(This was written in Grade 11, on 2022-12-19.)
(Relevant Manifold market: https://manifold.markets/12c498e/which-of-these-universities-will-ac)
December 19
Write about something that is socially awkward or discuss a time you were in a socially awkward situation that isn’t typically considered awkward.
One class of recurring events that feel socially awkward is responding to questions that assume certain mental models that are absent in my mind. For example, imagine that I am at somebody’s house and the host asks, “Michael, do you like pizza?" When I hear this question, my brain almost shuts off. I suppose that most people are able to classify food based on whether they “like” it or not, but I genuinely would not be able to tell you.
It’s not that I’m incapable of tasting food [0], but that I’m incapable of sorting every slight variation into a general model. There are many brands of pizza and many types of pizza with different toppings. There are many states that pizza could be in, such as being frozen, being extremely hot, being warm, being reheated, being soggy, being oily, being a little bit stale, etc. Then, for each of those, there are different ingredients in various positions on the actual pieces of pizza, all of which have their own states and tastes. Even on top of that, the taste of individual ingredients could change depending on what portion of the consumption process it is in, such as initially biting into the piece, chewing it, swallowing the chewed remains, etc. Finally, even in all of those cases, I would only be able to compare qualities of tastes and not state anything absolutely. Overall, I have no fathomable way to summarize this entire network of my memory of the different tastes of pizza into one “yes” or “no”. I’m still unsure how most people are able to do it without a second thought.
Instead, I am usually able to extract the real question that the person is asking, which is often simpler. With that pizza example, it’s likely that the person asking is doing so because they have pizza and want to understand whether to offer it to me or not. Then, I mentally restructure the question into something along the lines of “Option A: You will receive pizza of unspecified characteristics. Option B: You will not receive any pizza. Do you prefer Option A or Option B?” which is much easier to tackle and then translate back into a response for the original question. Not all questions can be broken down like this, though, which is where more of the social awkwardness sets in.
Another class of events, which is often even more awkward, is the recognition of people. For some reason, I have some struggles with matching faces to people. Yes, people. I can remember names about as well as is expected, but that association is between the person and the name, not the name and the face. When I see a face, I can usually make a pretty accurate estimate of who it is, but it is definitely not perfect, and I have a higher reliance on other factors such as their clothing, their voice, and the context of where I am seeing them. This is not only for people I see rarely but also for people I see every day. Even my own face is difficult to recognize: almost every time I look in a mirror, my immediate reaction is “Who is that? I’ve never seen that face before”, making me have to spend a moment consciously trying to pair my identity with my reflection.
[0]: However, I would guess that my sense of taste is still diminished compared to the average. Over the last few years, different foods still have noticeably different tastes, but the variations have been becoming less and less defined. This is likely at least partly due to the fact that I’m usually reading or listening to something while eating, so my mind has less attention to give to the taste, and my brain gradually learns that it can ignore it.