jimmy

Karma: 3,626

jimmy Apr 14, 2025, 5:29 AM
33 points
5
on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
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.
What links here?
- Richard_Kennaway's comment on Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief by Ivan Vendrov (Apr 14, 2025, 10:30 AM; 7 points)

jimmy Apr 12, 2025, 6:34 PM
2 points
−2
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.

jimmy Apr 12, 2025, 5:58 PM
−4 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.

jimmy Apr 12, 2025, 12:32 AM
2 points
−2
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.

jimmy Apr 11, 2025, 5:02 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.

jimmy Apr 10, 2025, 5:53 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.

jimmy Apr 10, 2025, 6:45 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.

jimmy Apr 10, 2025, 12:47 AM
4 points
−2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.

jimmy Apr 9, 2025, 7:39 PM
6 points
−2
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on Navigation by Moonlight by Jacob Falkovich (Apr 11, 2025, 6:10 AM; 2 points)

jimmy Apr 9, 2025, 8:54 AM
15 points
1
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on Navigation by Moonlight by Jacob Falkovich (Apr 10, 2025, 7:30 AM; 9 points)

jimmy Apr 8, 2025, 3:45 AM
22 points
2
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Navigation by Moonlight
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.

jimmy Mar 30, 2025, 6:24 PM
14 points
7
on: How I talk to those above me

I am not exactly sure why this difference—a total inversion! -
The boxing and corporate situations don’t seem that different to me. In both cases, the higher ups are providing direction and the people lower down are allowed to ask questions—but might get in trouble for trying to challenge those higher up.
In the situation where you describe talking to a senior statistician, “Why’d you use the mean instead of the median?” sounds a whole lot like “Why don’t we stand like this instead?” in a boxing gym. Those are both “Hey expert who is deservedly above me, please enlighten me”, and both work. If you say to your coach “You’re wrong, this stance is better”, that sounds more like “Really, you should be taking direction from me because I know better than you”. If instead, you were to tell the senior statistician “You’re wrong, in this case the mean is better” in that same tone, I could see him being shocked and annoyed with your arrogance. Especially if you try to condescendingly explain stats 101 considerations that he obviously has taken into account.
I asked the speaker—a mathematics professor I didn’t know—a direct question. He took it poorly, and rejected my question with a cutting remark [...] Part of the problem is that it’s just too easy for the senior. Imagine an undergrad, giving a math talk, trying to do the same thing to a mathematics professor in the audience who asked a question. Be as cutting as you want—nobody is going to laugh at the mathematics professor!
Okay, I think I see where the confusion is coming from now. You seem to be assuming that status markers like position as a professor accurately track actual ability/knowledge that supposedly justifies this position. If you have an bright undergrad and a math professor who doesn’t know enough math to be respected as a math professor, then the undergrad’s position doesn’t stop him from being able to expose the professor as a fraud. Imagine that situation again, where the undergraduate’s criticisms are spot on and the professor can’t address the question without exposing the fact that they don’t actually know math.
This stands out to me pretty strongly because as an undergrad I never shied away from pointing out where my professors made mistakes, and I’ve had it go both ways. My physics professors actually knew physics, and as a results were always secure. On the other hand, my philosophy of science professor didn’t actually know philosophy of science, so when tried to roll me over by posturing I could just keep poking holes until he was visibly fighting back tears and he explicitly asked me to stop correcting him.
Questions of “who is better” in Boxing can be resolved by spending three minutes in the ring with each other (and Go is the same, except it takes an hour). Skill differences in programming, or god forbid project management, are much harder to measure.
Philosophy is even less concretely resolvable than programming yet that was resolved so I don’t think it’s a huge deal, but I do think having a three minute definitive test available does help make these dynamics more clear.
In jiu jitsu, for example, you’re supposed to be nice to the lower belts but you can never offend them as an upper belt beating them up. Nor do you have anything to worry about when rolling with an upper belt that can mop the mat with you at any time they want.
But when a lower belt can demonstrate superiority over an upper belt, that’s when things get tense. That’s why jiu jitsu people can sometimes be weird about strength/quickness/wrestlers/leg locks. Any time a white belt can beat a brown belt, the brown belt has to find a way to square that with their social position—and sometimes that’s tough.
I think the bigger difference is who pays for poor performance. If you’re my boxing student, then your poor performance just means you get punched in the face. So if I’m criticizing your actions I’m just trying to help you achieve your goals of not getting punched in the face. If you’re my employee then your performance hurts my bottom line, and you don’t feel it unless I take action to make you. So if I’m criticizing your actions it’s because if affects me, and I’m probably going to do something to make sure it affects you—so you know there’s pressure to do better or else risk getting fired.

