Through painful trial and error, I've found that my hunch that a woman likes me is almost always wrong. Someone will be flirting very heavily with me, and I'll think "there is no way in the world she's not into me", and then it will turn out she will not be into me.
It may also be that you are recognizing the indications of interest correctly, but then screwing things up with your follow-up behavior. Usually, female attraction in the initial phases is easy to destroy with even a single serious misstep. (And it may be serious even if it seems insignificant or altogether non-obvious to you.)
Flirting. Through painful trial and error, I've found that my hunch that a woman likes me is almost always wrong. Someone will be flirting very heavily with me, and I'll think "there is no way in the world she's not into me", and then it will turn out she will not be into me.
Another possibilities behind this, in addition to Vladimir_M's excellent hypothesis:
There is a small percentage of women who look like they are flirting with everyone, even though they are merely being friendly.
If 5% of women are flirtatious with no attraction, they could still dominate Yvain's flirting experience if the base rate of attracted women flirting with him is low. Meanwhile, perhaps 100% of the women attracted to Yvain are a sort of serious or shy type who isn't into overt flirting. Then both P(attraction | flirting) and P(flirting | attraction) could be low.
In contrast, another man could experience that same 5% of merely friendly flirts, but also run into a greater number of attracted flirts, making most of his flirting experiences indicative of attraction.
I've noticed that I have a particular form of calibration problem, for which I don't know if there is a specific term. Tentatively, I'm calling it "pernicious sliding selective self-assessment."
What I mean by this is that all of my achievements become diminished in my own eyes, because my frame of reference for comparison gradually excludes people who haven't reached at least an equal level of achievement:
-- When I started working out, I gradually came to ignore the 80% (or whatever it is) of the population that is sedentary and could only compare myself to the people I see at the gym, a disproportionate number of whom make me look weak by comparison.
-- Similarly, when I took up a martial art, I ended up comparing myself not to the population as a whole, but to the more advanced practitioners, thus feeling incompetent.
-- I have a lot of academic accomplishments, including a degree summa cum laude from a competitive university and a Fulbright fellowship. Yet I suffer horribly from imposter syndrome, in part because my frame of reference for comparison gradually weans out anyone who isn't also academically accomplished.
Unfortunately, the fact that I am aware this is happening doesn't seem to help overcome it.
I remember the shock of going to my first crypto conference and realizing that I was nowhere near being the smartest person in the room. From there, it seemed to me that unless you were at the very top of your profession, you were always going to compare yourself to your immediate superiors and feel bad. However, I'm reliably informed that in at least one instance, being at the very pinnacle of a world-respected field of endeavour is not enough to feel good about your abilities.
It occurs to me that I also neglected to include participating on Lesswrong in my list. It's a slightly different phenomenon, but here the local sample is so skewed in terms of intelligence that even those of us with IQs 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean can be quietly nursing the humiliating thought that maybe we are idiots after all.
That is especially so for those of us who excel more in verbal intelligence than in math and programming capabilities.
I tend to think that if I talk about something I'm interested in, other people will be interested in it too. No matter how fascinating the underlying concept to me, nor how well I think I'm explaining it, this almost never happens.
Heh, I hear you on this one.
My initial response was to try to "fit in better" by simply avoiding those topics and sticking to smalltalk. Worked really well for the purpose, but also made me feel stupid - and worse, it drastically reduced the number of interesting people I got to know. Essentially, while most people found the stuff I care about horribly boring, occasionally I would run into someone to have a worthwhile chat with; but if you eliminate all the possibilities for such chats, they never happen.
So I resorted to introductory stories: interesting anecdotes and personal tales that have something to do with the subjects I'm interested in, even if they are tangential to the main area. If you draw people into the subject first, they are much more likely to allow you to expound on the boring bits as well.
For example, a side interest of mine are factors that change people's motivation patterns. Essentially impossible to talk about direc...
On the subject of body dysmorphic disorder (WARNING: Some gooey personal details ahead, and notes on how I more-or-less fixed mine):
I am male, and have been told that I have it (and by my psychiatrist, even!). To me, therefore, this is a particularly good example of the discrepancy between automatic self-evaluation and abstract self-evaluation; I could abstractly note that people seemed to find me attractive, and that I was in many ways on the right side of the physical appearance bell curve, but looking in the mirror inspired nothing but revulsion.
So, of course, this became the first subject at which I attempted mindhacking. I started with the typical self-help-book advice: Look in the mirror every morning, and tell yourself you're attractive. This was, somewhat surprisingly to me, partway successful - but only partway. The result was that my subjective evaluation eventually transformed to "I could be so good-looking, if it weren't for X, Y, and Z!" (although really the list I made had a lot more than 3 items). The primary feature to which the fixation reduced at this stage was my nose - rather than go into the specifics, allow me simply to say that I disliked it very m...
