As April 4, 2002, dawned, I was as usual filled with pre-talk nervousness. I was talking about, as I recall, primitive partition identities, for a seminar. I had prepared relatively (for me) well, so I didn't think the day would be a disaster, but like most classes I hadn't really been faithful in attending the seminar, and so I felt somewhat unsettled and out of my depth.

Then I walk into the room, and there's this girl, Bridget, in the back of the room (or maybe she walked in after I was already there, I forget.) The girl I've heard so much about. I get through the talk okay; I guess by now I'm reasonably experienced in giving talks, so I can sort of autopilot my way through it.

And then I spent an hour being the worst possible me at the worst possible time. I don't know where the good me is. I dig myself into a hole babbling at Bridget, and try furiously to scramble out of it only to end up burying myself in further dirt, with a general feeling of impending doom growing throughout. I didn't think it could happen in real life, but it's one of those movie moments where you're watching the protagonist (let's call him "Holden") unveil a skein of actions, and you see where it's going, and you are powerless to stop it.

The aftermath was predictable. Bridget decided to go to MIT for grad school. I believed then and I believe now that the primary reason was the way I acted, that she immediately parsed me as a typical asocial math stalker who would be thoroughly unpleasant to be around for her graduate school life. Who knows, maybe she's right and I'm the one who's wrong, but on that day she had no way of knowing three things:

1. I had heard a ton about her, all of which indicated that she was the sort of person who I would really like to get to know better.
2. I was having a really bad day, personal-quality-wise.
3. I would graduate the next year, leaving only the one year of overlap anyway.

First, the excitement. I was excited to meet Bridget. My sophomore year of college, I lived across the hall from a girl named Becky Weiss, who is notable for several reasons, the relevant one of which in this context is that she told me that Bridget would be coming to Harvard next year and that "I think you would really like each other." Later, I learned who this Bridget girl was, and discovered that, a) she was really pretty, b) she was vibrant, and c) many of my friends had crushes on her.

You read that, and you parse it as "stalker." The pretty part, anyway. Like a post-modern filmmaker, I'm including that there on purpose, to make you uncomfortable and to make you examine the source of that uncomfortability. In our society, it's not okay to be excited about someone. It's okay to think someone is pretty, but, please, keep that compliment to yourself unless you're dating them and have the right to say it!

I can see the point -- I can see how it avoids some awkward situations, how when you have an asymmetric situation of personal feelings these things are better communicated via body language than via Holden-esque blurting, and it was demonstrated in spades with the Bridget experience. But it is, I believe, largely responsible for a lack of self-esteem in our society.

I have to admit that I don't really understand the mindset of Bridget. If someone I didn't know very well, or even someone I didn't like, told me they thought I kicked ass, I wouldn't be scared or insulted. (Yes, it's happened.) I might blow them off, and feel guilty about it, but I wouldn't view it as a negative experience. And besides, it's very easy to short-circuit a situation like that (which I guess is what Bridget did, in a different way.) Did Bridget really think that I would hound her through her grad school experience if she didn't give me any cues to do so? Yeah, okay, some people would, fair enough.

Frankly, it means perhaps more to me when people who don't know me like me (which, incidentally, is why the Bridget thing was so personally distressing.) My friends, they're contractually obligated to like me. They've already formed personal ties, I already fill a role in their life -- they have to like me, because it's the only way their judgment in this matter can be validated. They have to like me, because they're stuck with me whether they like it or not, and might as well make lemonade out of lemons. I don't mean to say that it's fake, but it doesn't say much about my character now so much as it says about my character when I met them.

It filters down, gradually, of course, and I'm certainly not saying that the judgment of my friends is worthless. But I think you can get a better read on your character by seeing how people who don't know you well react to you, since they're not going in with any preconceived ideas of what you're going to be like, ideas that (since all stimuli are filtered through the mind) it's easy for them to parse your actions into simply by not paying close enough attention. To use a concrete example, if all you're doing is playing cards, it's easy to focus on the card-playing and assume that I'm feeling what the old Mike felt when he played cards. (I pretty much am, in that case, but you get the idea.)

Back to Bridget. The Bridget experience was a real eye-opener for me, in the sense that it indicated that I had lost all traces of social skill. I had another experience like that recently. I have these experiences relatively frequently, and I have the opposite experiences with about the same frequency.

Which brings me to the second part of this, personal consistency. If there is one mistake that people make when parsing others, I think, it is assuming that others' personalities are more consistent than ours are. I'm sure you've all heard of the horoscope fallacy, where horoscopes are written that everyone thinks are true about themselves, and one of the thing in there is something about being more inconstant than people at large.

I was having a terrible day when I met Bridget. I don't mean that bad things happened to me; I mean that I didn't have a focused mindset, that I didn't have good sentence construction, good body control, all of that nebulous stuff. I don't know that everyone would cast it in those terms, but I think we all realize that on some days, we're simply better equipped to deal with the world than on others. At least we realize that in our rational moments.

But we're never able to parse other people like that quite so much, at least people we don't know that well. Take the people around the math department, not the people I know real well but the people I see at tea twice a week or so. At this point, I feel like I've got a good read on each of them, and it's really easy to fit all of their actions into that skeleton construction of their personality. Even some of the people I know better there, I think of most of them as having consistent personalities.

It isn't true. Things like demeanor and verbiage vary wildly from day to day, even in the same circumstances. Because we can't see the internal machinations that lead to the external behavior, we are more willing to believe (on an unconscious, reflex-like level) that the external behavior is more constant than our senses tell us than we are willing to believe the alternate hypothesis of a complicated homunculus with raging fluctuations. We're also so used to seeing people in polished situations (specifically, when they're on the job), when they do have a more consistent demeanor, that we take this constancy as a relative given for all people.

In a sense, this is I think reflective of the atheist, analytic method of the scientist, at least in me and most of my crew. We don't interact with others like we interact with ourselves, and while we know that everyone else is just as complicated, it literally requires positing an otherworldly force to explain this. By that, I mean that the force that is responsible for these moods, the other's brain, is totally inaccessible to us on every level. It lives in their interior world, which has only a black-box interface with the outside world that we share with them.

One of the different things about humans is the empathy module that we have built in. (Like most of the things I say, this is of course backed up by experiments on chimps.) It goes some distance towards being able to understand others, but there is simply no way we can model others' complications and fickle nature in our own brains without leading to some sort of preposterous infinite recursion.

I'm not trying to excuse my behavior around Bridget. Bridget saw how I was on one day, and made the obvious extrapolation that that person was really me, just like the people who see who I am when I'm on make the obvious extrapolation that I kick ass. Neither of those is really true, though. From Bridget's perspective, I totally understand why, with no other real information to go on, she was scared of a vapid, neurotic stalker-type.

I'm as guilty as anyone, to be sure. I'm arrogantly proud about my ability to form snap judgments about people, to get a good handle on their character from one meeting, and I sure as hell don't consider whether or not they are having a good day or not, or work that level of uncertainty into my estimates. I suppose it's justly ironic (ironically just?) that Bridget turned the tables on me. (I also catch the irony of the fact that I'm whining about this at a time when I'm decidedly not on, as well as the irony of the fact that I'm trying to claim that I'm not obsessed and in doing so damning myself by overanalyzing something that happened a year ago. Let it go, man.)

But the point here isn't Bridget, Bridget's just an anecdote. The point is that we ascribe this illusion of consistency to others. It's a useful shortcut, a useful stand-in of the average for a more textured look, but ultimately it's inaccurate. People just have bad days sometimes. (People also just have good days sometimes, to be sure.) Heck, you do, right?

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