jimmy Mar 20, 2025, 6:53 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Jonathan Moregård’s comment on: Sapir-Whorf Ego Death
2) If I manage to create a strong object-level want, I will boost my attention without needing to coerce myself
[...]
I was more curious about how the difference between a third-person and a first-person perspective affects my meditation.
This is what I’m talking about. Defaulting to the third person perspective and forgetting about the first person perspective causes a lot of trouble. It’s not just “here’s an unrelated hack for making it easier to do meditation”, it’s that it completely changes your meditation.
You notice that your third person “I should focus on the breath” is missing the point, and redirect to the first person perspective of “Sensations of breath are arising”, but in doing so you no longer even have a claim to the relevance of the breath. So now you have an experience of attending to sensation of breath for no reason, because of fairly handwavy third person reasons.
I’m pointing out that you can use meditation as practice for bringing more conscious awareness to your everyday life by bringing more conscious awareness to your practice of meditation itself. It’s a very different experience when you know in first person why what you’re attending to is the most interesting thing at the moment, and in third person knowing that you’re right to think this is what’s worth attending to.
That doesn’t mean you “give in” to first person perspectives and give up awareness of your third person perspective, just that you don’t give in to third person ideas either and give up or attempt to disconnect your first person perspective. It’s practicing being aware of both, and noticing when your behaviors don’t make sense according to your own perspectives.

jimmy Mar 18, 2025, 11:16 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Jonathan Moregård’s comment on: Sapir-Whorf Ego Death
Untrained people (and semi-trained people like me) can’t sustain focus for extended amounts of time—even if I set my mind to the breath, it will slip away.

What I would say is that untrained people don’t sustain focus on their breath for extended amounts of time. When you introduce the word “can” you’re claiming more than just what is observed and making claims about what they would do in other counterfactuals too. If we’re careful with those counterfactual choices, I think the claim that they “can’t” turns out to be false.
The difference between “trying to try” and “trying on the object level” can be the difference between struggling for months and succeeding in seconds.
I do not understand what you mean with “There can be though, if that’s what you want”. Do you mean “It’s possible to will/train yourself to have a coherent self”?

Something like that, yeah.

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

jimmy Mar 18, 2025, 11:02 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Jonathan Moregård’s comment on: Sapir-Whorf Ego Death
When I practice focus meditation, I train myself to sustain a focus on my breath, for unusual amounts of time, to unusual degrees.

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

The answer to these questions is what allows you to resolve the conflict between “I want to focus on my breath” and “I am not focusing on my breath”.
Your model of things seem to assume that this level of focus is possible to sustain through “really wanting to” [...] I am reading your reply as supporting a model of cognition akin to homo economicus.
Sorta. Yes, I think that you’re probably physiologically capable of far more focus than you’re currently demonstrating in your meditative practices. And yes, I’m looking at revealed preferences and not buying into people’s claims of desiring things that the evidence shows they don’t actually desire.
There’s no magical law preventing you from being wrong about what you want. How might you notice if you were? What would that look like?
One way to test this would to take a non-meditator and give them a lot of money if they managed to sustain attention for an hour. (In this hypothetical, let’s say we have a way to measure this). The way I model this, no amount of money would be sufficient to accomplish an hour of focused attention for a non-practitioner.
Not necessarily. There are a couple assumptions you’re making here.
One is that they’d be physiologically capable of doing it, in my view. If we replace “focus on the breath” with “lift 500kg”, the answer to “Why aren’t you already lifting it, if that’s what you want?” is partly that you just can’t. Even if you were to try your genuine hardest, it would not lift—but there’d be real signs that you were attempting to lift it, and it wouldn’t at all look like “just not interested in lifting this weight”. I do think you’re physiologically capable of focusing on your breath to a greater extent, but it’s worth noting this requirement because failing because “can’t” is different than failing because “don’t wanna, so not really trying”.
Another is that “offering a lot of money” is enough to make them really want to do it. There’s no magical law saying that people will always be motivated by things that you think “should” motivate them. Indeed, people are usually not very good at drawing these connections. Replace offers of money with a gun to the head, and you’ll get stronger results—the reality of the consequences there are a lot more obvious, so it takes a much dumber person to fail to make the connections.
Eddie Hall’s 500kg lift is a dramatic example of this. You can watch it and think “Yeah yeah, he’s just really big and strong, no need for the overly dramatic music”—until you notice blood spontaneously dripping from his nose. And apparently his eyes, and ears—and brain. He says that the most he could do in the gym was 457kg, and that what it took to get that extra 10% was putting himself in the mindset that he was “lifting a car off of [his] kids”. It’s not that he “couldn’t” lift 500kg in the gym, it’s that it wasn’t worth the risk and he knew it, so he was only motivated to give 90% effort. Give people the motivation to actually try, and they don’t get magic powers but they do produce significantly more force because they’ll actually try.
Heck, it often takes much much less than that. My favorite example is when my friend was able to tap a big strong guy with a wristlock, and she had to argue with him about whether he was strong enough to resist. He insisted that he was genuinely unable to muscle through it, until she said “Jimmy muscled through when I had both hands on it, so unless he’s a lot stronger than you, you can definitely resist when I have one hand on it”. Surprise surprise, he was able to after that.

