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Comment by s_m_t | Hacker News Reader

This already exists, it is called flirting.

Given two socially well adjusted participants it allows either party to back down without hurting the other parties feelings and allows everyone to save face. The person escalating the flirtation doesn't feel bad because they aren't outright denied and the respondee isn't put in the awkward situation of having to deny someone.

It also has the added benefit of allowing each person to get to know each other better and figure out if they actually have real 'chemistry' to begin with. Furthermore, attraction isn't binary, you might initially start chatting with someone with the intention of escalating the flirting process but figure out, hey, I just want to be friends with this person! With the SENPAI protocol you might just end up in an ill fated relationship with your would be friend

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This technique is described in the paper:

2.4 The Start Out As Friends Protocol The Start Out As Friends Protocol (SOAP), as presented by [9], is summarized in Figure 1. In this protocol, Alice and Bob participate in many exchanges over a long period, transferring pieces of information that provide only incremental evidence of their responses. Over time, each party can become more and more confident in the other’s answer, until the probability of a mismatch is low enough that a JMAP exchange becomes feasible. Unfortunately, the runtime of this protocol may be inordinately long in some cases, and deriving evidence from the individual transmissions can be difficult. There are also highly complex failure modes when dealing with a malicious adversary, as Munroe illustrates in his paper.

[9] R. Munroe. Friends. May 2008. https://xkcd.com/513/

That's not the same thing.

Flirting does not require that you first be friends with someone and certainly doesn't require a runtime of many months. A successful flirtation can happen within a few minutes.

Flirting doesn't require a runtime of months, but then nor does SOAP. SOAP only specifies a "long period", but as they say, a minute can seem like hours.

Flirting has a high signal to noise ratio.

There are also many issues with unintentional signalling.

It is for people that aren't socially adept (which one can learn btw) and this is of course also one important criteria for sexual selection.

My view is that it is not in the interest of women (who mostly do the selecting while men do the approaching) to use a process for selection that obfuscates if the approaching person is socially adept or not.

It is maybe just my experience, but generally women do know which men are interested and which are not, even if the male didn't make an approach yet.

Do you have a set of suggested resources for learning to be social adept. Its too late for me, but I am hoping to teach it on to my version 2.0 systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...

A good start.

Long story short: use their names and feed their egos. Ignore all the stuff about sincerity and real connection, since the author does.

I called it a 'good start' for a reason. Obviously there is a lot more to social success than charm and flattery, but they are important regardless.

You could say that if you've made it to v2.0, you have already been evolutionarily selected in your favor.

If you have version 2.0 systems, how'd you do that without being socially adept? Did you adopt them as a single person or something?

If you've managed to convince someone to procreate with you (and multiple times at that, apparently), then you're by definition socially adept.

Try practice?

Seems like the sort of problem a deep neural network would be great for. I've already got some good hardware for it, but I'm a little apprehensive about acquiring enough training examples.

Just put together a research pool so you can generate a solid baseline. I'm sure you could use Amazon Mechanical Turk to get a large number of able participants at minimal cost to your wallet and pride.

That's the whole point. The noise provides plausible deniability.

> Given two socially well adjusted participants

But socially poorly-adjusted folks want love too!

> Given two socially well adjusted participants

So non-socially-well-adjusted, raised-on-the-internet types shouldn't get to date? Your comment is tautological and merely says that people who are good at dating are good at dating.

You might as well argue that the SENPAI paper implies that people who aren't comfortable with homomorphic encryption shouldn't get to date.

>who aren't comfortable with homomorphic encryption shouldn't get to date.

It's 2016, homophobia should be shunned anyway.

It would have been funny, had you written Homomorphobia.

Rather, the SENPAI protocol makes dating available to people who aren't socially adept but are comfortable with homomorphic encryption. Socially adept people can continue to flirt.

No one said that, but these people need to either work on improving themselves (which most people definitely can) or they have to deal with the fact that a vast majority of women will never be interested in them.

