(Mostly a brain dump of recent thoughts about social experiences.)

Over the past few months I've had success becoming more emotionally self-aware. Applying the same type of learning methodology to social experiences though feels quite daunting.

One of the main challenges here is that even adding a single person makes the experience vastly more complicated. Think of the difference between playing basketball or soccer by yourself vs. playing soccer with other people, and the difference in complexity becomes immediately obvious. In a social interaction, not only do you need a certain degree of self-awareness, but you need to interact based on the emotional state of the other person, the predispositions of the other person, the nature of the relationship, the context of the situation, what the other person knows about you, and each person's interests as well.

Each new person brings an entire copy of these already-numerous variables to track, and I think that's why for the longest time I found hanging out with more than one person to be extremely exhausting. It felt impossible to track what was important for everyone and to satisfy all of them at the same time. It seems like with lots of recent practice, I'm feel much comfortable in group settings. More recently I've been thinking about how to make better social experiences, whether it's in a one-on-one setting or in a group.

Part of the reason is that it strikes me that there isn't really that much time to hang out with people. Unless I co-reside with someone, even for close friends I will probably only hang out with them 100 times or so in the rest of my life. And for other friends, perhaps a few dozen or less than a dozen times total. After that, each of us will get busy and move on with our own lives.

Part of it too is that it seems like such a waste for a hangout to be kind of lukewarm, when so many great experiences are possible out there. A lifespan is pretty short however you look at it, and it seems like we should make every effort to have hangouts be positive, memorable ones.

Finally, I think I'm just kind of interested in experience design in general. From psychological and design perspectives, the problem of “how to make a hangout fun” is really interesting. It's something that I find myself gravitate towards thinking about.

There might be some confidence component to my motivation too. I recently took an interesting study that suggests that I like people more so than my confidence in leading a social interaction. This seems largely true, and I'd like the two to be more on par with each other.

But again, the skill tree of social intelligence is quite daunting. Unlike emotional intelligence, the amount of variables at play feel exponential rather than linear in scale.

To make it manageable, I think I'll probably have to scope my learning. For example, there are various special social interactions like negotiations, difficult conversations, competitions, and courtship. I think I should kind of ignore those for now and focus on making normal hangout-type interactions better.

Thinking about these types of interactions, one particularly interesting part is that I think the vast majority of really positive experiences can be categorized, here are some examples:

• Deep conversations
• Funny bantering
• Spontaneous adventures

I think that this type of experience are monotonically good in that the more an interaction approach that direction, the better that interaction becomes. There's no “uncanny valley” of deep conversations or funny bantering – the deeper the conversation, the funnier the bantering, the better.

Some of these categories require another person (deep conversations), while others can be experienced on one's own (spontaneous adventures). Some of these I feel comfortable with (again, deep conversations), while others I don't have much experience in (yet again, spontaneous adventures). Overall, those that I feel comfortable or can be experienced on one's own are easier to learn, while the ones that require other people or I feel uncomfortable with will be more challenging to learn.

Moving forward, I feel like a good approach is probably to work on one or two at a time. Perhaps becoming more comfortable with certain categories on my own for one, while experimenting with social settings for another.

Anyways, here are the current categorizations I have in mind.

I feel comfortable with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Safety and comfort – Overcoming hardships – Very aesthetic experiences – Becoming better at a skill – Creating something new – Creating a sense of hero's journey

I'm not very familiar with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Spontaneous, fun experiences – Feeling new emotions – Play for its own sake

I have some degree of comfort, but cannot be experienced on one's own: – Deep conversations – Validation and acceptance – Fun bantering

Others that seem out there or really challenging: – Intimacy – Laughing until your stomach hurts – Performing something together (doesn't have to be music, could be any form of performance)

They seem like an okay place to start, but feel free to reach out if I miss anything significant. I'm actually pretty excited to dig into a lot of these more.

— Categorized under: #irl, #social, #communications, #emotions, #streamofconsciousness

Recently I was reading a book called What to Say Next by Sarah Nannery. It was a really insightful account of what life looks like on the spectrum, and one of the interesting perspectives from the book was that contrary to the opinion that people with Autism are less emotionally sensitive, they are actually more emotionally sensitive.

The idea is that people with Autism experience certain emotions so strongly that it often causes problems in everyday functioning. For example, people with Autism have trouble making eye contact, and this is because the amount of information and emotions involved in it is overwhelming for them. Similarly, autistic people tend to spiral into negative emotions easily, because those emotions are felt so strongly.

I think the idea definitely has merit, and it actually made me think about what people mean when they use the work “sensitive”. In everyday context, we generally say that a person is sensitive to something if they pick up on it easily or can easily be bothered by it; but actually, this is a side-effect of a more fundamental type of sensitivity.

As an analogy, we can think of sensitivity as having the volume knob turned up on some aspect of life. A person who is sensitive will usually have a easier time picking up differences between different sounds, but this is only true if the volume isn't overwhelming. If a person is so sensitive that everything is incredibly loud, then instead of being more discerning, that person will actually be less discerning because they spend all their time running away from the noise.

So saying that a person is sensitive to something can paradoxically mean that that person is worse at processing that thing. Thinking about it, in everyday parlance, the better word to use to describe when someone is good at processing a certain type of stimulus is probably “discerning”. To a certain degree it implies sensitivity, but either the sensitivity is not overwhelming, or that person has learned to rein in their strong reactions to information, and has learned to direct that energy productively.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #communications, #thinking, #emotions

One of the social flaws I have often is coming across as a know-it-all.