Since I first read about calibration on LessWrong, I've been trying this with tests and debate tournaments.
With a sample size of about 50: 95% of my estimated test grades are within 3% of my actual test grades.
On debate, however, if I am 60% confident I won a round, I won it 90% of the time; if I am 80% confident I won, I win 100% of the time. Other people seem to be much better than me at assessing the probability I won a debate round (if they observed it).
It seems that I am really good at some forms of estimating, and really bad in other situations, which means that overall switching from Inside View to Outside View wouldn't necessarily be an improvement, but that in certain situations it would help me enormously. Has anyone else encountered this?
I walked out of my first examination almost certain I had failed. I got my results back, and learned I had passed with honors. This situation repeated itself with depressing regularity over the next few semesters.
Back during my schooldays I was often certain that I had failed a test, just like many other people in my class. It turned out that most of the time the others didn't fail the test while I did. I concluded that they are for some reason just bullshitting about their self-assessments, it didn't occur to me that they just repeatedly failed to accurately predict their own success.
You know, not sensing people's emotions from their faces is seeming less like a handicap and more like I am immune to illusions every time I hear about the biases most people have. Then I realize I don't expect people to be feeling something unless they tell me anyways, and that's potentially just as inaccurate. Then I realize I might not be compensating exactly enough, and worry recursively.
If you hate yourself and think you're worthless, take a moment to consider whether you have any evidence that you're objectively doing any worse than anyone else
Okay, suppose I'm objectively doing worse than everyone else, is that a reason to hate myself? I don't think so.
These people get locked away because their self-esteem is at an extreme no sane human would ever reach
I work in a psychiatric hospital, and I don't think self-esteem has much to do with it. You only actually get locked away if a doctor can convince a judge you're going to get yourself or someone else physically hurt (To be fair, this was different in Nietzsche's day.)
I'd say the vast majority of people with poor reality testing, including inaccurate self-assessments, are living in the community rather than in locked wards. Which does reinforce your message: it could be any of us.
I've always had this problem when asked to self assess on personality traits. E.g. 'Are you extroverted?' Compared to what baseline? My friends? Some hypothetical average person?
I'm not sure how much this relates to the question of calibrating self-assessments in particular, but when I was at Yahoo, a few of us made this game -- http://yootles.com/calibration/guessum -- with the objective of being a fun way to train yourself to be better calibrated, at least for mundane estimation tasks. It was based on this article: http://messymatters.com/calibration (and especially the follow-on post with the results, and the speculation that people could learn to be better calibrated, hence the game).
we all know people who insist that they are ugly and stupid and unlikeable even though they don't seem any worse off than anyone else.
And research agrees: studies show that people are uniquely bad at rating their own physical attractiveness.
Well, that's a relief, that I'm not unusual in being unable to evaluate my own physical attractiveness. (Or am I unusual in being aware that I don't know how good or bad looking I am?)
That plus I'd expect a certain amount of sampling bias at HotOrNot. I mean, I could be wrong, but AFAIK it could easily be true that you are in the 43% bracket of HotOrNot (not that I expect their 10-point system actually correlates to this, but anyway...) while still being pretty attractive by real-world mortal human standards.
People's subjective experience of how attractive someone is is heavily influenced by framing. I can't find the relevant study but basically people responded with better ratings when someone was surrounded by less attractive people than when someone was surrounded by people who were around the same or more attractive. Conclusion? The same as Mises: preference rankings are ordinal, not cardinal. The frame of hotornot is looking at a very large group, so all but the most attractive in the set will rank slightly worse than they otherwise would have (real life situations are always much smaller sets).
In addition, as the okcupid article indicates, variance matters a lot. 3 people rating you a 9 or 10 and 7 people rating you 1 or 2 means your overall rating will be low, even though a significant fraction of people think you're the bees knees.
Oh and to quantify: the research I'm familiar with indicates that women should, on average, bump up their estimation of their own attractiveness and men should bump it downward (but a smaller bump than women). But this hides an important dynamic: we don't care what the average person thinks of us. We care about what people whom we find attractive think. A rating of 8 from someone who we rate an 8 is roughly twelve billion times more important than from someone we rate a 2.
I never had any anxiety about exams. You just need to realize they have some implicit curve and cannot fail too many people, so if you're better than median, you simply have to pass, and if you're better than 80th/90th percentile you'll pass with very good result. It's very easy to observe your skills relative to others in your group.
But then I outside view naturally when vast majority of people seem to inside view naturally.
When I moved to Ireland, I knew that their school system, and in particular their examinations, would be different from the ones I was used to.
