It's really fascinating to me how someone with a list of Asperger's symptoms can so readily describe a lot of elements in my psychological life.

I have noticed for a long time that I tend to think about all sorts of things other people don't, and that I am just totally confused about other people's emotional responses.

A pretty key aspect of pareto-efficiency is that there are no interpersonal utility comparisons. A pareto-improvement is an improvement that makes at least one person better off (by their own standards) while making no one worse of (by their own standards). Even if a trade makes one person much, much better of and another person only a tiny bit worse off, that is not a pareto-improvement. Any situation like that can usually be made into a pareto-improvement by having the person who is made much better off give some enough money to the person who is made worse off that they are no longer made worse off.

Perfectly elastic collisions and point masses are also impossible, but that doesn't stop physicists from using them in their models sometimes. A simplification can be theoretically useful even if it can't exist in reality, especially when you're studying something as complicated as markets.

And perfect competition does have desirable qualities, it (along with some other conditions) allows for maximum allocative efficiency, meaning that all goods and services are held by the people who value them the most.

And utility incomparability is not a big problem for Pareto efficiency, as its not that hard (at least conceptually) to work out whether someone is better or worse off. The incomparability of utility functions is a problem for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor-Hicks">Kaldor-Hicks</a> efficiency, but that's not what we're talking about here.

I can't stand the stuff I see in the fashion magazines, it's hideous and absurd looking. Fashion models look like someone without depth perception or color vision dressed them. All the stuff I wear tends to be contrasting primary colors (black, red, blue, white) with straight lines of design and minimal labeling. As a consequence, half of my clothes are middle-priced men's clothes.

'Perfect competition' is utter nonsense. Not only is it impossible, there is also nothing intrinsically desireable about it.

And Pareto-Superior conditions are also nonsense. There is no non-arbitrary way to compare utilities of separate actors. What makes someone 'better' or 'worse' off is entirely subjective, and not at all subject to arithmetic comparison or external validation/invalidation.

I find it virtually impossible to be offended by anything. The very concept of 'being offended' seems to indicate something of an ego-blow, or a status-puncture.

I would say it basically comes down to the fact that abstract rationality is slow and requires lots of processing power. For the same reasons we can usually only mentally afford to employ a certain limited set of fairly abstracted terms, and can only follow the implications of this to a limited degree. If we were all Kryptonians it would probably be pretty functionally rational to stay in 'far mode' all the time, but as the squishy, dumb bugs we are a lot of our functional capacity derives from various habitual and patterned behaviour. Far mode mostly seems to serve as a general regulator for some general patterns, perhaps in order to improve intra-plan cohesion. The whole cognitive consciousness part of this may simply be a side-effect of it being kind of overlayed over the background pattern integration that constitutes our ordinary mental processes.

There are a variety of social interactions from which one can derive value outside the context of a simple economic transaction. Discussing intellectual topics, like on LW or in an academic environment is one example; professional networking to gain connections for career advancement is another. Excluding people for reasons unrelated to these goals, such as susceptibility to social pressure, is suboptimal because potential gains scale with the number of people you interact with.

Who you choose to socially interact with is otherwise pretty much arbitrary. Personally, I generally like your attitude and think the world could use more people who share it--but I don't feel justified to demand that they do.

For the record (I don't think this is objectifying, but my calibration's pretty confused lately), yes we'd probably prefer it was 'nothing,' but we still notice what you're wearing and respond strongly to it, and no, it's not as simple as "less is better".

I have NEVER had a guy bring up something I'm wearing unless it was clearly being used as an opening for chatting me up.

I assume 'chatting me up' is being used here to mean something involving dating? An internet search for the expression just turned up synonyms for "making conversation", which wouldn't make sense in context.

Curious... where are you from?

ETA: thanks to anonym below.

In that case, it seems odd to me that guys you know never bring up anything you're wearing. Do you have many male friends? Maybe this is a cultural thing, or am I the 'odd one out' here?