think is wrong with the billboard analogy I offered?
As a meta-level comment, I’d like to note that I’ve asked quite a few questions to try to understand your points, and you’ve ignored almost all of them, whereas I have (as you see) tried to respond directly to your questions in my replies. (Perhaps it seemed to you like the questions were rhetorical? But no, I actually did want answers to them!) For example, in the grandparent I asked:
What do you mean by “matter” here?
That wasn’t a rhetorical question; I really would like to know what you meant when you disputed my alleged assumption that you have to be aware of things for them to “matter”. In what sense do things you’re not aware of “matter”? (I can think of some obvious cases where this is true—one need not be aware of electromagnetism for it to affect you, for instance—but presumably you don’t suspect me of being a solipsist with regard to physics, so this can’t be what you meant. On the other hand, if someone is trying to communicate something to you—“sending cues”—but you are not aware of this, then, clearly, you cannot be receiving the message that is being transmitted. Is that something you dispute? Or does “matter” mean something else entirely here?)
(And likewise with the other questions I asked; they were meant to help me understand your points, not as some sort of rhetorical ploys. But let’s start with that last question, at least; it’ll do for now.)
Different minds may operate quite differently.
The distinction you are describing may be very important and salient to you, but it does not necessarily even exist for someone else. At one extreme, someone who is always effectively asleep (by comparison to the other extreme) and barely aware of their own existence, permanently on automatic pilot, senses things without being aware of themselves sensing things, because they are hardly aware of themselves at all. At the other, someone who is always aware of their own existence, whose own presence is as ineluctable to them as their awareness of the sun when out of doors on a bright sunny day: for such a person, to be aware is always to be aware of themselves. At either of those extremes, the distinction you are drawing does not exist. In the first case, because the person is never aware of themselves; in the second, because they always are.
The distinction always exists. The quotation is never its referent. Whether they can be collapsed into one concept without loss is another question --- and the answer to that question is still "No".
The answer could only be yes in the second extreme, and that second extreme doesn't exist.
I'll illustrate with an analogy.
"Has eyes open" is a different concept than "can see". Regardless of how well they correlate, we can test the former by looking at a person and seeing that they have eyes which aren't blocked by eyelids. We can test the latter by presenting things in their visual field and watching for a response that proves recognition. These are different tests, because we're testing for different things.
The first extreme is akin to a blind person who has eyes but no eyelids. The distinction between these concepts is maximally important in explaining this guy, because that answer to "Has eyes open?" and "Can see?" are always different. Regardless of whether people with such extreme lack of self awareness exist, they don't do anything to demonstrate a case where the distinction is unnecessary.
In the second extreme, you have someone whose eyes always work so asking the two questions always yields the same answer. In this case, you could indeed collapse the two concepts into one bucket because there's never any split cases... except for the fact that no one has physics defying eyes that see without light.
Similarly, there's far too much subconscious processing to be aware of every single bit of it, simultaneously, always. Are you aware of your breathing? Of the sensation of your butt in your seat? The sensation of your tongue in your mouth? Probably now, sure, but not before I asked. You had better things to do. And you most likely aren't aware of your state of vasoconstriction/vasodilation even now that I point it out -- though you could be, and sometimes this awareness becomes important.
The best you can aspire to is to become aware of the things that need awareness, as they need awareness. So that you can say "Okay, yeah, I'm aware of my breathing. What about it?". Or so that you notice when you stop breathing for bad reasons, for example, so that you can correct your own behavior before you pass out doing squats or something -- and even that is shooting for a goal you will never ever reach.
The thing is, when you look at the people who best approximate this ideal, they're by definition the ones that are very skilled in self awareness. These are most definitely not the people who aren't aware of the distinction between when they notice a thing and when they've noticed that they've noticed a thing. These are the people who saw the difference, saw how important that difference is in practice, and actively put in the work to make the distinction less obvious.
"Different minds may operate differently" is definitely true in a sense, but the distinction I'm drawing is fundamental, and the minds that are the least aware of it are those for whom it is most important -- because there's fruit there, and you can't start picking it until you see it. "I'm just so skilled in self awareness that I literally have never noticed myself making this mistake -- and have never noticed all the other people making it either" is a self disproving statement.
The distinction always exists.
