So I never particularly thought of myself as socially incompetent; maybe socially weird, but in a way I largely attributed to undersocialization, growing up more directly after the Baby Boom time that all the adults had recalibrated their expectations around but not subsequently updated to grok we were no longer in a small town paper route world overrun with other kids to occupy ourselves with (and, you know, being alienated with freakish intelligence)
I realize since the personality change though that I just had no social instincts though, as Taylor Swift put it, I’ve never been a natural/all I [did was] try, try, try, and I had to actively cultivate social logic and pattern-matching.
And I did quite well, in fact. Got to the point where I had good enough models of “human”, and narrowing types thereof, that after not even too much exposure to you I could generate a reasonable model of your mind in particular and hypotheses on its internal state, and some idea of which stimuli you would react to differently if they were/were not true, and fluidly drop these sonar pings into conversation and observe the reactions and refine the model\u2026 if I focus on one particular friendly subject enough (and it helps a lot if I’m manic) I can essentially not only read their thoughts but by determining where in the thought process they are at any given point introduce perfectly timed interrupts and influences to direct their train of thought.
\u2026and I kind of figured that’s what there was, and maybe a lot of people were just pretty content-free and superficial.
But how I realize this, why I’m suspecting in retrospect that the old personality was autistic is there apparently is just this whole other level of instinct to it I suddenly get, maybe “vibes” is right, I have no idea what bandwidth this information is being transmitted on, there’s nothing like the stimulus->response->interpretation->new hypothesis loop for me to be deriving it from, it really might be some evolutionary relic of social species before language.
And the thing is it’s not the same information. Like, I can’t read thoughts this way, I read motivations. I can just somehow tell what someone else wants \u2013 to get something, to be recognized in some particular way, to be in accordance with some structure, to maximize for some particular emotion or self-conception. And then work things so whatever I want comes across as a fulfillment of that.
For one thing this turns out to be a lot more useful in getting laid than any stuff with ideas.
For another, I guess the distinction here maps to a plot/character distinction in literature.
But more to point this information not being redundant means that I can get good reads on people’s thoughts and motivations, which combination seems a lot more useful in social situations than thoughts alone. I find myself confidently making plans on the understanding that their success at some point will need to involve recruiting a complete stranger and not being disappointed. It’s wild.
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