What were the main differences? I am guessing the school system you moved from was the US? As I only know parts of the UK system, I feel like I'm missing possibly important information.
re: flirting, your underlying system cares for maximizing max. expected pay-off, it doesn't care for maximizing accuracy. Biologically, you get giant utilons loss for missing a mating opportunity (Think about it! For your underlying system, that's a huge fraction of worth of your life! It's the utility loss comparable to being forced to play Russian roulette with live bullets, several times in the row!), and microscopic utilon loss for being rejected. Your underlying system, though, doesn't trust your cognition with the correct mating odds - if it tells your cognition correct odds, you end up not trying, and not reproducing.
University exams are a lot easier to pass in Ireland than in Italy (the only two countries I'm familiar with), but the consequences of failing an exam are way worse in Ireland than in Italy.
how everyone thinks they're an above average driver
I think I'm a terrible driver, and I gave up driving when I realized there was a good chance I might hurt someone.
very interesting. glad i read it. can really relate to the exam example (same thing happens to me). One comment, though, i wish you would not call women "girls" (as in "pretty girls") if you are talking about adult behavior, they are women, not girls.
When I moved to Ireland, I knew that their school system, and in particular their examinations, would be different from the ones I was used to. I educated myself on them and by the time I took my first exam I thought I was reasonably prepared.
I walked out of my first examination almost certain I had failed. I remember emailing my parents, apologizing to them for my failure and promising I would do better when I repeated the class.
Then I got my results back, and learned I had passed with honors.
This situation repeated itself with depressing regularity over the next few semesters. Took exam, walked out in tears certain I had failed, made angsty complaints and apologies, got results back, celebrated. Eventually I decided that I might as well skip steps two to five and go straight to the celebrations.
This was harder than I expected. Just knowing that my feelings of abject failure usually ended out all right did not change those feelings of abject failure. I still walked out of each exam with the same gut certainty of disaster I had always had. What I did learn to do was ignore it: to force myself to walk home with a smile on my face and refuse to let myself dwell on the feelings of failure or take them seriously. And in this I was successful, and now the feelings of abject failure produce only a tiny twinge of stress.
In LW terminology, I am calibrating my self-assessment of examination success1.
We appreciate objective measurements, like a percent score on an examination, or the running time of a marathon in minutes and seconds. But in the absence of such measurements, we use subjective mental estimates: how I feel I did on this exam, or how plausible that theory sounds.
The rationality literature has especially focused on one particular subjective mental estimate: our feelings of probability. For example, someone may say they feel 80% certain that Germany is larger than France. However, if they consistently answer questions like this with 80% confidence, and only get 60% right, then we say they are mis-calibrated: their subjective mental estimate of probability has a consistent mismatch with a more normatively correct probability. Calibration means revising your subjective mental estimate until it matches the objective value it tries to estimate; so that when you estimate something with 80% confidence, you get it right 80% of the time.
My story about exam scores is also a story about calibration. My subjective mental estimate of my exam scores was consistently too low; I would estimate I failed when I had really passed by a wide margin. By suppressing my original mental estimate and replacing it with one better informed by past experience, I am calibrating my estimate of exam scores.
Since passing my exams, I've identified other areas of my life where I need to calibrate my estimates:
-- Embarrassment. I used to be mortified if I answered a question wrong in class, assuming that people would judge me on it as long as they knew me. After thinking about it, I realized that although many people in my class answer questions wrong every day, I literally cannot remember a single one. If you pointed out any student in my class, even one of my close friends who I would be expected to pay extra attention to, and asked me "Has this person ever answered a question wrong in class?" I wouldn't be able to tell you. This suggests they won't remember my mistakes either, and that my subjective feeling of loss of respect on answering a question wrong is exaggerated to say the least2.
-- Interestingness. I tend to think that if I talk about something I'm interested in, other people will be interested in it too. No matter how fascinating the underlying concept to me, nor how well I think I'm explaining it, this almost never happens.
-- Flirting. Through painful trial and error, I've found that my hunch that a woman likes me is almost always wrong. Someone will be flirting very heavily with me, and I'll think "there is no way in the world she's not into me", and then it will turn out she will not be into me.
These aren't just things I'm often wrong about; making a list of those would be a Sisyphean task. They're the things that I'm wrong about that my natural instincts never auto-correct, so that I know I'm going to keep being wrong unless I consciously calibrate my natural instincts against a reasoned opinion.
In general, I find I am most often miscalibrated in areas that relate to self evaluation. Cognitive psychology has a slew of ideas about so-called "self-assessment biases". You've probably heard the self-serving ones where 94% of professors rate their teaching ability above average, or how everyone thinks they're an above average driver, or how (ironically) everyone thinks they're less susceptible to biases than other people. But more surprisingly, I also find cases where people consistently underestimate themselves - like my own tendency to always think I've failed my examinations. I don't have a good explanation of this - I don't know if it's strategic humility, self-verification, some underlying depression-like state, or what - but I'm pretty sure it exists. And there are two situations in which I find it most common and most annoying.