The perception and the perception of the perception are always different things. But to return to the situation at hand, I find it difficult to imagine responding to subtle clues by asking for the other person's phone number, without being aware that "here I am, responding to what I think are probably clues by considering possible responses", and also going on to higher levels of the ladder, like considering whether my perception of these supposed clues is correct, how i know what I think I know, deciding whether if clues these be I wish to build something on them (depending on the person, maybe I'd rather put them off than draw them on), deciding how long to maintain plausible deniability that there is anything going on here and when to break cover, and so on. The searchlight of attention, of noticing, sweeps over all of these, in less time than it takes to read this paragraph.
At least, that is how it is for me.
That all sounds right to me.
Yes, if you're considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues, you've likely noticed that you're considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues. That's something where you're quite likely to be wrong in a way that stings, so you're likely to notice what you're doing and rethink things.
When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don't stop and wonder whether it's a sign or not. You won't think anything of it because it's well within the noise -- but you might smile 1% more in return without noticing that you do. She might smile an additional 1% the next time, and you might respond in kind. Before you know it people might be saying "Get a room, you two!".
Even if she then asks you out -- or you ask her out -- it was the subtle iterated things that built the mutual attraction and recognition of attraction that enabled the question to be asked and received well. In that same situation, if you would have responded to that first 1% extra smile with "WILL YOU DATE ME", she probably would have said no because she probably didn't actually like you yet.
If you do ask her out, and she says "Yes", do you credit the fact that you explicitly asked, or the fact that she smiled that little bit more? Or the fact that you smiled back that little bit more and played into the game?
Yes, there are obviously many instances where men feel like their only chance is a leap of faith, and men tend to notice when they're contemplating it. In absence of opportunity to iterate, they might even be right.
At the same time, much of the work -- especially when done well -- is in responding to things too subtle to be overthinking like that, and iterating until the leap takes much less faith. I'm not taking any hard stance of when you should take a leap of faith or not, but I am pointing out that with enough iteration, the gap can be closed to the point where no one ever has to ask anyone anything.
When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don't stop and wonder whether it's a sign or not. You won't think anything of it because it's well within the noise -- but you might smile 1% more in return without noticing that you do. She might smile an additional 1% the next time, and you might respond in kind. Before you know it people might be saying "Get a room, you two!".
I do not believe that any such frog-boiling has ever happened to me.
It is said that humans who are not paying attention are not general intelligences. I try to cultivate the virtue of attention.
I do not believe that any such frog-boiling has ever happened to me.
Nor to me. I can’t map the described scenario to anything in my experience.
"Frog boiling" is standing in for "responding skillfully to women expressing subtle interest, and managing to turn it into clear cut interest so that asking her out is no longer a leap of faith"... right?
Am I reading this correctly that you're patting yourself on the back for successfully avoiding this experience? Is accidentally intentionally getting women too obviously interested in them the problem that you think most men have in dating?
Don't get me wrong, I know that's a real problem that can be had. It just seems like a weird flex, since most men would be more interested in knowing how to cultivate those experiences intentionally than how to avoid them. The latter is fairly self evident.
"Frog boiling" is standing in for "responding skillfully to women expressing subtle interest, and managing to turn it into clear cut interest so that asking her out is no longer a leap of faith"... right?
No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.
Am I reading this correctly that you're patting yourself on the back
No.
Is accidentally intentionally getting women too obviously interested in them the problem that you think most men have in dating?
No, that strikes me as so far fetched a scenario as to only occur in the fiction of another era.
No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.
This is a very strange read, for two reasons.
First, "happens on its own" is a bizarre way to frame things that are entirely composed of human behavior. If a ball is placed on an incline, it will roll down hill on its own with no further human input. If a woman smiles at you, nothing happens unless you do something. If you're smiling and talking to a woman, it seems really strange to say "Yeah, but I am not the one doing it. It's happening on its own!". I obviously see the temptation to define away that which you're not aware of as "not really me" so that you can say "I am fully self aware of everything I do" and mumble the "I don't take responsibility for anything my body does on its own" part, but at some point when this linguistic trick is sufficiently exposed, you'd think you'd say "Shit. I guess 'self awareness' isn't that great if we define the term so as to not include awareness of what's driving my actual behavior'". And it seems obvious enough for that, by now? I apologize if I'm misestimating what's obvious.