For some reason, I seem to need to think and process things on a much higher time period than other people. I estimate that I spend an average 1-2 hours a day just thinking random subjects, and as a result, I have a really strong need to try to formulate those thoughts into words. It gets to the point that whenever a conversation touches on a related subject, I tend to describe all my thoughts on it at once, which comes off as overwhelming and pretty self-centered.

Well, I think it's self-centered anyways – I suspect that vanity can sometimes play a role in me saying too much, too.

How does one go about resolving something like that? An ideal version is to find someone who is very similar in terms of the need to elucidate ideas, and has a lot of similar interests. I'll be on the lookout, though I suspect that it might be hard to come by.

In some other ways, I've come to realize that blogs are a way for me to remove that excess energy too. And blogging more often is likely a good alternative, if I could work out a balance between time-investment and quality of communication.

In the short term, I would say – expect a bit more blog posts to come in in the future.

— Categorized under: #irl, #social, #communications

One of the most interesting phenomenon in psychology to me is the broad category of things that could be primed by simple words, and some potential implications of those findings.

In priming, words that are conceptually close (e.g. cats and dogs), audibly close (e.g. rhyme and dime), and even just related cross mediums (one vs. 1) tend to speed up recognition and production of each other. In this way, one could conceptualize all symbols (including sounds and signs) as living on a sort of interconnected semantic web that's shaped by individual experiences.

Within each culture, these graphs are likely quite similar as well. For example, an English-speaking country would likely have such a web (courtesy of Wikipedia):

I often think about what makes interest writing, conversation, and music just for the fun of it, and one pattern I consistently see between these mediums are that pleasant examples of them often stay close in the semantic web and follows a very specific pattern if it needs to travel further in the graph.

For example, in writing, it's better to say “it's raining cats and dogs” than to say “it's raining buckets and bathtubs”. Both are understandable to listeners, but the latter takes significant effort to parse because these words don't usually appear together, and thus requires a jump in the semantic web.

Similarly, a conversation feel strange and unpleasant if a person jumped from talking about everyday work at the office to a vacation in the Amazons, since these apparently don't share any context. On the other hand, suppose that the person said “I'm really looking forward to the upcoming vacation, which I hope would be as awesome as that time I went to the Amazons”, then that connection is established, and the conversation feels normal and comfortable.

It is the case that an intentional leap in the graph can be done for comedic or dramatic effect, but outside of those scenarios, a leap almost always feel uncomfortable.

Music actually has such a network as well, for example, here are common chord progressions for the Major key (borrowed from Music Theory for Songwriters):

In music, chords have affinities due to pitch similarly, proximity, points of tension, common usage, and a wide variety of other traits. In chord progressions skipping chords would produce an effect very similar to suddenly switching to a random topic or using an unfamiliar idiom. The listener would feel disoriented, and the effect is usually bad (though sometimes it might end up being a pleasant surprise).

In general, I think this sort of semantic web applies to all real-time communications, just on different timescales. A dance or a meal could certainly have such a web at play, and even a large or detailed static image could generate a sort of communication over time that's likely governed by the same rules, but different webs.

These webs, when combined with other universal traversal patterns like hook, repetition, refrain, and climax, and decorated with other common elements like intensity and articulations, feels like it forms a bedrock for much of arts.

One thing I'm super excited about is to imagine how such webs are formed, what they look like biologically, and how they are different across cultures. In another way, I'd be curious to experiment with these a bit more, especially seeing what the rules for utilizing them look like, and how one might go about creating detailed scenes with just a few words.

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Categorized under: #theorizing, #communications, #writing, #psychology

One thing that always surprises me is the payoff ratio of job negotiations.

From observation, in tech it's not uncommon to get ~10k (in bonus numbers) per hour of effort in a job negotiation – that's more than 100x a junior developer's usual rate.

All it takes, it seems, is some knowledge of the market and pretty thick skin.

If the 10k is in pure salary, which is still not unheard-of, then that hour would likely have been that person's most monetarily productive hour ever.

For this reason, I generally feel ok – even good – if I fail a small negotiation but learn something from the failure. It's good practice for situations when the outcome of negotiations is 100x-1,000x higher.

— Categorized under: #finance, #communications

Postal letters are a pretty recent invention in the grand scheme of human's evolutionary history. The world's oldest postal service was established ~4,400 years ago, and back then it was only for kings and nobles. If you were a commoner back then, and you wanted to be in touch, you had to either talk in person, or just not at all.

It's interesting to think about this in the time of quarantine, when most communication becomes written, and face-time becomes exception to the norm.

The instant messaging features in the past few years have largely been try to make texting seem more in-person:

• The emojis act as substitutes for tone and facial expression.
• The typing indicators prevents people from talking over one another. * The various “like” buttons imitate facial expressions
• The “sent” and “seen” indicators solve the uncertain receipt problem.

But try as the IM apps may, they can't solve the cultural problem of vague norms around communications. When someone sends an instant message, did they intend to start a real time conversation, or did they intend it more like a memo? Is it rude to not respond to a message if it doesn't lend itself to a response, or would it be overzealous to try to respond to everything?

Unlike in-person-conversations where the norm is straightforward, in the world of IM, each person has their own rules. I think this causes a lot of confusion for a lot of people. What's interesting too is that there's no simple model that stands out as being the best, and regardless of that, since there is often a lack of direct feedback in these messages, it's unlikely for the IM norms to ever converge...

Is there a good personal or systematic solution to this? I wonder.

— Categorized under: #sociology, #psychology, #communications