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.
But people vary widely in somatic skills and how they interpret verbal instructions;
Yeah, that's why I actually ran the test. It's also why I used my wife as a test subject rather than one of the guys at jiu jitsu for example. My wife is definitely on the "less aware of how to use her body" side, so the fact that she got it right is more meaningful.
I definitely interpreted it as 'tense your arm really hard' and that's probably why the beam / firehose visualization helped.
I wasn't there so I can't say, but it's worth noting that the cues on how to interpret things can be subtle, and the fact that they're being led in a certain way can really easily slide under people's radar even while they simultaneously notice the cues and respond to them.
For example, if I wanted to tell my wife to tense her arm without telling her to tense her arm, I could have said "You're going to hold your arm out like this and not let me bend it" -- showing her a tense arm. Or I could have been more subtle and just kept a sub-noteworthy amount of tension throughout my body, and when I went to grab her wrist, grabbed it in a rigid fashion. This all suggests "this is how we resist things" without ever having to say it.
I'm not saying that Akido practitioners are deliberately misleading, just that people tend to nonverbally communicate in ways that convey their perspective, whatever that perspective may be. This tends to happen whether they realize it or not, and indeed whether they want it or not. For example, when my daughter was.. I think three, she watched a show explicitly intended to help kids not be afraid to get their shots. The thing is, she was already not afraid to get her shots and had actually thrown a tantrum because she could only get one flu shot the previous year. But as a result of watching that show, she picked up the creators' actual beliefs of "Shots are scary, but they shouldn't be so we're supposed to insist they're fine" -- and the show had the exact opposite effect from intended. It turns out, insisting "You shouldn't be afraid" isn't very compelling when you simultaneously demonstrate that you're coming from a place of fear -- even if you never admit to the latter out loud.
The way I held myself when telling my wife to not let me bend her arm was relaxed, only contracting the muscles that had a specific purpose. I don't recall if I demonstrated with my own arm, but if I did it was loose. When I held her wrist, I'm sure it was loose, etc. I don't mean to suggest that people don't unintentionally get confused into ineffective responses -- that definitely happens a lot. I just mean that IME a lot of the time all it takes is not buying into it oneself, and that the confusions persist in large part because they're actively upheld by the people giving instructions.
"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.
It turns out that for most people, the default intention of “holding your arm straight” by tensing your muscles and resisting your partner is not very effective.
Notice the presupposition that "tensing your muscles" is the default way most that most people hold their arm straight? Notice how in the video you linked he explicitly specified "really tight" and didn't just say "don't let me bend your arm", letting people do what actually comes by default? They seem to always specify to make the arm tense, which is unsurprising because if you're not told to resist wrong, you might not resist wrong and then their trick won't work.
I tried it with my wife, only instead of saying "Hold your arm really tight" I just said "Don't let me bend your arm". As a result, she didn't foolishly contract her bicep to help me, and was able to resist just as well as when I told her to visualize stuff. It's not that visualizing firehoses is unusually effective, it's that you're getting bamboozled into doing it unusually ineffectively to start with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, no. I'm so much stronger than my wife that there's no way she's keeping her arm straight if I'm serious about bending her arm. The test was 1) is she tensing her bicep when I don't subtly suggest she should and 2) is she able to put up more resistance when visualizing instead.
Do you have a preferred video demonstration? Or can you draw the force vector diagrams? I don't doubt that you're observing something real here, but from looking through YouTube I'm not seeing what you're describing.
"I want you to hold your right arm out straight, really tight"
"I want him to tense up as physically hard as possible" -- and then he has to admonish his volunteer for "losing focus" when his unbendable arm bends
"the only purpose of this is for me to experience relaxation completely on this muscle" -- with emphasis that the arm is gonna bend at least a little bit and maybe more.
This guy is flat out falling over unnecessarily.
This one shows something closer to what you're talking about, but it's pretty clear that he's cheating the starting position by giving himself a more advantageous position the second time and having the other guy start in a less advantageous position. Which I guess kinda raises the question of what exactly is it supposed to demonstrate? Is that "cheating" or is that the entire thing being conveyed?
My wife's first reaction to "don't let me bend your arm" was actually to swat my hand away from her wrist, which playfully points out that we're implicitly holding back in unspecified ways for sake of the demonstration, and if we were actually trying to not let someone bend our arm we would be doing something quite different. So what are the rules, anyway? As long as the rules are kept hidden it's really easy to move the goalposts around without anyone noticing.