Second, I would have thought "Forming mutually fulfilling relationships by navigating ambiguous social cues" was just obviously something that took actual social skills. Like, you can't do it if you're raised by wolves -- or otherwise failing to accurately track and appropriately respond to thing after thing after thing in the ways needed to coordinate a relationship with another human. If nothing else, I would have thought "guys who feel frustrated with their perceived inability to read women's cues" would be obviously suffering from a lack of specific social skills relative to the guys who find themselves effortlessly interpreting and eliciting those signals with the cute girl at the checkout counter -- at least, if we're holding constant other factors like good looks. What even is your model here? That human interaction is fake, and really once you account for height/looks/etc the outcome is predetermined regardless of what the people do or say, so long as someone asks the question?
No.
Speaking of awareness, are you aware of how it comes off this way?
No, that strikes me as so far fetched a scenario as to only occur in the fiction of another era.
Then I guess we're on the same page that "I've never been frog boiled like that" isn't a demonstration of high self awareness? I'm not sure what purpose you had in sharing that if not to use it as an example of the rewards from your deliberate work on attention.
I'm having a bit of trouble reading you. I was originally reading you as "Not understanding what I was saying, but interested to learn if it turns out I'm pointing at something real", so I tried to explain more clearly. Your last comment struck me much more of a "I already AM skilled at this, thank you very much" sort of "I don't have anything to learn from you, I'm just trying to point out where you're wrong", so I poked some fun at it. But you seem to be disclaiming that now.
Can you help me understand where you're coming from? Specifically, to what extent are you convinced that you're succeeding in self awareness and don't have anything big to learn here, and to what extent are you trying to grasp what I'm conveying because you can sense that there might be something big hiding beneath your conceptual floorboards? I'm fairly generous with my time if it's the latter, but if it's the former then I'm happy to just agree to disagree.
FWIW though, that "accidentally intentionally attracting women" problem does happen.
No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.
This is a very strange read, for two reasons.
The story began (emphasis added) (ETA: more emphasis added):
When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don't stop and wonder whether it's a sign or not. You won't think anything of it because it's well within the noise -- but you might smile 1% more in return without noticing that you do.
And I took that to be the pattern of the subsequent mutual 1%-ing, neither of the participants noticing what they are doing until you envisage some outside witness waking them up:
Before you know it people might be saying "Get a room, you two!".
Of course there are skills. But they all begin with noticing.
I am claiming no particular social skills for myself, only perhaps a general skill of noticing.
I was more or less with you for most of this comment, but it seems to me that you go astray in the end, in two ways.
First:
The thing is, when you look at the people who best approximate this ideal, they’re by definition the ones that are very skilled in self awareness.
This doesn’t work at all. Now, if we remove the words “by definition”, then we’d be left with an empirical claim, which could be true or false (I think it’s false, but more on that later), which is fine. But “by definition”? No, absolutely not.
The reason it’s wrong is that you’re equivocating between two concepts: someone who (as @Richard_Kennaway put it) “is always aware of their own existence, whose own presence is as ineluctable to them as their awareness of the sun when out of doors on a bright sunny day: for such a person, to be aware is always to be aware of themselves”, and someone who is “very skilled in self awareness”. You could claim that those are, empirically, the same thing! But they are not the same thing by definition. One is defined in one way, and the other is defined in another way. To claim that these two concepts have the same referent is an empirical claim.
Second:
“Different minds may operate differently” is definitely true in a sense, but the distinction I’m drawing is fundamental, and the minds that are the least aware of it are those for whom it is* most* important—because there’s fruit there, and you can’t start picking it until you see it. “I’m just so skilled in self awareness that I literally have never noticed myself making this mistake—and have never noticed all the other people making it either” is a self disproving statement.
Perhaps it is, but that’s because it is a mischaracterization of the concept described in the grandparent comment. Instead we can imagine a person saying: “I have never made this mistake myself (so naturally I have never noticed myself making this mistake, there having never been anything to notice in that regard); unsurprisingly, it thus also never occurred to me that other people might make such a mistake”.
Such a statement may be true or false, and we may draw various conclusions about its author in either case; but “self-disproving” it certainly is not.
For my part, while I won’t claim to embody the ultimate extreme on the spectrum described in the grandparent, I’m certainly quite a bit closer to the latter end of it than to the former end. Likewise, I have read, and participated in, enough conversations like this one to be aware that other people’s mind work differently; but I certainly find it strange. And yet, am I “skilled in self awareness”? You could claim that, or conversely disclaim it, but either way it seems to me to be more like a wrong question than anything else. As far as I can tell, there is no distinction between noticing a thing and noticing when I’ve noticed a thing. (Unless you mean something banal like “thinking about the fact that I’ve noticed a thing”? But that is not “noticing”, of course; one may notice all sorts of things, and then proceed to not think about them.)
