WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and I will not warn about them further. Also some anecdotes from slutcon which are not particularly NSFW, but it's still slutcon.

A girl I was seeing once asked me to guess what Hogwarts house she was trying to channel with her outfit. Her answer turned out to be Slytherin, because the tiny gem in the necklace she was wearing was green. Never mind that nothing else she wore was green, including the gems in her earrings, and that colors of all the other Hogwarts houses appeared in her outfit (several more prominently), and that the gem itself was barely visible enough to tell the color at all, and that she wasn’t doing anything to draw attention to the necklace specifically.[1]

I wonder, sometimes, just how much of the “subtle social signals” people think they’re sending are like that case - i.e. it's basically a game with themselves, which has utterly zero signal for anyone else.

Subtlety to the point of invisibility clearly happens more than zero percent of the time; I have seen at least that one unambiguous case, so existence is at least established. [...]

---

Outline:

(01:21) Just How Subtle Is The Signal?

(01:25) Hints in Writing

(02:34) Hints in Flirting

(04:26) Hints in Outfit

(05:46) Oblivious?

(06:29) Emotional Investment?

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
November 6th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5axNFSfaxgnTKPrpy/people-seem-funny-in-the-head-about-subtle-signals

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“People Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma)