enchanted_elixir
𝕸𝖊𝖗𝖈𝖊𝖓𝖆𝖗𝖞 𝕮𝖔𝖗𝖕 • 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟐🥉
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This thread serves as a real world case study on the guide I made earlier about detecting indicators of interest:
Yesterday, I was at a farmers market when I noticed a woman whom I thought was cute. She was approximately what I would consider an MTB, with a healthy BMI, glasses, about 5’5, straight dark hair, and a Mediterranean phenotype. She appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties and had something of a librarian aesthetic.
I initially looked at her primarily because she seemed familiar, not because I was overwhelmed by her appearance. I am rarely, if ever, enamored merely by someone’s appearance. She looked back at me twice, but at that stage, I assigned almost no significance to it. People look at other people for innumerable reasons.
A few minutes later, we both ended up near the line for a sandwich vendor. She was actually waiting to order a sandwich; I had already purchased a Mediterranean bowl and merely needed to retrieve the utensils positioned near the counter.
I asked her:
“Are you in line?”
She responded, smiling, with what seemed like a slightly amused and friendly tone:
“Am I in line? Yes, I’m in line.”
She then smiled at me.
Again, this meant very little by itself. A woman smiling during a minor social interaction is perfectly compatible with ordinary politeness. Under the framework presented in my guide, disinterest remained the null hypothesis. Interest was merely one possible alternative explanation.
What became more noteworthy was the behavioral sequence that followed.
Before our interaction, she had largely been attending to her phone. Afterward, she began using it less. She became physically restless, shifted her position repeatedly, moved her hair around, and appeared unable to stand completely still. None of these behaviors independently demonstrated attraction. They merely began updating the probability distribution.
She was eventually called to the counter and placed her order. She then had to wait several minutes for the sandwich to be prepared.
At this point, the environmentally incentivized behaviors were straightforward. The sandwich was being prepared in front of her, so the most immediately relevant object was the counter. Alternatively, if she wanted a distraction, she had her phone. The environment therefore furnished at least two obvious attentional targets:
Instead, she repeatedly turned away from both.
To look at me, she had to rotate almost 180 degrees away from the counter. She did this several times. When she looked back, she smiled at me again. She continued touching and rearranging her hair, at one point beginning to put it into a ponytail before apparently reconsidering and stopping. She then continued running her hands through it.
The crucial point is not that “playing with her hair means attraction.” That would be precisely the sort of superficial checklist reasoning my guide rejects.
The relevant observation is that, following our interaction, her behavior became increasingly organized around my presence despite the environment providing stronger and more immediately useful competing incentives. Her attention repeatedly migrated away from her phone and the sandwich she was waiting for and returned to me. The hair manipulation, smiling, physical restlessness, and repeated reorientation occurred as a cluster surrounding that attentional allocation.
This is behavioral deviation relative to environmental incentives.
Eventually, I decided that because her sandwich was taking a while, I should simply retrieve the utensils and leave. I said:
“Excuse me.”
She immediately moved and responded:
“Oh, sure.”
I reached past her, took the utensils, and left the market.
I did not ask for her number, initiate an extended conversation, or obtain any dispositive evidence. Consequently, I cannot claim that she was attracted to me. The null hypothesis was not definitively rejected.
Nevertheless, I would assign a meaningfully elevated probability to the attraction hypothesis.
Why?
Not because she touched her hair.
Not because she smiled once.
Not because she happened to look in my direction.
Rather, the inference arose from the total behavioral structure:
Any one of these observations could easily be noise. Their convergence is more informative.
This illustrates the correct way to use the null-hypothesis framework. The null hypothesis does not require pretending that all evidence is meaningless until a woman verbally announces her attraction. It means refusing to convert suggestive evidence into certainty.
You begin with disinterest. You observe behavior. You ask what the environment, her objectives, and ordinary social conditioning would otherwise incentivize her to do. You then examine whether her actual behavior systematically deviates from that baseline in a manner that becomes more probable under the attraction hypothesis.
In this case, I did not establish that she liked me.
I established something narrower and more defensible:
Her behavior was sufficiently misaligned with the immediate incentives of the environment, and sufficiently organized around monitoring and presenting herself to me, that attraction became a reasonable alternative hypothesis with a non-trivial probability.
That is the distinction between detecting evidence and inventing certainty.