I don't see your response to my other comment as responsive to my questions so I'm bailing there. I'll likely bail here soon too, but you've managed to draw me back in and get me curious.
First:
No, it's actually by definition. I see why you say that, you're misreading what I'm saying, whatever. Not worth hashing out.
Second:
I'm genuinely confused. Are you aware of the ways in which your restatement is still completely absurd? Doesn't matter I guess. Whatever.
As far as I can tell, there is no distinction between noticing a thing and noticing when I’ve noticed a thing. (Unless you mean something banal
This is the part that's interesting to me. I have a response I want to try out, and I'm curious to find out how you're going to respond.
One possibility is that you're going to ignore what I actually say, and try to dismiss it with "But in the context of women sending signals.."/"But that much is already obvious to me, so I'm pretending it doesn't exist". That is, you might use the fact that you don't yet see how to make sense of the entire previous conversation based on these initial steps as an excuse to stop following the steps which are all making sense and (in fact, if not apparent to you) leading towards a resolution. If you do this, I will have no choice but to curse you as a rat bastard, and note that you can't be trusted to notice and stick to a path that is leading somewhere :P
Another option is that you'll say something like "I understand what you're saying. I don't see how it connects", or "Now everything makes sense, why didn't you say it clearly like this in the first place you dummy?", and I would consider anywhere on that spectrum to be a success.
The last option is that you follow along and still don't see a difference between the two... which... I can't imagine how it could happen. But I sense that it might happen anyway, so I'm curious to find out if it does. If this happens, it won't have been a successful explanation but it'll still have been a successful exploration and that's enough for me.
Anyway..
What does it mean to "notice" something? How would you test that? Let's pick "a basketball" for the thing.
1. A blind guy (Bill) on a moonless night walks by a basketball, wanting to play basketball. He keeps walking, doesn't pick up the basketball, thinks "Shucks, if only I could find a basketball I could shoot some hoops!". There was never any mental representation of the basketball, as evidenced by the fact that he didn't pick it up. If the basketball were to interact with his senses in a way that led to a mental representation of "basketball", we somehow know that he would have. This is not noticing the basketball.
2. A sighted person (Bob) walks by the same basketball the next day, picks it up, and starts shooting some hoops. Unlike in the situation with the first guy, the basketball interacted with his sensory organs and brain in such a way that led to the mental representation of "basketball", which he acted on the way he acts with basketballs. This is noticing the basketball.
Noticing a basketball is forming an accurate mental representation of the basketball. This mental representation is not the basketball. The map is not the territory, the quotation is not the referent. They're fundamentally different things, no matter how good you are at recognizing basketballs.
Noticing that you've noticed the basketball is noticing this mental representation -- which again is not the basketball. Noticing that you've noticed the basketball is when you form a mental representation of the fact that you've formed a mental representation of the basketball. This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They're fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you've noticed a thing.
The test for whether someone has noticed the basketball is whether, when they have something to do with a basketball, they do that thing with the basketball. You know they notice the basketball when they pick it up and shoot some hoops.
The test for whether someone has noticed that they noticed the basketball is whether, when they have something to do with their mental representation of the basketball, they do that thing with the mental representation of the basketball. Okay, so what might this look like?
Say Bob leaves the basketball on the court and on his way home runs into a kid who asks if Bob has seen his basketball. To answer this, Bob doesn't have to look for a basketball, he has to look for a mental representation of a basketball. He's not being asked "is there a basketball right in front of you". He's being asked "Is there a mental representation of a basketball in your memory?". This is an easy one, so Bob will probably say "Yeah, I left it in the court", but it's important to notice that Bob doesn't say yes because he found a basketball in that moment -- he says yes because he found his mental representation of that basketball in memory. Bob didn't just shoot hoops, Bob noticed that he had been shooting hoops.
But what if Bob wasn't interested in shooting hoops? Then when he notices the basketball, what's there to do with that representation? Perhaps walk around it so as to not step on it and fall. Is this a noteworthy event? Maybe, maybe not. So when the kid asks "Have you seen my basketball?" he might say "Yeah, I had to step around it". But especially if Bob were preoccupied he might not have taken note of his obstacle avoidance, might fail to find in his memory a mental representation of this object he did indeed represent at the time, and say -- incorrectly -- "No, I didn't notice it". The fact that he stepped around the basketball is proof that he noticed it. The fact that he said "I didn't notice it", doesn't negate the fact that he noticed it, it shows that he didn't notice that he noticed the basketball. This is reminiscent of the famous hypnosis experiment where people were hypnotized and told that a chair placed in their path was invisible. The people instructed to fool the researchers into believing they had been hypnotized all walked into the chair, as one would. The people who were genuinely hypnotized walked around the chair, and when asked why they took the path they did, showed that they had no idea why they did what they did. They had noticed the chair, and not that they had noticed it.
