Favourites

Interacting with new people do from time to time, make me somewhat anxious. Some questions in particular are especially anxiety inducing – A question like “what is your favourite X”. The thing about favourites is that they imply a preference set in that one or more than one item in the set is more preferred than the others, usually in some kind of order. While it is true that for most categories of things I have a somewhat fixed preference set, problems arise from a few issues, which I will further elaborate below: The preference set is subject to extrinsic variables Too many tied orderings/too few tiebreakers The humblebrag