Flirting, if we continue to interpret it as a game between two agents, seems to have some interesting properties.
The "permission handshake" Scott Alexander points out (thanks, @noggin-scratcher) looks to be the core of the flirting game. A's goal is to gain permission to be romantically intimate with B while not letting B know that they're doing this, at least not immediately such that B can make up their mind regarding the matter. A's general strategy comes in two parts: gain this permission incrementally (i.e. spen... (read more)
I really appreciate you taking the time and writing a whole post in response to my post, essentially. I think I fundamentally disagree with the notion that any past of this game is adversarial, however. There are competing tensions, one pulling A to communicate more overtly about their feelings, and one pulling A to be discreet and communicate less overtly. I don't see this as adversarial because I don't model the event "B finds out that A is into them" to be terminally bad, just instrumentally bad; It is bad because it can cause the bad things, which is what a large part of my post is dedicated to.
I find it much more useful to model this as a cooperative game, but one in which A is cooperating with two different counterfactual Bs, the one who reciprocates the attraction and the one who does not. A is trying to maximize both people's values by flirting in the way I define in this post, there's just uncertainty over which world they live in. If they knew which world they lived in, then the strategy for maximizing both A and B's values looks a lot less conflicted and complicated; either they do something friendship-shaped or something romance-shaped, probably.
Flirting, if we continue to interpret it as a game between two agents, seems to have some interesting properties.
The "permission handshake" Scott Alexander points out (thanks, @noggin-scratcher) looks to be the core of the flirting game. A's goal is to gain permission to be romantically intimate with B while not letting B know that they're doing this, at least not immediately such that B can make up their mind regarding the matter. A's general strategy comes in two parts: gain this permission incrementally (i.e. spen... (read more)