If you pick up the basketball, and tell the kid you left it on the court, you've shown that you've both noticed the basketball and also the fact that you noticed the basketball.
If you walk around the basketball, and tell the kid you haven't seen it, you've shown that you've noticed the basketball but not the fact that you've noticed the basketball.
If you walk right past the basketball wishing you had one to play with, you've shown that you didn't notice the basketball -- and so you can't have noticed that you noticed
The weird part about this is that it can be hard to imagine not noticing. It's hard to miss a big orange ball on black asphalt, so it's hard to imagine there being a basketball there and not noticing it. It can seem like the distinction between the ball being there and noticing the ball being there isn't worth tracking because you'll never fail to notice it -- except in the obvious cases like if it's a moonless night and you're blind but that doesn't count, right?
But what happens the moment you try to find something that isn't so easy to find? Animals don't cease to exist when their camouflage works. Waldo doesn't draw himself onto the page the moment you notice him. When you start looking for things that are harder to find, and find them, then it gets a lot more obvious that there are many many many things in that external reality which you have not yet found and represented. Way too many to ever represent them all, in fact. So yes, you might not miss the basketball, but you haven't noticed everything that is there.
Similarly, if the only time you're looking at your own mental representations, they're metaphorically big and bright orange against a black background, it's going to be hard to imagine not noticing them -- except for the things that are "unconscious" and therefore "impossible to notice" but you can insist that those "don't count" either. And similarly, once you start looking for representations that are hard to find, and start finding them where you hadn't seen them immediately, it gets a lot more obvious that there's a lot of things represented in your mind which you haven't yet noticed. And that there's simply too much external reality represented in your head for you to represent all of the object level representations you have.
Noticing the basketball and noticing that you have noticed the basketball are fundamentally different things, because basketballs and noticing basketballs are fundamentally different things. The person who can't grasp the idea of external reality they can't represent didn't get there by too perfectly mapping the entire outside world for there ever to be a difference to notice. They got there by failing to ever look closely enough to notice all the things they've failed to represent, and the magnitude of what lies beneath their perception. The same applies to anyone who thinks they see everything their mind is representing and responding to.
Again, this doesn't explain how it becomes important in dating contexts, or in general. I'm simply starting with the fact that they are indeed different -- "walking into a chair" vs "confabulating why you've walked a weird path" different -- and that "I'm so good at it that the two always go together" demonstrates an inability to bring the two together, not success at it.
Noticing a basketball is forming an accurate mental representation of the basketball. This mental representation is not the basketball. The map is not the territory, the quotation is not the referent. They’re fundamentally different things, no matter how good you are at recognizing basketballs.
Yes, of course.
Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is noticing this mental representation—which again is not the basketball. Noticing that you’ve noticed the basketball is when you form a mental representation of the fact that you’ve formed a mental representation of the basketball. This representation of your mental construct is as different from the mental construct it represents as the your mental construct of a basketball is different from the basketball it represents. They’re fundamentally different things, regardless of how good you are at recognizing when you’ve noticed a thing.
On the contrary: these are not fundamentally different things, but rather, the same kind of thing—namely, they are both mental representations. (We might say that they are different instances, but not different classes.) And it is entirely possible that they simply co-occur basically always, as @Richard_Kennaway describes.
But especially if Bob were preoccupied he might not have taken note of his obstacle avoidance, might fail to find in his memory a mental representation of this object he did indeed represent at the time, and say—incorrectly—“No, I didn’t notice it”. The fact that he stepped around the basketball is proof that he noticed it. The fact that he said “I didn’t notice it”, doesn’t negate the fact that he noticed it, it shows that he didn’t notice that he noticed the basketball.
On the contrary again: what you are describing here is simply Bob not having noticed the basketball, and then truthfully reporting this fact.
(Note that this is different from the scenario where Bob is not preoccupied, notices the basketball, steps around, but then forgets that this happened; and, when later asked, falsely reports that he did not notice the basketball. In other words, these are what Dennett colorfully described in Consciousness Explained as the “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” scenarios, respectively.)