There is no IT solution that we could come up with to change this and it wouldn't even be desirable in the first place.

Sexual selection has the purpose to ensure that only people with desirable traits get to breed and while it isn't perfect it is my opinion that it still is the best process known to us.

> There is no IT solution that we could come up with to change this and it wouldn't even be desirable in the first place.

Tinder has worked well for some people I know

Yet how would I be viewed if I applied the same logic to acquiring goods and services? If you aren't able to earn a living then you should focus on improving yourself. If you can't then you are SOL.

It's funny how high production skills are forcefully shared but there is little effort to even try to share social skills. If anything, being socially awkward is met with scorn. Maybe we should swap the name to socially poor and people would have some pity

> If you aren't able to earn a living then you should focus on improving yourself.

Of course everyone should try hard to do this.

> It's funny how high production skills are forcefully shared but there is little effort to even try to share social skills.

What skills are forcefully shared? And how can you possibly share social skills? Or are you suggesting that government should allocate sexual partners to everyone? I don't understand what point you are trying to make here.

The bottom line is that most could significantly improve their social skills and confidence but many chose to live in denial because the first step is frightening and actually the hardest part. You just have to practice this skill like everything else in life and learn to not take judgement of others too serious.

If social skills can be learned by practice, then we can share by teaching. Maybe force 15% of one's time socializing is done so with those considered socially awkward. Socializing, not sex.

My actual point is that society says we should help those who wasted an education by giving up part of our lives (income tax is a time tax on the average worker), but society says that someone who wasted their teen years not developing social skills is just a loser. This is a troubling view.

If one considers a concept of social wealth then there seems to be a resource transfer from the financially well off to the socially well off without a response in kind.

In the worst case consider a child who was bullied and turned to tech, who gained financially useful tech skills but missed out on social skills. Once they grow into an adult they are then taxed to support those who picked on the 'geeks and nerds' and who scorned education in favor of social standing among their peers. So the bullies get to enjoy financial support and the dividends of their social skills while the 'geeks and nerds' get only the dividends of their financial skills. Seems we should either provide relevant welfare for both or neither... but if one side is going to be better at pushing a position that is to their advancement I can guess which.

And of course this doesn't account for millions of nuances in each individual life that are exceptions, like the child who couldn't learn because they were too focused on their hunger.

Maybe we can start by considering those without social skills as socially poor instead of just losers.

I'm not sure what your point is?

"So people who never play football shouldn't get to score goals?"

I think it's closer to the other way around. People who can't score goals can still contribute in a football game, for example as goalkeepers. But if you select your team based on who's the best at scoring goals, they're not going to get a chance to demonstrate their goalkeeping ability.

Similarly, I think there are a lot of people who are bad at flirting but would make good romantic partners for the people they're interested in. But being bad at flirting means they often don't get a chance to demonstrate the other qualities they could bring to a relationship.

Ding ding ding. The whole point of flirting is that it's a gradual (potentially) escalation path with a built in escape route / plausible deniability (for having a romantic interest in someone). It's like tossing across a thin fishing line and then the other person attaching a length of cord to while you pull it back and then attach a rope to, and so on. At any point any party can back down or back out without feeling hugely awkward or embarrassed, and to proceed it requires the cooperative participation of both people. It's quite an elegant system, in fact, it's a shame to many people are baffled by it.

The success of Tinder demonstrates demand for a faster and less ambiguous protocol. SENPAI is basically Tinder without a trusted third party.

Tinder would be MFP, which is quite effective with sufficient trust in the "F" (Tinder).

i wonder where harassment fits into flirting given that the second party can have a completely negative response to flirtatious advances. also flirting can create an immediate awkward moment as it is very similar to the "just man up and ask" protocol.

While JMAP doesn't work particularly well in a one-to-many relational structure it can be made decidedly less awkward in a one-to-one relational structure if you are willing to invest some social cycles up front.

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