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> This article might as well be called: If you are shy, its you're fault, stop being lazy and change. There seems to be a tendency to conflate someone saying "

> This article might as well be called: If you are shy, its you're fault, stop being lazy and change. There seems to be a tendency to conflate someone saying "You can change X" and "If you suffer from X, you're a lazy and bad person." That's not productive. It's an emotional response to a logical issue. pg goes into depth about these responses in the article "Keep Your Identity Small": http://paulgraham.com/identity.html http://paulgraham.com/identity.html A huge percentage of people can improve their social skills to practice, and we as a community can accept that without taking it as an insult to anyone who has weak social skills.

mistercow 14y ago
Well hold on though – there's a big difference between saying "you can change X" and "X is just a bad habit". A habit is supposed to be something you can overcome with a relatively trivial amount of practice and persistence, and that is why there's a stigma about having them. Yes there are treatments for social anxiety, but labeling a medically recognized disorder as a "habit" is demeaning and not cool.
- SatvikBeri 14y ago
  > A habit is supposed to be something you can overcome with a relatively trivial amount of practice and persistence, and that is why there's a stigma about having them. I haven't heard this connotation of habits being easy to change before. There's such a huge industry around developing good habits or getting rid of bad ones, and Google shows more results for "changing habits is hard" than "changing habits is easy". The author also didn't address Social Anxiety Disorder, just shyness, which is not a medically recognized disorder. Again, I think this is a case of reading too much into what the author says because people are emotionally attached to the subject.
mfieldhouse 14y ago
Ironically, this thread has degenerated in to exactly what pg is describing. People are binding their identity to their preferred style of social interaction. "I'm an extrovert..." "Oh well, I'm an introvert"
- Karunamon 14y ago
  Isn't someone's style of social interaction integral to their identity?
- hedgie 14y ago
  seeing as personality is defined as a preferred set of reactions to external events, your preferred style of social interaction is part of your identity by definition. this is shorthand for saying "I prefer alone time to recharge" or "I am energized by the company of others," which is a fundamental aspect of identity. factor analysis of personality breaks down personality into related sets of consistent behaviors. introversion/extroversion exists in even the simplest model. the distinction was first noticed by Jung. it was even observed in dogs by Pavlov, who found that dogs that were active around other dogs fell asleep when left alone, where as dogs that seemed exhausted by the same events perked up when isolated. introversion/extraversion is not a constant preference. sometimes introverts like parties. but individuals have a preference for one or the other that forms a preferred set of responses to external events, which makes it part of the definition of personality. this is an article based on folk psychology written in ignorance of thousands of articles on this subject, starting with Jung, experimentally noted by Pavlov in animals, and made rigorous in the work of Hans Eysenck. Eysenck used factor analysis to rigorously define extraversion and identified it as a basic dimension of human personality. this is an incontrovertible finding of modern psychology. extraversion/introversion form one of the parts of the five factor model, which uses factor analysis to identify five core factors of human personality. some models have more, some less - that's the art of the technique. but they all have introversion/extraversion. there is a distinction between shyness and introversion, where the former is mostly likely meant to mean socially anxious. however, introversion is an enduring personality trait that factor analysis consistently identifies.
  - JoachimSchipper 14y ago
    Sure it's part of your personality, but that doesn't mean it has to be part of your identity. There are people who don't consider their gender part of their identity, there are people who don't consider their (lack of) religion part of their identity, and there are definitely people who don't consider intro-/extrovert part of their identity. (Note that "identity" has the same meaning as in pg's article, above.)

mistercow 14y ago

Well hold on though – there's a big difference between saying "you can change X" and "X is just a bad habit". A habit is supposed to be something you can overcome with a relatively trivial amount of practice and persistence, and that is why there's a stigma about having them. Yes there are treatments for social anxiety, but labeling a medically recognized disorder as a "habit" is demeaning and not cool.

SatvikBeri 14y ago
> A habit is supposed to be something you can overcome with a relatively trivial amount of practice and persistence, and that is why there's a stigma about having them. I haven't heard this connotation of habits being easy to change before. There's such a huge industry around developing good habits or getting rid of bad ones, and Google shows more results for "changing habits is hard" than "changing habits is easy". The author also didn't address Social Anxiety Disorder, just shyness, which is not a medically recognized disorder. Again, I think this is a case of reading too much into what the author says because people are emotionally attached to the subject.

mfieldhouse 14y ago

Ironically, this thread has degenerated in to exactly what pg is describing. People are binding their identity to their preferred style of social interaction. "I'm an extrovert..." "Oh well, I'm an introvert"

Karunamon 14y ago
Isn't someone's style of social interaction integral to their identity?
hedgie 14y ago
seeing as personality is defined as a preferred set of reactions to external events, your preferred style of social interaction is part of your identity by definition. this is shorthand for saying "I prefer alone time to recharge" or "I am energized by the company of others," which is a fundamental aspect of identity. factor analysis of personality breaks down personality into related sets of consistent behaviors. introversion/extroversion exists in even the simplest model. the distinction was first noticed by Jung. it was even observed in dogs by Pavlov, who found that dogs that were active around other dogs fell asleep when left alone, where as dogs that seemed exhausted by the same events perked up when isolated. introversion/extraversion is not a constant preference. sometimes introverts like parties. but individuals have a preference for one or the other that forms a preferred set of responses to external events, which makes it part of the definition of personality. this is an article based on folk psychology written in ignorance of thousands of articles on this subject, starting with Jung, experimentally noted by Pavlov in animals, and made rigorous in the work of Hans Eysenck. Eysenck used factor analysis to rigorously define extraversion and identified it as a basic dimension of human personality. this is an incontrovertible finding of modern psychology. extraversion/introversion form one of the parts of the five factor model, which uses factor analysis to identify five core factors of human personality. some models have more, some less - that's the art of the technique. but they all have introversion/extraversion. there is a distinction between shyness and introversion, where the former is mostly likely meant to mean socially anxious. however, introversion is an enduring personality trait that factor analysis consistently identifies.
- JoachimSchipper 14y ago
  Sure it's part of your personality, but that doesn't mean it has to be part of your identity. There are people who don't consider their gender part of their identity, there are people who don't consider their (lack of) religion part of their identity, and there are definitely people who don't consider intro-/extrovert part of their identity. (Note that "identity" has the same meaning as in pg's article, above.)