This is reminiscent of the famous hypnosis experiment where people were hypnotized and told that a chair placed in their path was invisible. The people instructed to fool the researchers into believing they had been hypnotized all walked into the chair, as one would. The people who were genuinely hypnotized walked around the chair, and when asked why they took the path they did, showed that they had no idea why they did what they did. They had noticed the chair, and not that they had noticed it.
Here you are again describing these people not having noticed the chair.
If you pick up the basketball, and tell the kid you left it on the court, you’ve shown that you’ve both noticed the basketball and also the fact that you noticed the basketball.
If you walk around the basketball, and tell the kid you haven’t seen it, you’ve shown that you’ve noticed the basketball but not the fact that you’ve noticed the basketball.
If you walk right past the basketball wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that you didn’t notice the basketball—and so you can’t have noticed that you noticed
And if you walk around the basketball, wishing you had one to play with, you’ve shown that…?
The weird part about this is that it can be hard to imagine not noticing. It’s hard to miss a big orange ball on black asphalt, so it’s hard to imagine there being a basketball there and not noticing it. It can seem like the distinction between the ball being there and noticing the ball being there isn’t worth tracking because you’ll never fail to notice it—except in the obvious cases like if it’s a moonless night and you’re blind but that doesn’t count, right?
I have not had this experience (of it being hard to imagine this distinction); it has always been clear to me that it’s important and worth tracking. But of course I am aware that some people do think thus.
Similarly, if the only time you’re looking at your own mental representations, they’re metaphorically big and bright orange against a black background, it’s going to be hard to imagine not noticing them—except for the things that are “unconscious” and therefore “impossible to notice” but you can insist that those “don’t count” either.
Sure. Have you ever noticed individual hydrogen atoms? No? Well, why doesn’t that serve as an example of a thing that you didn’t notice? Because you can’t notice them, of course. (Unless you have one of them fancy quantum microscopes, anyway.)
And similarly, once you start looking for representations that are hard to find, and start finding them where you hadn’t seen them immediately, it gets a lot more obvious that there’s* a lot* of things represented in your mind which you haven’t yet noticed. And that there’s simply too much external reality represented in your head for you to represent all of the object level representations you have.
There are plenty of “low-level” representations in our brains (and auxiliary organs) which are inaccessible to conscious awareness. These are of a different kind than mental representations as we ordinarily think of them. For example, take color vision: would you say that we “notice” the individual lightness values of the three color channels formed by signals from the three types of cone cells in our retina? I think that it would be very silly to say that yes, we notice this information, but we do not notice that we notice it, etc. No, we are simply unaware of it, because our visual cortex begins to combine and transform the color channel information long before it gets anywhere near the processes that we could reasonably describe as constituting any “noticing” of anything whatsoever.
Noticing the basketball and noticing that you have noticed the basketball are fundamentally different things, because basketballs and noticing basketballs are fundamentally different things.
Consequent does not follow from antecedent. A mental representation is the same kind of thing as another mental representation.
(Computer science analogy: NSString is a different kind of thing from NSString*. But NSString* and NSString** are the same kind of thing, and so is NSString***, NSSTring****, etc.)
(Of course, you need to know about NSString** to understand the pattern, otherwise you might think that there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to objects. It’s once you go to that second level of indirection that you realize that actually, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and pointers to [objects, and …]]]… or, in other words, there are two kinds of things: objects, and pointers to things. Thus also with mental representations: to establish the recursion, you must have mental representations of mental representations… at which point you realize that there are two kinds of things: stuff out there in reality, and mental representations of things.)
The same applies to anyone who thinks they see everything their mind is representing and responding to.
“Blindsight, but for social cues” is the grand revelation that all of this has been leading up to…?
1FYI I think there are a set of cues that move you from ‘pretty unlikely to be interested’ to ‘maybe interested’, but not that get you above like 25% likely.
1Approximately nobody accurately picks up on womens’ subtle cues, including other women (at least that would be my strong guess, and is very cruxy for me here).
Indeed, this is well supported by innumerable examples from various social media of discussions where a man asks “the following situation happened involving a woman, please enlighten me as to its meaning”, and gets the mostly wildly divergent array of answers from women (most of whom, of course, are completely confident in their answer’s correctness, and many of whom express bafflement, or even indignation, that anyone could possibly think that the truth might be otherwise).
Not romantic, fun, sexy, etc to just ask. Much better when it's as close to a dance as possible, as much subtley as can be expected is involved.