Yesterday, I was at a farmers market when I noticed a woman whom I thought was cute. She was approximately what I would consider an MTB, with a healthy BMI, glasses, about 5’5, straight dark hair, and a Mediterranean phenotype. She appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties and had something of a librarian aesthetic.
I initially looked at her primarily because she seemed familiar, not because I was overwhelmed by her appearance. I am rarely, if ever, enamored merely by someone’s appearance. She looked back at me twice, but at that stage, I assigned almost no significance to it. People look at other people for innumerable reasons.
A few minutes later, we both ended up near the line for a sandwich vendor. She was actually waiting to order a sandwich; I had already purchased a Mediterranean bowl and merely needed to retrieve the utensils positioned near the counter.
I asked her:
“Are you in line?”
She responded, smiling, with what seemed like a slightly amused and friendly tone:
“Am I in line? Yes, I’m in line.”
She then smiled at me.
Again, this meant very little by itself. A woman smiling during a minor social interaction is perfectly compatible with ordinary politeness. Under the framework presented in my guide, disinterest remained the null hypothesis. Interest was merely one possible alternative explanation.
What became more noteworthy was the behavioral sequence that followed.
Before our interaction, she had largely been attending to her phone. Afterward, she began using it less. She became physically restless, shifted her position repeatedly, moved her hair around, and appeared unable to stand completely still. None of these behaviors independently demonstrated attraction. They merely began updating the probability distribution.
She was eventually called to the counter and placed her order. She then had to wait several minutes for the sandwich to be prepared.
At this point, the environmentally incentivized behaviors were straightforward. The sandwich was being prepared in front of her, so the most immediately relevant object was the counter. Alternatively, if she wanted a distraction, she had her phone. The environment therefore furnished at least two obvious attentional targets:
- Watch the food being prepared.
- Look at her phone while waiting.
Instead, she repeatedly turned away from both.
To look at me, she had to rotate almost 180 degrees away from the counter. She did this several times. When she looked back, she smiled at me again. She continued touching and rearranging her hair, at one point beginning to put it into a ponytail before apparently reconsidering and stopping. She then continued running her hands through it.
The crucial point is not that “playing with her hair means attraction.” That would be precisely the sort of superficial checklist reasoning my guide rejects.
The relevant observation is that, following our interaction, her behavior became increasingly organized around my presence despite the environment providing stronger and more immediately useful competing incentives. Her attention repeatedly migrated away from her phone and the sandwich she was waiting for and returned to me. The hair manipulation, smiling, physical restlessness, and repeated reorientation occurred as a cluster surrounding that attentional allocation.
This is behavioral deviation relative to environmental incentives.
Eventually, I decided that because her sandwich was taking a while, I should simply retrieve the utensils and leave. I said:
“Excuse me.”
She immediately moved and responded:
“Oh, sure.”
I reached past her, took the utensils, and left the market.
I did not ask for her number, initiate an extended conversation, or obtain any dispositive evidence. Consequently, I cannot claim that she was attracted to me. The null hypothesis was not definitively rejected.
Nevertheless, I would assign a meaningfully elevated probability to the attraction hypothesis.
Why?
Not because she touched her hair.
Not because she smiled once.
Not because she happened to look in my direction.
Rather, the inference arose from the total behavioral structure:
- She looked at me repeatedly.
- Her phone use decreased after our interaction.
- Her physical behavior became more restless and self-conscious.
- She repeatedly manipulated her hair.
- She turned almost completely away from the object she was waiting for in order to look at me.
- She smiled during several of those looks.
- These behaviors clustered temporally after direct contact had been established.
- Her attention remained allocated toward me despite salient environmental competitors.
Any one of these observations could easily be noise. Their convergence is more informative.
This illustrates the correct way to use the null-hypothesis framework. The null hypothesis does not require pretending that all evidence is meaningless until a woman verbally announces her attraction. It means refusing to convert suggestive evidence into certainty.
You begin with disinterest. You observe behavior. You ask what the environment, her objectives, and ordinary social conditioning would otherwise incentivize her to do. You then examine whether her actual behavior systematically deviates from that baseline in a manner that becomes more probable under the attraction hypothesis.
In this case, I did not establish that she liked me.
I established something narrower and more defensible:
Her behavior was sufficiently misaligned with the immediate incentives of the environment, and sufficiently organized around monitoring and presenting herself to me, that attraction became a reasonable alternative hypothesis with a non-trivial probability.
That is the distinction between detecting evidence and inventing certainty.
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