Not Being Straightforward Is in Everyone’s Best Interest
Or, the evolutionary importance of playing coy, wooing, and sizing up
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Q: Are there drawbacks in being straightforward?
Darwin was wrong about sex.
He wasn’t wrong about the males being the wooers. His reading of the basic characters of the two sexes holds up well even today.
“The female … with the rarest exception, is less eager than the male … She is coy, and may often be seen endeavouring for a long time to escape from the male. Everyone who has attended to the habits of animals will be able to call to mind instances of this kind … The exertion of some choice on the part of the female seems almost as general a law as the eagerness of the male,” Darwin wrote in 1871.
Nor was Darwin wrong about the consequences of this asymmetrical interest. He observed that female restraint left males competing with one another for scarce reproductive opportunities, and thus explained why males so often have built-in weapons — the horns of stags, the hornlike mandibles of stag beetles, the fierce canines of chimpanzees.
Males who were not hereditarily equipped for combat with other males have been excluded from sex, and their traits have thus been discarded by natural selection.
Darwin also saw that the choosiness of females gives great significance to their eventual choices. If they prefer to mate with particular kinds of males, those kinds will proliferate. Hence the ornamentation of so many male animals — a lizard’s inflatable throat sack, brightly coloured during the mating season; the immense, cumbersome tail of the peacock; and, again, the stag’s horns, which seem more elaborate than the needs of combat alone — would dictate.
These decorations have evolved not because they aid in daily survival — if anything, they complicate it — but because they can charm a female so as to outweigh the everyday burdens they bring.
Both of these variants of natural selection — combat among males and shrewd judgement among females — Darwin called “sexual selection.” He took great pride in the idea, and justifiably so.
Sexual selection is a non-obvious extension of his general theory of natural selection. While natural selection provides a chameleon the ability to change colours to increase its survivability, sexual selection gives a bird garish colours that virtually say “Kill me” to predators. This theory, however, has not just endured over time but has also grown in scope.
What Darwin was wrong however was about the evolutionary cause of female coyness and male eagerness. He saw that this imbalance of interest creates competition among males for precious reproductive slots. He even saw the consequences of this competition. What he didn’t see was what had created the imbalance in the first place.
In all fairness, whole generations of biologists after him would do no better.
Today, let’s talk about communication. More precisely, let’s talk about why even though all of us say and, upto some level, want everyone to be straightforward in their communication, it’s never a good idea.
For example, if a guy goes to a random girl and says, “I like you,” it’s not gonna work out. It’s too plain, too obvious, too boring — where’s the fun in that?
All of us want to have an experience — some wordplay, some mindgames, to make things interesting for both parties. And there’s an evolutionary as well as a practical reason for that.
We want the same thing from movies as well — reveal just enough information at a time and take us on a ride for as long as possible, which is usually 2–2.5hrs, because after that we start to lose interest due to mental fatigue.
Bottom line is this. Even though all of us say, “be straightforward,” nobody actually benefits from it. And I’m not just talking about sex. It’s only an analogy to understand communication in general.
Being straightforward in areas such as sales, marketing, negotiation, persuasion, deal making, and politics leads to nothing but failure — for both parties.
Now, the opposite of straightforward isn’t beating around the bush, or playing pretend. It’s much more complex and, to be honest, much much more interesting than that.
More importantly, not being straightforward is in everyone’s interest. That’s what we are going to talk about today.
Let’s crack on!
The first step toward understanding the basic imbalance of the sexes is to assume hypothetically the role natural selection plays in designing a species.
Suppose you’re in charge of installing in the minds of human beings the rules of behaviour that will guide them through life. The object of the game is to maximise each person’s genetic legacy.
To oversimplify: you’re supposed to make each person behave in such a way that he or she is likely to have lots of offspring, and these offspring in turn will have lots of offspring, and so on.
Obviously, this isn’t the way natural selection works. It doesn’t consciously design organisms. It doesn’t consciously do anything. It blindly preserves hereditary traits that happen to enhance survival and reproduction.
Still, natural selection works as if it were consciously designing organisms, so pretending you’re in charge of organism design is a legitimate way to figure out which tendencies evolution is likely to have ingrained in people and other animals.
In fact, this is what evolutionary biologists spend a good deal of time doing: looking at a trait — mental or otherwise — and figuring out what, if any, engineering challenge it is a solution to.
When playing the Administrator of Evolution, and trying to maximise genetic legacy, you quickly discover that this goal implies different tendencies for men and women.
Men can (theoretically) reproduce hundreds of times a year, assuming they can persuade enough women to cooperate. Women, on the other hand, can’t reproduce more often than once a year.
The asymmetry lies partly in the high price of eggs. In all species they’re bigger and rarer than the minuscule and mass-produced sperm. But the asymmetry is exaggerated by the details of mammalian (as opposed to reptilian) reproduction. The egg’s lengthy conversion into an organism happens inside the female, and she can’t handle many projects at once.
So, while there are various reasons why it could make “Darwinian” sense for a woman to mate with more than one man, there comes a time when having more sex (for the purpose of reproduction) just isn’t worth the trouble.
But for a man, unless he’s really on the brink of collapse or starvation, that time never comes.
Each new partner offers a very real chance to get more genes into the next generation — a much more valuable prospect, in the “Darwinian” calculus, than a nap or a meal.
As the evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson have succinctly put it: for males there is always the possibility of doing better.
There’s a sense in which a female can do better, too, but it has to do with quality, not quantity. Giving birth to a child involves a huge commitment of time, not to mention energy, and nature has put a low ceiling on how many such enterprises she can undertake.