This is certainly a filter, but not consciously. Consiously this allows the woman to feel good about herself and the whole interaction.
(Not that being straightforward is bad or can't be exciting - though it is usually flatter)
Now, one could reasonably counter-argue that the yin strategy delivers value somewhere else, besides just e.g. "probability of a date". Maybe it's a useful filter for some sort of guy...
I feel like you know this is the case and I'm wondering why you're even asking the question. Of course it's a filter; the entire mating process is. Women like confidence, and taking these mixed signals as a sign of attraction is itself a sign of confidence. Walking up to a guy and asking him to have sex immediately would also be more "efficient" by some deranged standards, but the point of flirting is that you get to signal social grace, selectivity, and a willingness to walk away from the interaction.
Can't she just try this to decide whether there seems to me mutual interest / test the waters and then fall back to asking if he doesn't ask first? These things are not mutually exclusive.
Previously in sequence: You Are not a Thought Experiment
Cross-posted from SecondPerson.dating.
I want to conclude our interplanetary exploration of sex differences with one that’s of great interest to me personally: there seems to be little explicit advice on dating for women, and almost none of it is written by men. Despite my sincere attempts to write for both sexes, the percent of my own subscribers who are of the female persuasion is lower than when I used to write 4,000-word treatises on sports analytics.
There’s a lot written by and for women about the care and maintenance of existing relationships. But as far as getting into a relationship, almost all advice for them boils down to overcoming insecurity and selecting the right man. Very little is oriented towards changing oneself to become more desirable, even less towards proactively seeking the right man wherever he may be. In my review of How to Not Die Alone, I concluded:
I contrasted H2NDA with Mate: Become the Man Women Want, a self-help classic for men. Like most books in this genre, Mate takes it for granted that the reader of the book is merely the raw material from which a better man may be built. It contains long lists of verbs in the imperative: do this, and for fuck’s sake stop doing that.
When men give women dating advice, it often sounds very similar to what they’d tell a man. I could point to a lot of my own writing through the years, but Wesley Fenza volunteers to make the point explicitly:
I’m sympathetic to Wesley and to all the other men who have complained that women are cowards for never making the first explicit move. I’m sympathetic because asking people out is, indeed, scary and hard and it would be much easier if someone else did it for you just this once. Yet I will propose a radical idea: the reason that most women don’t care for this sort of advice is neither that they are stupid nor cowards. It’s just not how women do things. Not only is it silly to resent Venusians for being from Venus, but the Venusian role is a crucial contributor to making relationships work, on par with the more explicitly active role of Martians.
Important caveat: #NotAllWomen. Wesley and I both know disproportionately more women who lean towards classically male approaches to dating, sexuality, self-improvement, and discourse. I have several female friends who have done well with an assertive and masculine approach to romance, though they do all seem to live in the Bay Area. Out of respect for them, instead of calling the different approaches to agency male and female I will use a different symbology.
Women don’t want action plans for self-transformation because that’s a yang thing. Yang decouples and acts. It draws back like a nocked arrow, identifies a target, and flies toward it, piercing the sky. That’s what guys keep asking me: forget where I am right now, tell me where I’ll find the girl and how to get her.
Yin works differently.
The Lunar Arts
Yin influences outcomes through receptivity, response, and subtle shaping. It sets the emotional tone and the context instead of decoupling from these. Yin gives reassurance or discouragement — to men, but also in some sense to the universe as a whole.
To male eyes, this often looks like women are trying to manifest outcomes through magical thinking alone, instead of deliberately pursuing or even asking for the thing they want. Women often complain: why won’t the right guy show up, why won’t the wrong guy leave, why won’t this guy change. A guy sees this and asks: why don’t YOU do something about it?
What men often miss is that magical manifestation is, in fact, extremely powerful. What women sometimes miss is that complaining about something manifests more of it, not less. Magic is powerful, but it’s not as reliable and easily controlled as men’s blunt tools.
Scott Alexander, an astute observer of people, describes the power of yin in Different Worlds:
This night-and-day difference in outcomes isn’t all luck and circumstance. It’s a result of something the women are doing without directly aiming for it. One woman manifests discrimination and catcalling, another manifests friendly respect. Of course women would want to learn to control this power, not to give it up for yang.
Yin also has to do with the nature of female attraction itself, which is often reactive and unpredictable. A man will find many women physically attractive after a brief glance, which gives him both a clear target for direct action (to find out more and/or seduce her) and the motivation to do so.