The first involves good looks. Some people just have no idea how attractive they are or aren't. This is most obvious in body dysmorphic disorder, a condition where normal looking (or even very attractive) people somehow get it into their head that some feature of theirs - their nose, their hair, their weight - is inhumanly hideous and that they look like some kind of swamp monster. This is an officially recognized psychiatric disorder because it's completely divorced from reality - usually their nose or hair or whatever looks absolutely normal and just like everyone else's.
BDD is less rare than people think, at about one to two percent of the population, but even people without the full-fledged disorder can be really bad at determining how attractive they are or aren't. There are a lot of pretty girls who go around saying they're ugly in order to trick people into complimenting them, or to signal that they're available and not too picky, but I've come to realize that there are also a lot of pretty girls who genuinely believe they're ugly (it's less obvious in men, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were there under the surface).
And research agrees: studies show that people are uniquely bad at rating their own physical attractiveness. The opinion of unbiased observers evaluating a subject's attractiveness usually correlate at a level of r = .4 to .5; the opinion of the subject herself correlates with everyone else only around the r = .2 level. Other studies using purportedly "objective" measures of attractiveness like facial symmetry report a similarly low level of correlation between the objective measures and the self-reports. What self-reported physical attractiveness correlates strongly with is not objective attractiveness, but self-reported self-esteem, with r values around .5 or .6 depending on the study.
If you're not so good at statistics - that means that people often agree on how attractive a particular subject is, but that subject's estimate of her own attractiveness is often completely different from everyone else's (in either direction), and more related to that subject's self-esteem than to reality.
Sites like hotornot.com or okcupid's MyBestFace have a lot of problems, most obviously that they depend a lot upon how good a specific photo is. But I think either is leagues ahead of trying to guess how attractive you are to others based on how attractive you feel. If you have any concern whatsoever about how attractive you are, the worst thing you can do is trust your own brain, especially if it's telling you you're probably pretty ugly when everyone around you seems to think you're okay.
Which brings me to the number one most tragic failure of the inside view I see in my friends, my acquaintances, and the psychiatric patients I encounter.
Nietzsche said that a casual stroll through an insane asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. Such an experience might also teach people to be skeptical of their own subjective valuation of themselves - their self-esteem. If our hypothetical visitor doesn't figure it out after seeing the depressed patients, who are obsessed with their own guilt and moral worthlessness to the point of confessing to any crime they hear about because it seems like the sort of thing someone as awful as themselves might do, she can go visit the schizophrenics with delusions of grandeur, who insist they are the next Jesus or Einstein, or God's chosen representative on Earth.
These people get locked away because their self-esteem is at an extreme no sane human would ever reach. But your location outside the insane asylum doesn't prove your own calculations of self-esteem come from reasoning processes that are any more valid. We all know self-obsessed narcissists without any real achievements to their name, and we all know people who insist that they are ugly and stupid and unlikeable even though they don't seem any worse off than anyone else.
Research confirms that people's self-esteem is poorly correlated with reality. Across many experiments with many different designs, people's self-reported likeability has no correlation with their likeability as reported by other people with whom they interact. This is true whether the experiment measures artificial interaction in a lab, simulated "dates" with people of the opposite sex, or the attitudes of their roommates.
There are no studies correlating self-reported morality with experimentally determined morality, but if you want conduct one, you could probably gather enough secretly gay evangelical ministers and adulterous family-values politicians to make up a pretty good sample size.
If you hate yourself and think you're worthless, take a moment to consider whether you have any evidence that you're objectively doing any worse than anyone else, or whether you just have a low self-esteem set point. If the latter appears to be true, then try to replace the inside view with the outside view when worrying about how much bother you're being to other people or whether you "deserve" to be happy.
(if your problem is in the other direction you may not have as much vested interest in correcting yourself, but do keep in mind that most of the purported benefits of self-confidence have been exaggerated).
SUMMARY
People's subjective mental estimates are often way off, especially when they're estimating qualities closely linked to their self-worth. Both everyday experience and scientific research provide ample evidence of people who both underestimate and overestimate themselves in various ways. If you worry you may be one of those people, try and get objective estimates of the parameter you're concerned about from other people or from empirical testing. Then make an effort of will to consciously replace your subjective estimates with your new better-calibrated estimates.
FOOTNOTES
1: This could also be interpreted as replacing the Inside View with the Outside View and this would also be a good moral to draw from the story; I'm phrasing it in terms of calibration because it's more appropriate for some of the other examples later down.
2: See Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky, 2000 for experimental proof of the same idea