How?
Well, you weigh your options, and figure out what you want.
Instead of “I should do this, but I’m struggling to get myself to do it”, you notice that you don’t want it, and reflect on the consequences and whether you continue to want them once you realize what you’re asking for.

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

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

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

jimmy Mar 18, 2025, 6:18 PM
11 points
8
on: Sapir-Whorf Ego Death
Some time ago, I realized that the perspective “I want to focus on the breath” is self-defeating. [...] The problem with “I should focus on the breath” is that it assumes a self who is monitoring, evaluating, striving.
It often makes sense to talk about “I”. “I” makes sense. I am writing this, for one. You know exactly what that means, it is clearly true, and there is nothing that noticing this requires you to flinch away from.

”Should”, on the other hand, falls apart very quickly and is usually functioning to preserve a disconnect from reality. Valentine talks about it here, and So8res talks about it here.
You say you should focus on your breath. Why? Why aren’t you already drawn to your breath, if that’s what you want to focus on?
Sensations of the breath are arising, yes. And so are many other things. If those sensations are interesting and worth attending to (according to you), then simply noticing that they’re there is enough. If it’s not, then “I want to focus on the breath” is empirically shown to be false—so now you have a question of why you’re trying to force yourself to do a thing you don’t want to do.
The lack of “self language” when talking to oneself comes straight from maintaining connection to reality instead of BSing yourself. I might tell my wife I want to eat lunch, if that helps coordinate with her. But if I’m telling myself that I want to eat lunch, then with whom am I attempting to coordinate? I’ll just eat or not eat. It’s not that there’s never any such thing as a “self” that has enough coherence to become a useful model, it’s that when you’re saying “I want to focus on my breath” and then choosing not to, there’s clearly no coherent self wanting to focus on those sensations.
There can be though, if that’s what you want.

jimmy Feb 13, 2025, 5:47 PM
2 points
0
on: Studies of Human Error Rate
Instead, skeptics often gesture to hallucinations, errors. [...] However, such arguments reliably rule out human “understanding” as well!
“Can do some impressive things, but struggles with basic arithmetic and likes to make stuff up” is such a fitting description of humans that I was quite surprised when it turned out to be true of LLMs too.

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

jimmy Feb 10, 2025, 8:31 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: C’mon guys, Deliberate Practice is Real
My “c’mon guys” here is not “c’mon the empirical evidence here is overwhelming.” It’s more like “look, which world do you actually expect to result in you making better decisions faster: the one where you spend >0 days on testing and reflecting on your thinking in areas where there is real feedback, or the one where you just spend all your time on ‘object level work’ that doesn’t really have the ability to tell you you were wrong?”.
(and, a host of similar questions, with the meta question is “do you really expect the optimal thing here to be zero effort on metacognition practice of some kind?”)
I mostly agree in general and I feel ya on the “c’mon guys” thing, yet I don’t do my own separate “rationality practice”.
For me, it’s basically the same reason why I don’t spend much time in a weight room anymore; I prefer to keep my strength by doing things that require and use strength. I’m not against weight lifting in principle, and I’ve done a decent amount of it. It’s just that when I have a choice between “exercise muscles for the sake of exercising muscles” and “exercise muscles in the process of doing something else I want to do anyway”, the latter is a pure win if the exercise is anywhere near equivalent. Not only is it “two birds with one stone”, it also streamlines the process of making sure you’re training the right muscles for the uses you actually have, and streamlines the process of maintaining motivation with proof that it is concretely useful.
The option isn’t always available, obviously. If your object level work doesn’t have good feedback, or you’re not strong enough to do your job, then specific training absolutely makes sense. Personally though, I find more than enough opportunities to work on meta cognition as applied to actual things I am doing for object level reasons.
The thing that seems more important to me isn’t whether you’re doing a separate practice for the sake of learning, but whether you’re reflecting on your thinking in areas where there’s real feedback, and you’re noticing that feedback. I do think there’s a place for working on artificial problems, but I also think there’s an under recognized place for picking the right real world problems for your current ability level with an expectation of learning to level up. And an underappreciated skill in finding feedback on less legible problems.