In contrast, a female friend of mine says that she finds most men unattractive: either dull or disloyal, emotionally immature, and blind to their own faults. For a man to be seen in a different light requires serendipity: an unusual situation where he can prove himself, or being vouched for by trusted friends. These situations can’t be forced.
Here’s how my friend describes it:
Yang is a rationalist virtue — you can just do things! — but it often runs afoul of the key rationalist injunction: do not write the bottom line first. Men say: I think you’re hot, can you just say “yes” or “no” and make it simple? Women say: we don’t know how we feel about each other yet, leave room for all possibilities and let it play out. One of these possibilities is, of course, that the guy is dangerous. The vulnerable sex can’t afford to be reckless.
Coyness isn’t purely for the woman’s own protection; it fulfills an important function for both sexes. Yin sets the stage so that yang can take credit for acting. Women need to judge men by their actions, and men need to be recognized, admired, and respected for what they do.
The yin master finds out from her friend that a certain guy with potential is coming to dinner. She wears a dress with a subtle neckline and arrives early to secure a seat with an empty chair next to it. When the guy arrives, she holds eye contact a fraction longer than usual and invites him to the empty chair by laughing a fraction louder at his silly joke. She leans away when he starts talking sports, but angles slightly towards him when he’s sharing a story of how he got in trouble that one time abroad. The story is good, so she mentions off-handedly how long its been since she saw a good painting and it’s his cue to ask for her number.
Later, the guy tells his roommate about dinner, puffed with pride: I had to sweat for it but I finally got this girl’s number, gonna ask her out to the art fair Sunday! It’s unfair though that women never have to do anything for dates, it’s all on us guys.
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When Yin Fails
There are as many ways to exercise yang unskillfully as there are to fail at yin, but men have the advantage of getting fast and direct feedback. A man gets rejected, left on read, ignored, ghosted, “friendzoned”, or pepper sprayed — he can learn and change his ways. Due to the nature of yin, it’s harder for a woman to tell when she is doing something wrong.
Some yin traps:
One can see each of these as a failure to be sufficiently yin. They all involve a craving for perfect knowledge and tight control that is antithetical to open acceptance. This is the theme of Existential Kink, a batshit and wonderful book telling women to accept that they get dark erotic pleasure from all the negative circumstances they find themselves in. It’s full of incredible quotes about trembling and moaning and about quintupling your income after you realize how turned on you were by being broke.
Kinky Jungian pop-Buddhist shadow work is, however, rather niche. When a woman is failed by yin, she will hear different advice being broadcast at her by most men, self-help literature, superhero movies, and corporate feminism: you should be more like a guy. Instead of waiting for soulmate, track your roster in Excel[1]. Declare your boundaries like contract terms. Develop a thick skin and boss babe attitude, and don’t give any of yourself unless you’re getting a good deal in return.
It’s not that this advice is wrong or misguided. It serves women well at work, in dealing with impersonal bureaucracies, on the disembodied internet. But herein lies the tragedy. If women are forced to adopt more masculine attributes to succeed elsewhere in life, at least in the realm of romance they should be free to leave these attributes to men. Attraction thrives on polarity, and relationships work when both partners complement each other, not when they’re trying to perform the same role.
I don’t mean to say that any relationship must be maximally polarized on gender, or that this is achieved by obeying “traditional gender roles” whatever those are. But I want both sides to be free to flourish doing what they do best, instead of nudged by HR to give up yin and yang for dull gray.
For yin to flourish, yang must step up. Nicole Ruiz notes that even people who don’t want to attribute it to men notice a lack of masculine virtue in the world:
If I have a goal with respect to my male readers, it’s to inspire them to masculine virtue in their dating lives. To take ownership, set clear intentions, communicate with honesty, and pursue what they value with courage and agency. There’s a bind, however: reading words off a screen is not itself an exercise in virtue or agency. Changing people with words is hard.
But perhaps I can encourage skillful yang by teaching guys some respect for yin. It took long years and very patient friends to get me there myself, but I’ve finally stopped telling women to just tell the guy what you want, how hard is it? What women do, just like what men do, is hard and valuable. I’m grateful to them for it.
Next: Moonlight Reflected
At LessOnline 2024 I attended a talk by a woman who said that since women get attached too quickly and it takes a while to find out if a guy is worth anything, a girl must date exactly three men at a time and replace the lowest-performing one each month with a stronger candidate.