So each child, from her (genetic) point of view, is an extremely precious gene machine. Its ability to survive and then, in turn, produce its own young gene machines is of mammoth importance.
It makes Darwinian sense, then, for a woman to be selective about the man who is going to help her build each gene machine. She should size up an aspiring partner before letting him in on the investment, (subconsciously) asking herself what he’ll bring to the project.
Something similar happens outside the realm of sexual selection as well.
In business as well as political deals, negotiations, and contracts — wherever there’s a lot of uncertainty or possible ulterior motive, and where nobody is ready to put their cards on the table, but both parties need this deal to go through — an internal game of simultaneously playing coy and sizing up happens between the parties.
It would be futile if you try to be straightforward here. You have to both woo to get what you want, and also play hard to get so that you don’t have to give away much in exchange. A crude term for the same is horsetrading.
Sexual selection is not a rational decision. A woman doesn’t typically size up a man and think: “He seems like a worthy contributor to my genetic legacy.” She sizes him up subconsciously and simply feels attracted to him — or doesn’t. All the “thinking” has been done — unconsciously and metaphorically — by natural selection. There’s no conscious decision.
Decisions outside sexual selection are similar in this aspect. Often in the midst of uncertainty, you feel in your guts it’s a good deal to go ahead with — or you don’t. As much as we would like to believe, our life decisions — even the most important decisions — are more emotional than rational.
One of the reasons sales representatives are always smiling and trying to be extra friendly is because they want us to trust them. If we feel they are trustworthy, maybe we’ll be more inclined to take the deal.
The reason it doesn’t work is because human beings have a penchant for detecting something fake more than a mile away.
Evolution has made us overtly cautious. There was a time it saved us from being eaten by wild animals. These days, even though there are no animals lurking around, this habit acts as a sixth sense for sensing whether everything is in order or if something is off, for example, a sales rep is trying to rip us off.
Only a good salesperson knows how to woo and build real relationships with prospects. This only comes by taking real interest in the prospect’s challenges and really trying to help them. Real relationships cannot be built by touting, i.e., by being straightforward.
If you think about it, almost every interaction is an exchange and, most of the time, one party is trying to sell something to the other — be it an idea, or a service, or a product. This game of playing coy, wooing, and sizing up goes on perpetually in all walks of life.
When the startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) interviews founders, they have only ten minutes to size up a founder and gauge if the investment is worth it. Founders also have only ten minutes to inspire confidence in the decision makers. This can only happen if their answers show that the founders are worth their salt.
Any answer that comes out as vague or not well thought out, or worse, if the founder says, “I don’t know,” they lose leverage. After ten minutes if YC is still undecided and 50/50 on the matter, the deal is off.
Investors and VCs have a far more developed sense of smelling bullshit, so founders have to be honest and to the point with their answers. There’s no beating around the bush.
It’s often advised to be straightforward here. It’s however important to note that being straightforward here doesn’t mean saying something like, “Yeah, growth hasn’t been great!” Even if that’s god’s honest truth, such an answer would kill founders. It’s boring and unimaginative — just like a boy going to a girl and telling, “I like you,” under the pretence of being straightforward. It shows laziness and lack of initiative.
More importantly, it doesn’t help the other party size you up, and make a decision about you. It keeps them hanging at 50/50. It’s almost an insult!
A better answer explains the possible reasons why something isn’t working and what are the possible ways it can be fixed. A better answer is informative. It takes the conversation closer to a decision.
My partner is one of the most sceptical person I’ve ever met. Whenever I have some insight about something, I share with her. Then she counters me with a lot of questions and examples (playing coy). This gives me an opportunity to back up my claim with additional insight, research, examples, etc. (wooing). This back and forth gives her the opportunity to asses my claims (sizing up) and make a decision — she ends up agreeing or disagreeing with me.
This ritual is important — it makes sure only strong and valid ideas live to see the light of day. The weaker ones are destroyed by the rebuttals.
Not being straightforward isn’t about being vague. It isn’t about lying or duping. It isn’t about fake enthusiasm or false interest. It is about giving a better answer. Not a lie, only the truth, but not a boring, lazy, and obvious truth. Rather a truth that makes the case stronger.
Without one party playing coy, the other party doesn’t get an opportunity to make their case. If they don’t make their case, nobody knows what they are worth, and there’s no opportunity to size each other up.
In sexual selection, if the male doesn’t try to woo the female, she has absolutely no way of knowing whether he can be trusted with her eggs. This isn’t at all in sexual selection’s interest. The last thing it wants is bad genes to be propagated to the next generation. There’s a reason she plays coy, so that he gets the opportunity to prove that he is worth is mettle.
Similarly, in a world where there are so many parties — countries, businesses, individuals — with conflicting agendas, this is the only sane way to make good judgement amidst all the ambiguity.
We never have all the information at hand. To make decisions confidently, we need to play coy and give the other party the opportunity to woo us, so that we can size them up.
Timeless Insight
As a creator you’ll have to fall in love with the process of creation, get into a state of flow, without overly worrying about the result. That’s the only way to become a great at what you do.
Getting 100K subscribers, or 1M customers, or 100Mn in sales is not creation. It’s a side effect. Yes, it’s a good validation that people want what you are creating. It can be a good revenue source as well. But if that’s the only thought on your mind, especially in the beginning, it would kill you.
At any given moment, what you need is a minimum amount of validation — the smallest number of subscribers, customers, or sales you need to prevent yourself from losing your faith upon what you are doing.
This is how you slowly become great. By getting just the right amount of validation to help you keep on doing what you love to do, without losing heart.
What I’m Reading
I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. Rather I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.
— Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness
Tiny Thought
Socrates was put to death because there is something terribly dangerous, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