jimmy Feb 6, 2025, 9:01 AM
8 points
0
on: hypnosis question

1) Yes and no, depending on what you mean by “real thing”.
The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis is a giant tome of scientific knowledge on “hypnosis”; none of which suggests that it’s not real. Hypnotists really can do seemingly wild shit that most people cannot do. Most hypnotherapists like to say “It’s not mind control like Hollywood depicts”, but even that is only partially true. The lawyer Michael Fine used hypnosis to sexually assault his clients and give them amnesia for it, and he is in prison now only because he was dumb enough about it that his victims were able to notice that they were missing memory and that things didn’t add up. I’ve talked to victims of more clever hypnotists who haven’t gotten caught.

At the same time, there’s a reason hypnotists tend to write book with subtitles like “there’s no such thing as hypnosis”. I’d argue that it’s more accurate to say “there’s no such thing as not-hypnosis”, but neither really conveys an accurate understanding. The bottom line is that hypnosis isn’t what it appears to be, because “not hypnosis” isn’t what it appears to be, and once you get familiar with how to do hypnosis and see all the gray area between the black and white, the term kinda loses meaning. Competent hypnotists have a strong tendency to drop all the formalisms, and the most competent have a tendency to stop seeing what they do as “hypnosis”—at least, in my judge of competence as someone who also doesn’t see what I do as “hypnosis”.
2) Yes and no. I’ve gotten some interesting results using “self hypnosis”. One that stands out is using self hypnosis to “be comfortable” when I was seasick on a rocking boat one night. It worked, and I got comfortable—only to feel myself about to vomit anyway. Careful what you wish for.
The hard part isn’t “Can hypnosis be used to get my brain to believe X”, it’s what’s true? What’s worth doing? Are things going well, relative to the relevant expectations? The more you try to bullshit yourself, the more you’ll a) have unintended effects if you succeed, or b) foresee this and find it hard to get yourself to do self hypnosis. The more you see clearly what the right answer is, the less you’ll need hypnosis in the first place. The real value in learning hypnosis is as a proof of concept that allows you to see when you’re BSing yourself so you can stop that.

Due to the counter-intuitiveness and subtleties here, it’s hard to give a less cryptic short answer. I’m actually finishing up a ~20 post 65k word sequence on essentially this exact question. It’s about what I’ve learned about psychology and rationality as a result of picking up hypnosis in 2010. It will give concrete and actionable answers to what you’re looking for here, as well as the underlying justification. I have a draft done and basically waiting for a proof reader to make it through, then I’ll start posting.

jimmy Jan 27, 2025, 5:55 PM
2 points
0
on: The Clueless Sniper and the Principle of Indifference
There are several complications in the example you give, and I’m not sure which are intentional.
Let’s start with a simpler example. You somehow end up needing to take a 400 meter shot down a tunnel with an experimental rifle/ammo you’ve been working on. You know the rifle/ammo inside and out due to your work and there is no wind, but the rifle/ammo combination has very high normal dispersion, and all that is exposed is a headshot.

In this case, where you center your probability distribution depends on the value of the kids life. If the terrorist is about to nuke the whole earth, you center it on the bad guy and ignore the kid. If the terrorist will at most kill that one kid if you don’t kill him now, then you maximize expected value by biasing your distribution so that hitting the kid requires you to be further down the tail, and the ratio of terrorist/hostage hit goes up as the chance of a hit goes down. If the kid certainly dies if you miss, also dies if you hit him, and is only spared if you hit the terrorist, then you’re back to ignoring the kid and centering the distribution on the terrorist—even if you’re more likely to hit the kid than the terrorist.

In the scenario you describe, you don’t actually have the situation so well characterized. You’d be forced to lob bullets at a twenty degree inclination, without being able to use sights or see your target—among many other large uncertainties. In that case it’s not that you have a well known distribution and unknown result of the next draw. You don’t know what the distribution is. You don’t know what the meta distribution the distribution is being drawn from.

Statements like “more likely” are all relative to a model which you presuppose has some validity in context. What’s the model, and where do you think you’re getting the validity to say it? Even if the simulation God paused the game and spoke to you saying “I’ll run the experiment a billion times, and we’ll see if the kid gets hit more often”, you’d have no idea how to set up that experiment because you don’t know what you’re controlling for.

I’d guess that you’re asking about something in between, but I’m not sure which unknowns are intentional.