He puts on his noise-cancelling headphones.

Hypocrites get what they deserve, he supposes. He'll have to apologise to Lev later. "Ah well, no book review for us," he says to Sarah. "Too bad, you should meet him sometime. He's brilliant. Anyway. Do you enjoy a little risk when you're not at work too?" Shit, was that an accidental innuendo or is he just expecting to see them everywhere because of the game?

"Sometimes. --Unfortunately I have a meeting in a few minutes, catch up with you later?"

"Sure, see you 'round." Dammit dammit dammit he is such an awkward fuckup, he is now two for two in this coffeeshop on people he tries to interact with avoiding him. Except the barista but she's paid to interact with people.

Lev sees that Sarah has left and takes off his noise-cancelling headphones.

Bruce is not going to bother him again immediately. He is going to sit here and drink his coffee and feel awkward and wonder if putting points in SED will give him general social skills or just make people want to sleep with him.

Quest available: Just Spit It Out

Have a real conversation with ??? Aarons for fifteen minutes. ????????????

Success: +500 XP, +1 SED, +1 LST
Failure: The Skip the Boring Parts perk, ????????

Maybe this is the Erogame's way of saying Lev wouldn't mind talking to him. It seems like sort of thing the Erogame would do in that circumstance. On the other hand, P(A|B) is not P(B|A); this might also be the Erogame wanting him to do something obnoxious. But there's only one way to find out. He gets up, brings his coffee over to Lev's table, and smiles nervously. "Mind if I sit here?" he asks, flashing back to more real and fictional First Days Of School than anyone should have to put up with.

"Go ahead!"

Oh thank goodness, Lev isn't still annoyed at him. He grins, sits, and starts trying to read Lev's book upside down. This last isn't really a conscious decision; he just does that.

"Don't bother, a bunch of the studies didn't replicate."

"Alas. Anything in here that did?"

"Yeah but-- he keeps going 'priming might sound weird but the weight of the scientific evidence is so strong that there is no option but believing it's true' and, no, the weight of the scientific evidence wasn't that strong, in fact it turns out that priming effects exist only for the most obvious things like word-stem completion tests and, no, it is not true that if you are primed with elderly people you walk slower. And that would be fine if he'd said that the evidence was weak and he was uncertain, science moves on, but he's so overconfident and it's really really annoying."

(Lev has never been this passionate about anything related to biochemistry.)

"Ugh, yeah. And now science marches on and he has egg on his face, but I doubt you're willing to trust his interpretation of the evidence on questions where the jury is still solidly out."

"Yeah, I think the lesson of Thinking Fast and Slow is that academic social psychology can't yet outperform just thinking about what people you know are like and drawing conclusions about what humans are like from that, which is terrible. I mean, you don't even get to know that many people? But the studies are all conducted on MTurkers or undergraduates who are even less representative than the people you'd meet in your day-to-day life, people barely ever do cross-cultural studies and when they do it turns out people from the Anglosphere are strange--"

He's wearing a necklace with a rose and a ring with a cubic zirconia diamond on it. If Bruce is observant enough, he'd notice that Lev is also wearing foundation, eyeshadow the color of his skin tone, and a tinted lip balm, and his fingernails are painted with clear polish.

"Man, now I want to gather some objective data about how good I am at even noticing what people I know are like, I might be even worse than academic psychology. Analyzing bad tools with different bad tools." 

He doesn't notice the makeup, but does notice the jewelry and that Lev is very nice to look at today. He tries to think of a way to compliment him that doesn't sound any of weird, douchey, or lame.

"Well, I mean, I could ask you about studies and you could guess whether you'd think they'd replicate and then that would tell you if your intuition could outperform Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman."

Facial expressions! A thing Lev generally does not particularly have most of the time! And in general he seems much more relaxed and much happier.

"That sounds extremely fun actually, do you want to?"

"I always want to talk about psychology." (This is a fact Bruce may previously not have noticed.) "True or false: people are more likely to donate to a charity if the overhead for that charity is already covered than if they have to pay for it themselves."

"Hmmm. Irrational but plausible . . . I'm gonna guess that replicated."

"Yes, it did!" When he is happy, apparently, he bounces. "How about this-- if you get someone to look at a picture of Rodin's The Thinker, that makes them report a lower level of religions belief."

"Pffff. No way. At least I sure hope not. Sheesh."

"Yeah, that one's not real. People can tell how tennis players feel during high intensity game moments without looking at their faces, just by looking at their body?"

"To be fair, I could have inferred that one from your earlier comments. Hmmm, now we run into the thing where I'm bad at people . . . I couldn't do that with tennis players, but it seems like the sort of thing normal people could. I'm gonna say that one replicated."

"Before a high-stakes math test, students who spend ten minutes writing down how they feel about the test do better on the test than those who don't?"